Славянские древности

Abstract

The paper is based on the folklore tradition of a mythical being, the Master of the Wolves, whose chief function was commanding or dividing up food among the wolves. He appears in many Slavic and other European legends, and some Southern Slavs also celebrate the so-called “wolf holidays”; a being with the same function appears also in incantations against wolves. It turned out that the incantations are usually connected with the first days of pasturing in the spring and the beginning of summer, while the legends refer to the last days of pasturing in the autumn and the beginning of winter. The legends and incantations as well as the beliefs and customs clearly indicate the remains of a tradition, the intention of which was to explain and to support the changing of time, the binary opposition of winter and summer, as it pertained to the annual cycle of Slavic stockbreeders.

Key words: Slavic folk beliefs, legends, folk customs, incantations, the master of the animals, wolves.

In 1961 Lutz Rohrich published a paper on Herr der Tiere ‘the Master of the Animals’ in European folk tradition. In the paper he argues that in European folk legends and tales we can find a series of folk beliefs about a master of animals in some form. These legends are, according to him, one of the most ancient layers of European legends and had come to Europe from the Mediterranean basin, more precisely from the Cretan-Minoan cult of Artemis (Rцhrich 1961: 343–347). One of the masters of animals briefly mentioned in the paper is the master of wolves known in Slavic tradition.