Baubas

Also Known As: also baubà, baubaũ, baũbinas, baubõžius, bùbas, bùbė, bùbis, bubõlius, bubùlis, babaũžis, babaũšis; from Lithuanian báubėti, to swell or thicken, or baũbti, to bellow
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Lithuanian Mythology, Baltic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: He exists only where it is too dark to see, and he catches, carries off, gores or drags under water any child who goes where he has been said to be.
Role in Mythos: He is the being invoked in Lithuanian children’s frighteners, the short sharp sayings villagers used to steer a child away from the well, the yard or a sleepless night.
Relation to Humans: Lithuanian parents named him at crying children between roughly the ages of one and six, pointing into an unlit corner as they did it. He belongs entirely to that transaction and appears almost nowhere else in the collected folklore, which makes him one of the few mythical beings whose whole existence is a piece of household discipline.

Behind the clay stove in a Lithuanian farmhouse there is a gap the lamplight never reaches, soot on the bricks and a cold draught coming off the wall. That is where he sits. A mother never had to describe him. She tipped her chin toward the gap, dropped her voice, and the child understood everything that needed understanding.

Baubas occupies a very small and very odd corner of Lithuanian folklore. He is not in the legends. He is not in the fairy tales. He turns up almost nowhere except in the vaikų gąsdinimai, the children’s frighteners, which are short sayings fired off to stop a child doing something: do not go outside, the bauba will carry you away; sleep, little one, or the bubė will gore you. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth those lines were ordinary equipment in Lithuanian village households.

He does not have a name so much as a drawerful of them. Baubas, bauba, baubau, baubinas, baubožius, bubas, bubė, bubis, bubolius, bubulis, and in some regions babaužis or babaušis. Lithuanian folklorists read that abundance as a measurement. Olga Cherepanova’s rule is that the number of names a mythical being carries is directly proportional to how popular it is, and by that measure baubas outranks every other bugbear in the country. Most of the others were local. He was known everywhere.

Ask what he looks like and the record goes quiet. The frighteners never say. That vagueness is not damage in transmission, it is the working part of the machine, since a shape left blank is filled in by the listener and the listener always does a worse job than any storyteller would. The one place his body leaks through is the lullabies, and what they hand over is peculiar. Wooden claws. Iron horns, which is why the threat can promise that the bubė will gore you. Then, in the same breath, human belongings: little glass boots, small baskets of hide, a bag of silk. Elsewhere he is simply black, as in the line about the black babaušis rising suddenly out of muddy water.

His country is the inside of the house, and inside the house it is the parts that go unlit: under the stove, in the recess behind it, hunched in the corners, working into the angles of a room, up in the loft. He gets out occasionally. He is said to sit in the well, in standing water, now and then in standing rye. The location was never really the point though. The condition was. He can be anywhere so long as it is dark, and the language admits as much, because to say that the baubai are crawling into the corners is simply to say that night is coming down.

He has no story. Not a birth, not a death, not a single encounter anyone thought worth setting down as a tale. What he has instead is a property, and the property is that he exists only where seeing is impossible. A nineteenth-century observer caught the whole mechanism in one line: from the age of one until six mothers frighten their crying children with hush, be quiet, the bubis will get you, the bubis, and as they say it they point into the dark.

Where the name comes from has two answers, and the second is probably the better one. The obvious answer hears baubti inside it, to low, to bellow, the noise of cattle, and that opens onto something considerably older. The Prussians and Lithuanians had a cattle god called Baubis. Matthäus Prätorius, writing at the close of the seventeenth century, calls him Jaučbaubis, a name built from the words for oxen and for bellowing. His help was asked when calves were weaned and cows blessed, and cattle were sacrificed to him. Daniel Klein’s hymnal of 1666 mentions him. Friedrich Kurschat’s dictionary of 1883 still lists him as Jaučių Baubis, patron of herdsmen. Rimantas Balsys reads the thing behind the stove as the last surviving splinter of that god, a divinity ground down across three centuries into a noise used on toddlers.

The second answer is less romantic and probably closer to the truth. Lithuanian also carries baubėti, to swell, to thicken, to grow coarse, and it sits among words for lumpy round objects: baubelis, a pine cone; baublys, a rotted tree; bubaras, a pimple; bubas, any round thing at all. Kazimieras Būga traced the whole cluster of roots back to an Indo-European stem meaning to swell or grow bigger. On that reading baubas is not named for the sound he makes. He is named for his shape, and the shape is thick, crooked and badly made. Birutė Jasiūnaitė, who set the case out in 2000, points to the Samogitian and Russian parallels running the same way, and notes that the same word is casually applied to a beetle, a worm or a louse. The being under the floor and the thing in a child’s hair are one vocabulary.

The rye is where his two halves touch. Jonas Balys and Rimantas Balsys both connect the baubas who lurks in standing grain with the older spirits of crop growth, and their account of what happened to those spirits is unsentimental. By the early twentieth century the field deities that had survived here and there in the regions had been demoted, and what stepped into the same job of keeping people out of the wrong places were things to frighten children with. A god of the harvest becomes a reason not to trample the rye.

What he does is brief and it is all one motion. He catches. He grabs. He carries children off. He gores, when he is the horned version. He drags them down into water. That is the complete repertoire, and it is plenty, because it is delivered by an adult who is standing right there and who can see into the corner better than the child can.

His limits are stranger and more absolute than any weapon. He cannot be seen, which means he cannot survive being seen, because the moment there is enough light in the corner to make out what is in it, there is nothing in it. He cannot speak either. Bellowing is the opposite of speech, and it puts him, at his most articulate, somewhere in the animal world rather than the human one. Gintaras Beresnevičius, setting him beside his soggier relative the maumas, put the difference between them in terms of consistency, baubas the harder of the two, maumas the softer and far more attached to water, a comparison that reads as less absurd once it is clear that both names also serve, in plain Lithuanian, for what comes out of a child’s nose. Above all he cannot act. He barely appears in any folklore text that is not a frightener, so there is no scene anywhere in which he moves without an adult mouth to move him. He waits behind the stove for somebody to say his name.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who or what is Baubas in Lithuanian folklore?

Baubas is the Lithuanian children’s bugbear, a being of lower mythology invoked by parents to frighten a child into behaving. He is not a god and belongs to no pantheon. He appears almost exclusively in the vaikų gąsdinimai, the short frightening sayings used in Lithuanian villages from the late nineteenth century into the middle of the twentieth.

What does Baubas look like?

The frighteners give Baubas no appearance at all, and that vagueness is characteristic of him. Lithuanian lullabies supply a few scattered details anyway: wooden claws, iron horns, glass boots, baskets of hide and a silk bag. One recorded line describes him simply as black, rising out of muddy water.

Where does Baubas live?

Baubas lives inside the house, in whichever part of it is unlit: under the stove, in the recess behind it, in corners, in the angles of a room, up in the loft. He is also placed in wells, in standing water and sometimes in standing rye. Darkness rather than any specific place is the real condition of his existence.

Where does the name Baubas come from?

There are two explanations. One links it to baubti, to bellow, and through that to Baubis or Jaučbaubis, an old Prussian and Lithuanian cattle god recorded by Daniel Klein in 1666 and by Matthäus Prätorius at the end of the seventeenth century. The other links it to baubėti, to swell or thicken, which would make Baubas named for a lumpy, misshapen form rather than for any sound.

What can Baubas do to a child?

Baubas catches children, seizes them, carries them off, gores them when he is described as horned, and drags them into water. He has no other powers and no myth cycle of his own. His force comes entirely from being named by an adult who is pointing at a dark corner.