Jievaras

Also Known As: also ievaras, jovaras; regionally barzda “the beard”, niuka, kukla, čiubas; the word is also the ordinary Lithuanian name for a tree
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Lithuanian Mythology, Baltic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: A braid plaited from the last handful of standing rye, bent back down to the soil over a buried offering of bread and salt so that the grain is returned to the ground it came from.
Role in Mythos: It closes the rye harvest, and in harvest-end songs the same word names a tree that carries the three tiers of the world and a bridge to the country of the ancestors.
Relation to Humans: Women made it in the stubble at the end of the cutting, and the households that made it expected bread to keep meeting bread from one year into the next. Those who were asked in the twenty-first century why it was done mostly could not say, only that it had to be.

The little square of ground was weeded down to bare soil first, which took some doing in a field that had just been cut and was otherwise nothing but stubble and dust. Into the scrape went a piece of black rye bread with salt shaken over it, sometimes a lump of cheese, sometimes three small coins, once in a while three apples or three stones. Earth was pushed back over the top. Standing above it, untouched by the sickle, was the last handful of rye in the field.

The woman doing this cut the ears off. She plaited what was left the way she would plait hair, took the finished braid, bent it over toward the house and pressed it down against the ground with a stone. That was the jievaras, and with it the rye harvest was finished.

The name travels. In one parish it is jievaras, in the next jovaras or ievaras; around Onuškis and Trakai it is the same object under the same word, but further east it becomes the niuka, or the čiubas, or the kukla, and in one village in what is now western Belarus a woman remembered her mother calling it simply the barzda, the beard, and the job of doing it as tying the beard so the crops would bear. What stays constant under the shifting names is the gesture. Grain that came up out of the soil is put back into the soil, ears down, weighted, so that the circle closes and starts again. Bread, as the saying went, should meet bread.

The word carries a second life that has nothing to do with fields. Jievaras is also a tree, and in the songs sung while the braid was being made it is a tree of a very particular kind: standing by the road, with ringing kanklės at its roots, a falcon’s young at its crown and bees humming through its middle, the three tiers of the world stacked in one trunk. In the calendrical hymns the same word turns into a bridge, the ievaro tiltas, which is what the dead cross. A plait of rye in the dirt and a cosmic tree with a hawk in the top of it are the same word, and the people who sang the song while making the plait apparently felt no strain in that at all.

It would be tidy to call the jievaras a grain spirit. The Lithuanian record does not quite allow it. The being thought to live in the standing crop, retreating deeper into the uncut patch as the reapers closed in, had its own names, žebris and rugių boba, the rye hag; and in many districts the last swathe was something to dodge rather than claim, because whoever cut it would be last at everything afterwards, would be widowed, would be chased by dogs, would stand out the dances. The old harvest power seems to have been demoted after Lithuania’s conversion, and what survived intact was not the being but the thing made in its place. The jievaras is the object. Whatever it was for had already gone quiet.

Its powers, such as they are, are entirely about continuity. It kept bread in the house through the winter and grain in the bins; it asked next year’s rye to come up as thick as this year’s. Around Adutiškis the women sang at it directly, telling it to hand on its strength to the one that would be made next August. Elsewhere the whole thing was punctuated by shouting across the field that the mice could have the stubble and the barns would have the grain. In the Varėna villages three strands of the last standing rye were bent to the ground one at a time, one for the birds, one for the mice, one for all the beasts, which is a fair reading of who else had a claim on the field.

Its limits are just as plain. The jievaras was never carried home. Unlike the harvest wreath, which was set on the farmer’s head and then hung in the corner beside the holy pictures, and unlike the first sheaf, which stood indoors all season and was threshed first for luck, the jievaras stayed out in the open where it had been made. It was left there, and when the ploughing came round it went under with everything else. It could not be reused, moved or repaired, and it worked only in the place where the rye had actually grown.

By the seventeenth century it was being written down, and by the early twentieth it survived in only a few corners of Dzūkija in the south. In 2011 and 2012 the folklorists Nijolė Laurinkienė and Rita Balkutė went looking for the last people who had done it, and found women in their eighties and nineties who could still plait one on request, hands going through the sequence without hesitation. Asked why, most of them shrugged. Nobody explained it, one said; they just called it the beard. Another, asked whether she had ever heard the name of the earth goddess whose bread she had been burying all her life, said no. She thought about it and offered a substitute of her own: žemė, earth, žemelė, little earth. Then she went back to talking about the rye.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Jievaras?

Jievaras is a braid plaited from the last handful of uncut rye at the end of the Lithuanian rye harvest. Bread and salt were buried in the ground beneath it, the ears were cut off, and the plait was bent over and pinned to the soil with a stone. It was left standing in the field rather than carried home.

Is Jievaras a god or a spirit?

No. Jievaras is the ritual object, not a being. The spirit believed to live in the standing rye and retreat into the last uncut patch was called žebris or rugių boba, the rye hag, and those are separate names in the Lithuanian record.

Why was bread and salt buried under the Jievaras?

The buried bread and salt returned the crop to the earth that produced it, so that the yearly cycle would repeat and the household would never run out. Coins, cheese, apples or small stones were used in some villages instead of or alongside the bread.

What does the word Jievaras mean in Lithuanian songs?

In harvest-end songs jievaras names a tree with the features of a world tree, with kanklės sounding at its roots, a falcon’s young in its crown and bees in its middle. In calendrical hymns the same word names a mythic bridge, the ievaro tiltas, linking the living world to the world of the ancestors.

Where and when was the Jievaras still made?

The custom is recorded from the seventeenth century and survived into the early twentieth century in parts of Dzūkija in southern Lithuania. Folklorists recording in 2011 and 2012 still found elderly women in southern and eastern villages who could demonstrate how it was plaited.