Slavic Warrior Women, pt. 2: A Question of Genre

Link to full dissertation, Amazons, Shieldmaidens, and Daring Polianitsy: Slavic Warrior Women in Medieval Literature and Folklore: https://libraetd.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/r207tq787

It's time for part 2 of my Slavic Warrior Women series! This time, we'll be delving a little deeper into the concept of genre, which is integral to understanding how history becomes literature. Put on your academic hats, and let's dive into how historical Scythians became fictional Amazons and later, the folkloric polianitsy.

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Amazons in battle (Amazonomachy) on a pot

The Amazons and their descendants exist at the crossroads of history, literature, mythology, and folklore. Consequently, a study such as this demands a multidisciplinary approach, drawing source material from archaeological reports, histories, ethnography, and a broad swath of literature from key time periods and locations. Out of this amalgamation of sources, I assemble the most complete, relevant narratives of individual warrior women who figure in the literature of Ancient Greece and Rome as well as medieval Russia, Iceland, Denmark, and the Czech Republic. I also synthesize the dominant narratives of the most popular polianitsy from dozens of Russian folktales collected in various provinces from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. Because of the breadth of sources consulted, it is necessary to first discuss the pertinent disciplines and where they intersect, beginning with genre.

One commonality that kept resurfacing among the primary literature I consulted was that the narratives, though they entered the written record, existed in oral tradition for centuries prior to their recording by ancient and medieval authors. Folktales and myths, as examples of oral literature that originated during humanity’s earliest attempts to understand, interpret, and narrate the universe, share significant source material, and so they also contain overlapping motifs, themes, and plots.^[1] Scholars of various disciplines have attempted to demarcate the line between the two genres. Since the Greek term μύθος (mythos) originally indicated ‘tales’ or ‘stories’ in a general sense, this continued nebulousness manifests in the tendency to illustrate rather than define either genre.^[2] For the purposes of the present study, I would suggest the main difference between mythology and folklore lies in the elevation of subject. Myths answer lofty, existential questions through personification and deification: the origins of the universe, powerful forces of nature, night and day, life and death. Folktales, on the other hand, illuminate more mundane, human topics: duels and battles, unfaithful spouses, heists and thefts.^[3] In this sense, Amazons and polianitsy alike belong more to the realm of folklore than mythology, which will become apparent in the following chapters.

Myths and folktales also differ with regard to their primary actors. Folk heroes, though they may occasionally possess magical powers or abilities beyond that of the average human, are not gods. Some folk heroes may indeed conceal remnants of deities, stripped of their divinity and transformed into saints and tricksters and devils as polytheism and paganism gave way to today’s dominant monotheistic religions, but they are meant nonetheless to be interpreted as human, or at least mostly human in the case of ancient demigods like Heracles, Achilles, or the Amazons, who were said to be fathered by the god Ares.^[4] Thus, some folktales contain mythic elements, and some stories straddle the line between folklore and mythology, such as the Russian epic folk ballad “Dunai,” in which the suicide of the titular character begets the river Danube. Yet, as genres of oral literature, myths and folktales can be differentiated by the grandness of their subjects and the mortality of their protagonists. Mythology illuminates the deep and the transcendent mechanisms of the universe, and so the actors lean toward divinity, whereas folklore illustrates the breadth of human folly and adventure. Narratives of warrior women normally fit into the latter category.

Since oral literature predates the very concept of writing, the earliest written literature derived its components from the myths and folktales previously preserved among a community’s storytellers.^[5] While oral literature is by its nature performative, core narratives within the genre are remarkably consistent. The names of certain characters or the specific magical item a hero procures may change from variant to variant of any given tale, but the tale itself remains recognizable. Once these stories took written form, they became even more static, exchanging their residual improvisatory qualities for permanence.^[6] For example, the essential narrative of the Trojan War is the same across Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica, despite the lives of the three authors straddling nearly a millennium. At the time of Homer’s initial composition, the story of the Trojan War had already been firmly established in oral tradition; by the time Quintus of Smyrna added his continuation, Homer’s written account had become canon. Similarly, once scholars began collecting and publishing folktales, the disparate variants tended to coalesce into one or two dominant versions.

The evolution of written literature from and alongside oral literature further expanded the available genres to preserve warrior women’s narratives, but most relevant here is the enshrining of the past in the form of historical chronicles. The relationships between history and recorded history, and between recorded history and literature, are necessary to address because of the present study’s inclusion of people and events that are historically attested juxtaposed with those that are fabricated from a historical inspiration. History, as the sum of past events, is objective, but no matter how impartial a historian endeavors to be, the act of recording history requires a certain amount of judgment, interpretation, and perspective.^[7] Different disciplines like archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and ethnography can supplement written histories by uncovering unwritten pieces, assembling their own narratives from evidence mined in burial sites, linguistic archaisms, genealogies, and other non-narrative sources.^[8] The act of fashioning a narrative out of these events is where recorded history becomes literature, and thus, where the narratives of literary-historical warrior women like the Amazons reside.^[9] 

The line between recorded history and literature is also less and less distinct as we go further back in time as the delineation between historians and authors is a relatively modern one.^[10] The earliest historians like Herodotus, the Father of History himself, had limited options for source material. With few prior histories to consult—and for some topics, none—these early historians mostly relied on eye witness accounts, hearsay, and oral literature. However, written epics, lyrics, dramas, and other literary works existed in abundance, and so they relied on such genres to give form to their histories, a method still employed by many contemporary historians.^[11] The most readable, entertaining, and coherent of histories—in other words, the most literary—are the ones most likely to have endured beyond the historian’s lifetime, thereby able to inform later generations of the happenings of the past.^[12] The literary aspects of the histories and chronicles consulted for the present study, from Herodotus and Plutarch to Cosmas of Prague and Snorri Sturluson, are what preserved them such that they could be consulted at all.

Citations:

1) L. P. Koval’chuk, “Osobennosti integratsii antropomorfnykh blendov v russkom skazochnom diskurse (na primere ishkodnogo prostranstva ‘zhenshchina’),” Vestnik ChelGU 6, no. 335 (2014): 55; S. Binbin, N. Kravchenko, and S. Matvieieva, “Archaic archetypes and symbols of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples: to debunk the myth of a single people,” Amazonia Investiga 11, no. 59 (2022): 187; O. G. Lopukhova, “Transformatsiia gendernykh obrazov v tekstakh russkikh volshebnykh skazok,” Vestnik TGGPU 1, no. 16 (2009): 1.

2) Graham Anderson, Fairytale in the Ancient World (Routledge, 2000): 2.

3) Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales: A New History (State University of New York Press, 2009): 4.

4) Grigory Bondarenko, “Russian Epic Songs and Folk Spirituality,” Temenos Academy Review 18 (2015): 126; Izar Lunaček, “The Good, Bad, and Outcast: On the Moral Ambivalence of Folk Heroes,” Studia Mythologica Slavica 17 (2014): 208-209; Anna V. Zhuchkova and Karina N. Gulai, “Funktsional’noe znachenie mifologicheskogo obraza Koshcheiia Bessmertnogo i ego otrazhenie v russkikh volshevnykh skazakh,” BBK 82, no. 3 (2015): 166.

5) Bondarenko, “Russian Epic Songs,” 110; Jack Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (Routledge, 2006): 13.

6) Tatar, Heroine with 1000 Faces, 30.

7) Lerner, Creation of Feminist Consciousness, 4; Hubert A. Royster, “Literature and History: A Comparison and a Contrast,” The North Carolina Historical Review 20, no. 2 (1943): 125.

8) Lesser, Cassandra Speaks, 38.

9) N. O. P. Pyke, “History as Literature,” The Australian Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1947): 101.

10) Walter Laqueur, “Literature and the Historian,” Journal of Contemporary History 2, no. 1 (1967): 6.

11) K. N. Panikkar, “Literature as History of Social Change,” Social Scientist 40, no. 3/4 (2012): 4.

12) Pyke, “History as Literature,” 95.