Vila

A woman with standing

Most female figures in folk tradition are defined by harm done to them or by harm they do: the rusalka drowned, La Llorona bereaved, the tlahuelpuchi afflicted, the dziwożona excluded.

The vila of the South Slavic epic songs is in a different position entirely. She holds territory, she has skills that heroes need, she takes formal oaths, and she enforces them.

This is not a modern reading imposed on the material. It is what the songs do with her, repeatedly, across the great collections.

What she does in the songs

She heals. A hero wounded past ordinary help is healed by a vila — and the healing is a transaction, with terms.

She shoots. Vila arrows appear in the songs as a real danger to named heroes. She is an adversary who can kill at a distance.

She swears brotherhood. This is the feature that matters most and is most often lost in translation. Pobratimstvo — sworn brotherhood — is a formal, binding kinship in South Slavic society, with obligations on both sides. A hero and a vila who swear it are bound, and a great deal of the narrative tension in the songs comes from what happens when one party fails the other.

She curses. Blindness, a withered arm, a horse that will not run. The punishments are specific and they are responses to specific offences: trespass on her ground, interrupting the dance, breaking the oath.

What the singers describe, and what they leave out

For a figure who appears this often, the vila is remarkably thinly described. The epic songs in Karadžić's collection are interested in what she does, not in what she looks like. She is adult, she is female, she is beautiful in the formulaic way the songs call every notable woman beautiful, and that is nearly the whole portrait.

The one physical detail the singers return to is hair — long, loose, falling down the back and chest, unbound in a culture where a grown woman's hair was covered or braided. Loose hair is doing social work here rather than descriptive work: it marks her as outside the household order. After that the songs equip her rather than describe her: a bow and arrows, a horse, a voice that carries across a valley.

Almost everything else usually pictured belongs to later layers. Blonde or golden hair, a translucent white dress with a silver belt, flashing eyes, wings, and the goat or horse hooves hidden under the skirt come from nineteenth-century ethnographic reports and from the romantic-national literature that followed Karadžić — and they do not agree with each other. Winged vile are a regional and largely literary development; hooved ones are reported for some lowland traditions and absent elsewhere. The songs themselves give her no wings, no hooves and no fixed costume.

Not a fairy

English translations reach for "fairy" and the word does damage.

A fairy in the English imagination is small, decorative and peripheral. The vila is none of those. She has the body of a grown woman, long loose hair is the one physical attribute the songs dwell on, and beyond that the singers describe her by what she carries and does — bow, horse, voice — rather than by her face. She is consulted, feared and bargained with, and she appears in heroic narrative as an actor with her own interests.

Her closest kin in other traditions is not the rusalka. It is Tapio and the leshy — owners of territory with whom one makes arrangements — except that the songs give her a social role those two do not have: she enters into kinship.

Where she lives

Mountains, springs, high meadows, and the edges of forest. Water is the constant: the spring is her place, and in several songs her power is tied to it.

The ring in the grass belongs to her as well — a circle of darker, flattened grass on a high meadow, read as the place where the vile danced in the night. It is the common move of the tradition: a real, visible, slightly uncanny feature of the landscape acquires an agent. Fairy rings are a fungal growth. They are also, to anyone who walks up to one, obviously a circle that somebody made.

Karadžić and what collection does

The vila reaches the modern reader mainly through Vuk Karadžić, who from 1814 collected and published South Slavic oral song on a scale comparable to Afanasyev's in Russia and Lönnrot's in Finland.

The same caution applies to all three collections. A collector selects, arranges and sometimes smooths, and the published corpus is not identical to what was sung. But the vila is not an artefact of collection: she is present across regions, singers and song types, in a role too consistent to be an editor's invention.

What collection did do is fix her in a national-literary register — the songs became foundational texts for South Slavic national identity in the nineteenth century, and the vila became a symbol as well as a being. By now she appears on emblems, in band names and in tourism, which is the same afterlife the rusalka and Väinämöinen had.

Sources

Karadžić's collections (from 1814) for the songs; Ivanits (1989) for the East Slavic comparison that makes her distinctiveness visible. Sworn brotherhood is an institution of South Slavic society that the songs assume their audience understands, and they state its terms rather than explain them.

• Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpske narodne pjesme (Serbian Folk Songs) (1841). Vienna, four books, 1841–1862The great collection of South Slavic oral epic and lyric song, in which the vile appear constantly — as healers, adversaries, and sworn sisters to heroes.
• Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (1989). M. E. Sharpe, Armonk NYFor the East Slavic comparison. The rusalka occupies overlapping ground and behaves very differently, which is the point of the comparison below.