Leshy

What it is

The leshy is the forest's owner. Not its guardian spirit in the gentle sense and not a monster living in it — the proprietor, who has animals to manage, boundaries he expects to be respected, and a temper about trespass. The practical folk material treats him accordingly: hunters and herders asked permission, left payment, and took care not to give offence, in much the way one would deal with a difficult landlord whose land cannot be avoided.

His name says the same thing. It comes from the Common Slavic root for forest, *lěsъ, and it appears across Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian tradition. What is striking is that there is no single name. Borovoy is the spirit of the pine barrens, gayevoy of a grove, leshy proper of deciduous forest, with lesovik, lesun, lesnik and leshak alongside them. The variant you use depends on which wood you are standing in. He is less a character with a name than a function the forest performs, named locally.

Linda Ivanits records that belief in him lasted among rural people well into the late twentieth century. This is not a figure recovered from a medieval text; it is one that people were still taking seriously within living memory.

The forest sets his scale

The leshy has no fixed size, and the way his size is described is the most distinctive thing about him. Accounts put him anywhere from a giant stepping across rivers to something as small as a single blade of grass. In a number of them the rule is explicit: his height matches the vegetation. Tall as the pines where the pines are tall, waist-high in scrub, lost in the grass of a clearing.

Read literally that is a shapeshifting trick. Read as the folk material probably intends it, it is a statement that he is not a being of a certain size who lives in the forest — he is the forest's own scale, taking a shape. The same logic runs through the rest of him: he is recorded as invisible, or as casting no shadow, or as impossibly heavy. These are not the attributes of a creature. They are the attributes of a place that has turned to look at you.

Dealing with him

Unusually for a spirit, the record is mostly procedural. It tells you what to do.

If he has you lost. His standard working method is misdirection: he leads wanderers off the path, hides what they are carrying, and mimics a familiar voice to pull them into ground they cannot walk out of. The counters are reversals — undress and put your clothes back on inside out or back to front, or walk out along your own footprints. Both answer an illusion by undoing a sequence.

If you want him off you. Prayer and the sign of the cross, invoking God, salt, fire, a linden stick, mountain ash, dogs, copper bullets. Also profanity, and also making him laugh. That last pair is a good indication of how the relationship was understood: he can be insulted and he can be amused, which are not things you do to a force of nature.

If you need something from him. Bread with salt, Easter eggs, in some accounts livestock. Shepherds and hunters went further and made agreements with him, sometimes in blood, trading a season's safety or a good hunt for an obligation. Breaking the agreement was held to bring illness or death, and getting out of one required a cross, an icon or some other holy object — which is where the Christian reinterpretation becomes visible in the material itself.

The animals

He is their shepherd, and the word in the sources is the shepherd's word. He drives the forest's animals, protects them from hunters and from fires, and stands patron to particular species, bears and wolves most often. This is the part of the figure that looks least like a demon and most like a job.

One account is worth repeating for what it reveals about how the belief worked: when large numbers of animals moved out of a district, the explanation offered was that the local leshy had lost his herds to another spirit in a card game. Migration is a real phenomenon that needed an answer, and the answer given was bookkeeping between owners. He was not a metaphor to the people who said this. He was the responsible party.

What it looks like

What the record describes. Three registers, all attested. As vegetation: a tree, a stump, a mushroom. As a man: tangled green hair, skin like bark. As an animal: bear, wolf, black goat. Plus the non-appearances — invisible, shadowless, unnaturally heavy. No single canonical body exists, which is consistent with a figure whose point is that the forest can look back in whatever form is to hand.

What later sources added. The hard edges. Folk Christianity recast him as a fallen angel, a creature of the Devil, or an unacknowledged child of Adam and Eve, and attached him to Chort, the Black One. A benevolent-to-ambivalent owner became an unclean force. Later still he has been pulled toward the horned-forest-demon of fantasy illustration and games, which fixes a silhouette the folk material deliberately leaves open.

Origin and sources

Most of the detail here comes from Russian-language scholarship, Neonila Krinichnaya's Russian Mythology: The World of Folklore Images (2004) above all, with S. V. Maksimov's collection of 1903 representing the pre-revolutionary fieldwork and Ivanits (1989) serving as the English-language survey. Elena Levkievskaya's work recurs throughout the reference literature.

One caveat about the state of the material, which applies to this page more than to most: the widely available English summaries of the leshy are poorly sourced, and several frequently repeated details — the inside-out clothing remedy among them — circulate in popular writing without a citation to any primary collection. The remedy appears in reference works, so it is reported here, but anyone building on this page should confirm it in Krinichnaya or Ivanits directly rather than trusting the secondary chain.

• Neonila A. Krinichnaya, Russkaya mifologiya: Mir obrazov folklora (Russian Mythology: The World of Folklore Images) (2004). Akademicheskiy Proekt / Gaudeamus, Moscow, 1005 pp.
• Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (1989)
• S. V. Maksimov, Nechistaya, nevedomaya i krestnaya sila (The Unclean, the Unknown and the Holy Force) (1903). Tovarishchestvo R. Golike i A. Vilborg, St Petersburg