A to Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! B is for Baba Yaga

 

When I was a small child, about five or six, our house had a back yard toilet, at the back of a narrow yard. Mum used to scare my older sister by telling her she might meet Baba Yaga if she went outside at night. Mum is a lovely person, not sure why she did that, but it does tell you something about where she came from. 

Baba Yaga is a witch who comes from Slavic folklore. There are many stories connected with her, both in folklore and modern stories. I even remember her from a collection of stories about Russian Prince Ivan I read when I was about seven. Sometimes she is a villain, sometimes she helps the hero. 

She appears in music(Pictures At An Exhibition) and fiction, by the likes of Jane Yolen and Peter Morwood.

She flies around in a mortar and pestle - yes, a giant version of the kitchen equipment we use to grind stuff. Her hut, deep in the forest, is on chicken legs. It is surrounded by a fence of human bones - the bones of her victims.

Author Susan Price’s Ghost World sequence has those huts as homes for shamans. At one point they have a sort of  shaman conference in which everybody arrives in their chicken leg houses. 

Usually, Baba Yaga stories involve someone on a quest, passing by her home and having adventures, or sometimes going there because they have to. 

For example, Vasilisa the Fair, a sort of Cinderella figure, is sent by her wicked stepmother to fetch a light from Baba Yaga.

The witch demands she does some housework in return for the light. She does it with the help of a magic doll her mother left for her and returns with a glowing skull. The stepmother and sisters are burned to death. 

Eventually Vasilisa marries the king. We don’t hear what happens to Baba Yaga, who had thrown the girl out in disgust when told that Vasilisa did all that work with the help of her mother’s blessing. Presumably she is still out there in the forest, meeting young questers and threatening to eat them.

Jane Yolen wrote a verse novel, Finding Baba Yaga, seen from the viewpoint of the witch.

She is in Peter Morwood’s Tales Of Old Russia trilogy, starting with Prince Ivan. This is set in a specific time in mediaeval Russia, but it’s fantasy all right. It begins with the story of Prince Ivan, whose sisters all marry shapeshifting men, before he marries the warrior Marya Morevna. 

In Orson Scott Card’s Enchantment, a young man doing research for his PhD thesis encounters the Sleeping Beauty, who is in a Ukrainian forest. She was put there by Baba Yaga. When the couple marry and move to the US, she follows - and absolutely adores aeroplanes! 

There is plenty more in modern fiction, though many modern stories tend to turn her into a feminist figure. 

Up to you to decide what to call her!