Eglė

A pond in the last of the summer light, three sisters twisting the water out of their hair, and something cool and dry already waiting inside a linen sleeve. The youngest reaches for her shirt and finds a grass snake coiled in it. Her eldest sister grabs a fence stake and swings in to beat the thing out. Then the snake speaks, in plain human words, and all three of them go rigid.

Give me your word that you will marry me, it says, and I will come out willingly.

The girl is Eglė, and in the telling a collector took down in Moscow in 1883 she is the youngest of three daughters in a house that also holds twelve sons. She cries. She offers to simply hand the shirt over and let the creature go back wherever it came from. The snake repeats itself. There is nothing else to be done, so she gives her word, which in this story is a binding thing.

Three days later the yard fills with snakes. They hang along the gate bars, wind up the fence stakes, coil round the long wattle poles, and the matchmakers among them slide indoors and up onto the bench beside the old couple. The parents refuse, then look properly at the number of them, and hand over the youngest and best loved of their children. The snakes leave singing. The family mourns her as dead, telling each other that the filthy things have taken her off somewhere and finished her.

They are wrong. At the seashore a handsome young man is waiting, and he tells her he is the same snake that sat in her sleeve. They cross to a small island, go down beneath the sea, and come into a palace fitted out better than anything above the water. The wedding feast runs three weeks.

She stays nine years and is content there, which the tale states without apology or explanation. Four children come: Ąžuolas, Uosis and Beržas, oak and ash and birch, and last a daughter, Drebulė, aspen. It is the eldest boy, larking about one day, who asks the question that ends everything. Mother, where do your parents live? Let us go and visit them.

Žilvinas does not refuse. He agrees, and then sets conditions. First, spin the tuft of silk in the storeroom. She sits at the wheel until it drones for days on end and the tuft is exactly the size it was when she began. An old woman living nearby, held by everyone to be a knower and a caster of spells, tells her to throw the thing into the fire the next time she heats the oven for bread. The silk goes up with a hiss, and in the flames Eglė sees a toad the size of a laundry beater writhing there, and understands that the silk had been coming out of the toad all along. Next, iron shoes, which she scrapes against brick and stone and gravel until it is obvious they will outlast her; the old woman sends her to the blacksmith to have them scorched in the forge, and after that they are gone in three days. Last, a pie, with every pot and vessel in the house hidden away; the old woman tells her to smear a sieve with sourdough and carry water in it.

Her husband walks her to the water, puts her across, and gives her one instruction. Come back alone with the children, stand at the edge, and call him. If milk foam comes in on the waves, he is alive. If blood foam comes, he is not. He turns to the children and tells them the words are never to leave their mouths.

The welcome at her old home is enormous. Neighbours and distant relatives come to look at her, and everyone wants to know what it is like down there, whether it is beautiful, whether she is happy. Nine days go by before she notices any of them passing.

Her brothers spend those days working out how to keep her. They take Ąžuolas into the forest, question him, whip him with rods, and he tells them he knows nothing. Uosis the next day, Beržas the day after, and nothing from either. Then they coax out Drebulė, the smallest, who says she does not know until she sees the rods come out from under their coats, and then says all of it.

Twelve men went down to the shore with scythes.

When Eglė finally comes to the water and sings the call, the sea moves from the bottom upward, and what rolls in on the waves is red. Her husband’s voice reaches her out of the deep and tells her which weapon and whose mouth. Nobody arrives to put any of it right. What she does instead is speak, and in the oldest versions the words are sung rather than said: may you turn into an aspen, may you tremble day and night, may the rain wash your face and the wind comb your hair. Stand, my sons, as strong trees. I, your mother, will remain a spruce.

Her name was a tree from the first line, and the story is only the distance she travels to become it. The aspen shakes at the smallest breath of wind, the telling ends, because she shook in front of her uncles and gave away her own father and mother.

That is one telling. A second, written down by Jadvyga Teofilė Juškytė in 1904, gives a king’s daughter who drops a ring into a pool and a snake who fetches it up at a price. Her sisters try to swap the bride: first the eldest sister, then a cow with a kerchief tied over its horns, then a pig. Each time the snake dances a round with the substitute and sings that this is not his maiden, his maiden is up in the high granary spinning flax and weeping. Here the impossible tasks are glass shoes, a wax spinning wheel and a tuft of silk, and the person who tells her how to beat them is the snake’s own mother. One brother does the killing and hangs the scythe in the porch, where his sister sees it and understands. There is no spruce at the end of that version at all. The mother-in-law calls up out of the water that the two sons are like little oaks and the one daughter like a small green frog, and the teller says, that is the whole tale.

Both were printed by Jonas Basanavičius in Chicago in 1904, and both are grains in a very large heap. When Leonardas Sauka assembled the corpus for the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore in 2007 and 2008 it filled four volumes and rested on 150 Lithuanian texts, 89 Latvian, 28 Russian, 22 Belarusian, six Ukrainian, four Tatar, two Bulgarian and one Kazakh. Most tellers use no names at all. They say the girl, the grass snake, the brothers. Eglė and Žilvinas are Lithuanian habits; only three Latvian texts name the wife, and they call her Madalia, while Russian tellers reach for Masha and Osip and Belarusian ones often call the serpent Jacob.

The husband is less stable still. Across the Latvian material he is a grass snake in twenty-nine texts, a worm in nine, a snake in seven, a toad in two, and once each an eel, a catfish, a little fish and a dragon. Six times he is a gentleman, three times a sea king or a king’s son, once a farmhand, once a man who is also a bear. In twenty-one of them he is simply the devil, which is what a few centuries of preaching will do to a bridegroom who lives under the water. Russian versions hand the killing to the mother rather than the brothers and turn the family into birds instead of trees, a son into a nightingale, the daughter into a swallow, the mother into a cuckoo. In the Setu and Võru country of southeastern Estonia most versions open somewhere else entirely, with a riddle about a pair of shoes sewn from the skin of a louse.

Whatever power Eglė holds arrives once, at the very end, and it costs her everything she has. Through the rest of the story she solves nothing on her own. The silk, the iron shoes and the pie are all beaten with borrowed instructions from a neighbour, and the promise that carried her under the sea was talked out of a frightened girl standing at a pond with her shirt in a snake’s grip. Her weakness is the same thing as her strength. She keeps her word, and she keeps it to two households that want opposite things from her, and the tale never once lets her choose between them. It removes the choice instead, and leaves her rooted in the ground with her children around her.

Scholars have never entirely agreed on what they are looking at. Donatas Sauka wrote in 1982 that the story does not fit the shape of a wonder tale and poses a riddle that will not be solved quickly. Gintaras Beresnevičius argued in 2003 that a Lithuanian theogonic myth sits lodged inside it, and was careful to add that he would not claim Eglė and Žilvinas were the primordial gods themselves. In 2008 Saulis Bagočiūnas mapped a cluster of Baltic-looking river and place names around Lake Peipus in the Pskov region that echo the tale’s characters and even its milk foam, and had to leave the age of those names an open question.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Eglė the Queen of Serpents?

Eglė is the mortal heroine of the best known Lithuanian folk tale, the youngest daughter of a large peasant household who promises to marry a grass snake after finding it coiled in her shirt sleeve. She goes to live with him in a palace beneath the sea, bears four children, and at the end of the story turns herself and them into trees. Her name is the Lithuanian word for spruce.

How does the story of Eglė end?

Her twelve brothers force her youngest child to reveal the call that summons her husband, then kill him at the water’s edge with scythes. When Eglė sings the call and blood foam comes in on the waves instead of milk foam, she curses her daughter Drebulė to become a trembling aspen, turns her three sons into oak, ash and birch, and becomes a spruce herself.

Who is Žilvinas?

Žilvinas is the grass snake who takes Eglė as his bride and appears to her on the shore as a handsome young man. He rules a palace under the sea and sets her three impossible tasks before allowing her to visit her family. The name Žilvinas belongs mainly to Lithuanian versions; in Latvian tellings the husband is often a worm, a toad, a sea king or the devil, and in Belarusian ones he is frequently called Jacob.

Why does the aspen tremble?

In the tale the aspen trembles because Eglė’s daughter Drebulė trembled in front of her uncles and gave away the secret that got her father killed. Drebulė is the Lithuanian word for aspen, and the story works as an explanation for why that one tree shakes in the smallest breeze while oak, ash and birch stand firm.

Is the tale told the same way everywhere?

No. More than three hundred variants have been collected across Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and further afield, and they disagree on almost everything except the bargain and the betrayal. In Russian versions the mother kills the snake and the family becomes birds rather than trees, and in one Lithuanian telling recorded in 1904 there is no spruce at the end at all.

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