Giltinė

The sound came from the roadside in the dead of winter, weeks after Christmas, when there was nothing standing in any field worth cutting. A man walking home heard it clearly: the long, patient rasp of a whetstone drawn down a scythe blade, over and over, in the frost. He knew what was being sharpened and he knew who was sharpening it. He got home, and not long after that he died, and the people who repeated the story afterwards agreed that the fright had done as much of the work as anything else.

Lithuanians called her Giltinė, and the name is a threat. It comes from gelti, to sting, the verb used of bees and of snakes, and eighteenth-century writers were already saying so out loud. Gottfried Ostermeyer called her the goddess of killing and of plague and glossed her name as thrusting a sting the way a bee does, or a stinger the way a serpent does. That etymology has held up better than most. It also marks out something unusual about Lithuania: most of the peoples around it never gave personified death a proper name at all, making do with a woman’s first name or a polite substitute, so that Polish death goes about as Baśka or Zośka or Kaśka. Lithuanian death has a name, and everybody knew it.

She surfaces in writing much later than she must have existed. The word is first caught in a handwritten German and Lithuanian dictionary of the mid-seventeenth century, the Lexicon Lithuanicum, and the first person to describe her at any length was Matthäus Prätorius, who called her the goddess of death and gave her a servant. The servant’s name was Magyla, and Prätorius said she was the one who kills or tortures like an executioner, which is a curious division of labour for a goddess who could presumably manage on her own. A century later Jokūbas Brodovskis put Giltinė in a list of gods as the goddess of plague, and also, revealingly, offered her as one possible rendering of the German word for a ghost. Pilypas Ruigys and Kristijonas Milkus followed him: death, and the heathens’ plague goddess, in a single breath.

In the legends people actually told, she is white. That is the oldest and steadiest thing about her. Sometimes it is her clothing, a woman wrapped head to foot in white cloth walking out of a farmyard at dusk, and sometimes it is her skin, which is why a bloodless face in Lithuania still gets called white as death. White was the colour of Lithuanian grave clothes and of mourning long before black arrived from the towns, and it stayed with her. Usually she is old. Not always. When a child is dying, witnesses report a small child coming up the road into the village, and by evening the sick little one next door is dead. When a man is dying, she can walk the road as a traveller. She matches what she has come for.

Often she is not visible at all, and then the household hears her instead. Doors bang. Doors swing open and shut with nobody coming through them, and the family sitting up with a sick relative knows exactly what is moving around the house. There is a Lithuanian phrase for a person who cannot enter a room quietly: he bangs about like Giltinė.

What the language fixes about her body is a catalogue of things that are wrong with it. She is too thin, thin as Giltinė. She is cold, cold as Giltinė. Her teeth stick out, and her grin is the standard comparison for anybody smiling too widely, who is said to be grinning like nine Giltinės. The teeth were the one feature the village mummer who played her had to get right, painted or built onto the mask, because the teeth were what made the face belong to the other world.

A sick man once told his wife that Giltinė was coming up from the graveyard, and asked her to open the door. She opened it, saw an empty yard, and turned to scold him for it. He stopped her. She is coming to my bedside, he said, let her come to me. He took a few deep breaths and died.

How she does the actual killing has shifted over the centuries, and the shift can be traced. The oldest layer is the sting, which is what her name preserves and what Jonas Balys and Gintaras Beresnevičius both took to be the original image. In legends written down more recently she does not sting at all. She licks, with a long tongue full of poison, and a man in one of those stories saves his own life by cutting the tongue off. The phrase-books add the plainer methods. She strangles. She suffocates. She pinches the life out, or takes hold with her nails.

The sting had a second career in church. When Lithuanian preachers needed to render Paul’s line about death having lost its sting, they had the word ready and waiting: Martynas Mažvydas used it in his hymnals in the sixteenth century, and Mikalojus Daukša put the question to her by name in his Postilė, asking Giltinė where her sting had gone. The village goddess and the scriptural figure of speech went into the same sentence and neither of them blinked.

The scythe is the newer weapon, and Algirdas Julius Greimas said so flatly: the rattling-boned spectre mowing people down is a late Christian import into Lithuanian folklore rather than an inheritance. The Danse Macabre came back into fashion in European art in the seventeenth century and Lithuania took its share. There was once a painting, now lost, of Jonušas Radvila dancing with Giltinė. A shrouded skeleton with a scythe still stands inside the church of Saints Peter and Paul in Vilnius. Kristijonas Donelaitis, writing his great poem of the Lithuanian farming year, has her sharpening a ready blade for the lads and girls and swinging so blindly at their young faces that braids and caps and all their finery come to nothing. A Samogitian priest put it to his parishioners more briskly: as the scythe cuts the grass, so death cuts down a man’s life.

The image sank into daily belief and stayed there. Woodworm ticking in a beam meant Giltinė whetting her blade, and a death in that house. Anybody sharpening a knife after dark was sharpening her scythe for her, whether he meant to or not.

She is at her most alarming when she introduces herself. In one Lithuanian version of the widely told story in which a poor man asks Death to stand godmother to his child, she takes him off into the forest, pulls a scythe out of a pile of stones, and says: I am Giltinė, and here is my tool.

The same tellers insist that the gaunt figure is not her natural shape, that she was beautiful once and got this way by misadventure, usually at human hands. She climbed an apple tree and could not get down, so the crows settled on her and picked at her all winter until she dried out like tinder and nothing was left but bare bones. She was tricked into a coffin and shut up for three hundred years while the flesh rotted off her. She was folded into a nutshell and came out shrivelled, one teller adding that she now looks the way we see her painted, which suggests he had the church picture in mind and knew it was a picture. She can be made small at will: a nutshell, a bone, a snuffbox, a bottle, a bag. Anything with a lid.

The plague made her large again. Fishermen of Lithuania Minor were still saying in the twentieth century that when the great pestilence of 1709 came, Giltinė walked in out of the lagoon and strangled people, and a Prussian Lithuanian legend has her going house to house that year with the plague on her. The Lithuanian word for the lagoon and the open sea, marios, sits very close to the word for plague, maras, and the closeness plainly did some work in people’s minds. Death came in off the water.

She is normally one. The curses say otherwise, sending an unwanted person off to the giltinės in the plural, and Simonas Daukantas argued from those phrases that there had genuinely been several, on the reasonable ground that there are several kinds of dying. Radvilė Racėnaitė has pointed out that nine in a Lithuanian curse is a way of saying a great many rather than a count, and that the three white women who turn up at a deathbed in some legends are more likely the souls of dead relatives coming to collect one of their own. Marija Gimbutienė made her a secondary figure, an aspect of the fate goddess Laima or, following Greimas, her sister, and folded both into a reconstructed Great Goddess of Old Europe. That reconstruction has worn less well than the folklore it was built from.

Greimas, who studied the godmother story closely, thought it a mistake to file her as nothing but a death goddess, since she keeps a sideline as a patroness of medicine. The tales bear him out. The man who becomes her godson generally becomes a healer on the strength of it, and the arrangement works beautifully right up until he tries to cheat her.

Her power is total and completely unsubtle. She comes when the time is up, she cannot be argued with, she does not need to be seen in order to do the work, and in a plague year she can cross a whole province. Her weakness is the other face of the same coin. She is single-minded, and single-minded beings are easy to fool, which is why almost every story about her ends with somebody shutting her inside something. It never holds. The lid comes off eventually, and she is thinner and colder than she was, and still coming.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Giltinė?

Giltinė is death personified in Lithuanian folklore, usually described as a gaunt old woman dressed in white who arrives when a person’s life is finished. Her name comes from the Lithuanian verb gelti, to sting. Seventeenth and eighteenth century writers in Lithuania Minor listed her among the gods as a goddess of death and of plague.

How does Giltinė kill people?

By stinging, licking, strangling or reaping. The sting is the oldest version and is preserved in her name, while legends recorded more recently have her killing by licking with a long tongue full of poison; Lithuanian phrases also describe her strangling, suffocating and pinching the life out of a person. The scythe belongs to a later layer borrowed from Christian European imagery.

Is Giltinė the sister of Laima?

That pairing comes from modern scholarship rather than from the folk legends. Marija Gimbutienė treated Giltinė as a secondary deity, either an aspect of the fate goddess Laima or, following Algirdas Julius Greimas, her sister, and placed both inside a reconstructed Great Goddess. Later folklorists have handled that reconstruction cautiously, because the legends themselves do not put the two together.

Can Giltinė be defeated?

She can be delayed and tricked, but never beaten. Lithuanian tales are full of people who shut Giltinė inside a nutshell, a coffin or an apple tree, and one hero saves himself by cutting off her poisoned tongue. She always gets out again, and the tales use those confinements to explain why she is so gaunt now.

Why is Giltinė associated with the plague?

Eighteenth century Lithuanian dictionaries name her outright as a goddess of plague, and folk belief kept the link alive. Fishermen of Lithuania Minor said that during the great pestilence of 1709 Giltinė came out of the lagoon and strangled people, and a Prussian Lithuanian legend has her carrying the plague from house to house that same year.

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