Bardaitis

Also Known As: Old Prussian Bardoayts, also written Bardoyas; variant readings Gardoayts and Perdoyts; reconstructed in Lithuanian as Gardaitis
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Baltic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Bardaitis has ships and boats in his keeping and receives fish as his offering.
Role in Mythos: He is the god of ships in the sixteenth-century lists of Old Prussian gods, set among the water deities directly after Patrimpas.
Relation to Humans: Sailors and fishermen of the Sambian coast looked to him as their patron and gave him fish. The Lutheran bishops who wrote his name down did so in order to forbid his worship.

A flat-bottomed boat grates over the shingle and takes the water, and the men in it smell of tar, wet rope and yesterday’s catch. Somewhere in the business of getting off the beach, a name is spoken. On the coast of Sambia, the blunt peninsula that pushes into the Baltic between two lagoons, the name was Bardoayts. He was the god of ships.

That is nearly everything the record says, and the record is a strange one. In 1530 the Lutheran bishops of Pomesania and Sambia issued a book of church rules, the *Constitutiones Synodales*, and in it they listed the gods their Prussian parishioners were still not supposed to be worshipping. Bardoayts stands in that list among the powers of water, directly after Potrympus, the god of flowing streams, and close to Autrympus, lord of the sea. A German text of about the same years, the *Sudovian Book*, describes the customs of the Sudovians living in Sambia and gives the same run of names. Beside his it puts a single gloss. Ships.

The bishops also set a row of Roman gods alongside the Prussian ones, as educated men of the time liked to do. Around the water gods the Latin names are Castor, Pollux and Neptune, and the two rows do not line up cleanly enough to say for certain which was meant for him. Either answer points out to sea. The twin brothers were the old patrons of sailors in a storm, and Neptune needs no introduction.

Later reference works fill in a little more. Sailors and fishermen were his people, and fish was what they gave him. It is a sensible offering. A man who lives off the water has fish and not much else, and a god who looks after boats may be assumed to take an interest in what comes home in them. How the fish was given, where, and with what words, nobody wrote down. A cold morning, a share of silver-scaled catch set aside before the rest went to the smoke-house: the picture is easy to imagine and impossible to confirm.

He has no myth. No story tells where he came from, who his parents were, or what he ever did. No one describes his face. The clergymen who recorded him were compiling a list of errors, not collecting tales, and they stopped at the name.

Even the name is uncertain. The same god appears as Bardoayts, Bardoyas, Gardoayts and Perdoyts, depending on the copy. The Lithuanian linguist Kazimieras Būga argued that the form with G was the true one and that it came from *garda*, a word for a ship, which would make him simply the ship-god, named for his work. On that reading the B is a copyist’s slip that stuck. The Russian scholar Vladimir Toporov looked instead at his place in the list, shoulder to shoulder with Potrympus, and proposed that the two had been a pair. Rolandas Kregždys, in a study published in 2008, treated the name as an epithet for a god of the sky and noted that a century of attempts to settle the question had failed. It has not been settled since.

There is a wider doubt as well. Some historians distrust the whole sixteenth-century Prussian pantheon and suspect that the lists owe as much to learned tidying as to anything a Sambian fisherman believed. Others, especially in Lithuania, take the *Sudovian Book* as an honest witness. Bardaitis lives entirely inside that argument.

What he could do, then, is what his trade implies: keep a hull sound, bring a crew home, see the nets filled. He ruled the vessel, not the water under it, which belonged to other gods. His weakness is one no offering could mend. The people who prayed to him lost their language by the early eighteenth century, and their sea-god survives as a single word in the handwriting of the men who wanted him forgotten.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Bardaitis?

Bardaitis is the Old Prussian god of ships, written Bardoayts in the original sources. He was the patron of sailors and fishermen on the Baltic coast of Sambia. Bardaitis is the modern Lithuanian form of his name.

Where is Bardaitis mentioned?

Bardaitis appears in the *Constitutiones Synodales*, a book of church rules issued by the Lutheran bishops of Pomesania and Sambia in 1530. He is also named in the *Sudovian Book*, a German account of Prussian customs from about the same period. Both list him among the water gods, directly after Potrympus.

What was offered to Bardaitis?

Fish was the offering made to Bardaitis. The sources do not describe how or where the offering was made.

What does the name Bardaitis mean?

The meaning of the name is disputed. The linguist Kazimieras Būga held that the original form was Gardaitis, from *garda*, a word for a ship. Rolandas Kregždys argued in 2008 that the name is an epithet of a sky god, and no explanation has been generally accepted.

Are there any myths about Bardaitis?

No myths about Bardaitis survive. The sources record his name, his link with ships and his place in a list of gods, and nothing about his origin, appearance or deeds.