Baba Yaga

What it is

Baba Yaga is the witch of the East Slavic folktale: an old woman living alone in the forest, visited by heroes who need something from her and who may or may not survive the encounter. She is not a goddess and not quite a monster. She belongs to the category of figures the folktale places at the edge of the inhabited world, where the rules of the village stop applying.

The earliest clear written record of the name is from 1755, in Mikhail Lomonosov's Russian Grammar, where it appears as "Iaga baba". Lomonosov lists Slavic figures alongside their Roman equivalents, and she turns up twice — once in that paired list and once in a further group for which no Roman equivalent is offered. That small editorial decision is the first hint of something later scholarship confirmed: she does not map cleanly onto anything else.

The tales themselves were collected a century later. Aleksandr Afanasyev's Narodnye russkie skazki, published from 1855, is the collection through which most of her stories reached print, and she appears in a number of them — Vasilisa the Beautiful, Marya Morevna, The Maiden Tsar, Baba Yaga and Zamoryshek, and several more. The figure is older than any of these records; the oral tradition long predates the first time anyone wrote the name down.

The standard modern study is Andreas Johns's Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale (2004), which surveys hundreds of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian variants. Johns sorts her appearances into three roles — donor, ambiguous donor, and villain — and his central argument is that the ambiguity is not noise in the data. She helps about as often as she threatens, and the outcome tends to turn on how the visitor treats her: whether they are polite, whether they answer her questions, whether they do what she asks.

What it looks like

Three different things get mixed together when people picture Baba Yaga, and they are worth separating, because only the first comes from the tales themselves.

What the tales describe. Remarkably little about her body. Folktales are sparse about appearance in general, and hers is no exception. The recurring epithet is Baba Yaga kostyanaya noga — "bony leg" — and that is close to the whole of it. What the tales do describe in detail is not her but her property: the hut that stands and turns on chicken legs, the wooden mortar she travels in, the pestle she steers with, and the broom she uses to erase her tracks. She is defined by her objects far more than by her face.

The hut is the most stable element. In The Maiden Tsar it is said to stand in the open field, turning on chicken legs; elsewhere it creaks as though alive. It is not a static prop — the turning is part of it, and a hero typically has to speak to the hut to make it face him.

What the illustrators added. The fence of human bones crowned with glowing skulls is real, but it is specific to one tale. In Vasilisa the Beautiful the skulls ring the clearing and light it like lanterns, and Baba Yaga later gives Vasilisa one of them on a stick. Other tales put her in an ordinary hut with nothing on the posts. The reason almost everyone pictures the fence anyway is Ivan Bilibin, whose plates for Vasilisa the Beautiful (1900, with a further plate dated 1902 showing more skulls on the stakes and a scaled bird's leg under the hut) became the images through which most readers have met her ever since. Bilibin worked in firm black outline and flat colour, drawing on peasant embroidery, lubok broadsheets and seventeenth-century manuscript ornament. He illustrated one tale; the result became the default for all of them.

Regional variation

The name travels across the Slavic languages with the same two elements and shifting emphasis. Baba is the old woman or grandmother; Yaga is the part nobody has satisfactorily explained. In Polish she is Baba Jaga, in Czech and Slovak Jezibaba — the elements reversed, the jezi- component carrying a separate sense of the witch.

Johns's survey is explicitly East Slavic — Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian — so the West Slavic material needs a different source, and the differences there may be larger than the shared name suggests.

Origin and sources

What is documented: the name from 1755, the tales from the 1850s onward, and a substantial body of twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship analysing both.

What is not documented: where she came from. The etymology of Yaga has no accepted answer. Attempts to identify her with an earlier death goddess exist — an eighteenth- century writer connected the name to a figure called Iagaia baba — but these are interpretations built on thin evidence, not established descent, and it is more honest to say the origin is unknown than to pick one of the theories and present it as the answer.

It is also worth being clear about what the collections are. Afanasyev was editing oral material gathered by many hands across a large territory, and the versions he printed are versions, not the tale. Johns's method — comparing hundreds of variants rather than reading one as canonical — exists precisely because no single text is authoritative.

• Mikhail Lomonosov, Rossiyskaya grammatika (Russian Grammar) (1755)
• Aleksandr Afanasyev, Narodnye russkie skazki (Russian Fairy Tales) (1855)
• Andreas Johns, Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale (2004). Peter Lang, International Folkloristics vol. 3