Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. I almost hesitate to invoke the name of Bobba Yaga in this episode. For starters, the old Hag may hear her name and seek me out, dragging herself through the sky in a mortar, pushing her way with a pestil, and erasing her path with a broom.
But more to the point, she is a complex figure in Russian folklore, similar to various witches and ogresses in other folk traditions, but also wholly unique and also ambiguous at times. As such, I invoke her, knowing that she may indeed return, perhaps for a full length episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind in the future. As Andrea's John's points out in the book Bobba Yaga, The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian folk Tale, it is both accurate and incomplete to think of Bobba Yaga as
a mere witch. Certainly, all the hallmarks of the supernatural hag are present. From grotesque descriptions of her body to her various magical powers, but she is also a creature that frequently desires human flesh, and so she is ogre as well. Depending on the telling, she may take on gigantic proportions. Folklorist Carol Rose mentions accounts in which she drops her jaw to the ground and doomed traveler's venture inside, thinking they found a cave line with stones, stalactites, and stalagmites,
but she is also very humanoid in other depictions. John's also points out that Bobba Yaga may serve different roles in different tales. While she certainly does play the villain in many Russian fairy tales, she also fulfills the role of donor from time to time, a character who appears in a tale to provide the hero with magical assistance. She was both cannibal and counselor. This Baba Yaga, and of course, much may be said about Baba Yaga's hut,
A monstrous home for a monstrous being. You'll find it deep in the forest, in a clearing, surrounded by fences decorated with human bones, the skulls each retaining their fleshy eyeballs. This wooden hut stands atop a pair of chicken legs, or sometimes a single chicken leg, and famously answers to the cry Hut, hut, stand with your back to the forest, your front to me. This aspect of her tail resonates
with tremendous strangeness, according to Civilian Forester. In Baba Yaga, the Wild Witch of the East, and Russian fairy tales, the bird legged hut may symbolize her connection with the Avian world. It may also illustrate the home magical mobility, allowing it to amble about the mysterious woods from one point to another, far from a fixed point of reference. You can trust it is a place lost in the forest,
perhaps just as you are lost in the forest. Forrester also points to mundane stilted houses as a possible inspiration for the folk tale, but stresses that the spinning may also be connected to rights and concepts of the passage of time. Quote a spindle holding up a rotating house where a frightening old woman tests her visitors and dispenses wisdom suggests a deep ritual past. Tune in for additional episodes of the Monster fact or the Artifact each week
as always. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.