Lithuanian Mythology - History of Scholarship

History of Scholarship

Surviving information about Baltic paganism in general is incomplete. As with most ancient Indo-European cultures (e.g. Greece and India), the original primary mode of transmission of seminal information such as myths, stories, and customs was verbal, the then-unnecessary custom of writing being introduced later during the period of the text-based culture of Christianity. Most of the early written accounts are very brief and made by foreigners, usually Christians, who disapproved of Pagan traditions. Some academics regard some texts as inaccurate misunderstandings or even fabrications. In addition many sources list many different names and different spellings, thus sometimes it is not clear if they are referring to the same thing.

Lithuania became Christianized between the end of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th century, but pagan religion survived for another two centuries, gradually losing its cultural influence and coherence. The Evangelical Religion, established in Prussia by Albert of Brandenburg Prussia promised to preach to people in their own language, rather than Latin. Duke Albert established the Albertina University in Königsberg, where languages of the neighboring countries were taught and the first books in those languages were printed. The last conceptions of the old religion survived approximately until the beginning of the 19th century. However, as it was the tradition, they were never documented by followers of the religion themselves, and all known facts are from documents left by outsiders.

Although the pre-Christian religion in Lithuania died out much later than in any other European country, actual information on Lithuanian mythology is scattered and late. Interest in it has increased since the beginning of the 19th century, when the narrative material began to be collected. However, at this time the majority of Lithuanians had already ceased to live according to the beliefs and doctrines of their earlier religion, and story-tellers could not explain their meaning more adequately and precisely. Without these explanations, the folk tales and songs collected by scholars seemed to some mythologists and historians to be more the raw material out of which a mythology or a heroic epos might be composed than the mythology itself. The relics of the old religion were interwoven with other stories of folkloric mythology, and were subsequently documented quite well, including many testimonies written by storytellers themselves. However, the more syncretic character of this mythology raised some uncertainties and, subsequently, hypotheses and discussions, as to what the pagan Lithuanian religion actually was.

Because of this view, many scholars preferred to write their own reconstructions of Lithuanian mythology, based also on historical, archaeological, and ethnographic data. The first such reconstruction was written by the Polish-speaking Lithuanian historian Theodor Narbutt at the beginning of the 19th century. Two well-known attempts at reconstruction have been attempted more recently by Marija Gimbutas and Algirdas Julien Greimas. This method of reconstruction is thorny, and none of the attempts has been satisfactory.

The two biggest difficulties in this process are, first, the fact that Lithuanian mythology was not static, but constantly developed, so that it did not remain in the same form over the longer periods usually treated by mythologists. Secondly, Slavic mythology, which in general concepts seems very different from its Lithuanian and Latvian counterparts, had a certain influence on people's thought, which affected the ethnographic data, and thus the judgments of scholars who made use of such data.

Thus, the first reconstructions and descriptions of Lithuanian mythology offer a far from true description of their subject, being little more than a patchwork of arbitrarily selected details from Lithuanian and Belarusian mythologies. The account offered by Narbutt, and ideas raised by Adam Mickiewicz (for example, in his play Dziady) are among these, but mythologists since the second half of the 19th century have become more accurate, as a result of their knowledge of contemporary linguistic research which shows the structural differences between Lithuanian and Slavic languages.

The most modern academics exploring Lithuanian mythology in the second half of the 20th century were Norbertas Vėlius and Gintaras Beresnevičius. Their works are considered as the most objective. They are very critical and careful about mythological sources.