Medeina

Also Known As: also Medeinė; called Žvorūna, Žvėrūna or Žvėrūnė in the Malalas interpolation and Modeina by Jan Łasicki; from Lithuanian medis, tree, or medė, forest, and žvėris, beast
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Baltic Mythology, Lithuanian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She holds the forest and everything wild inside it, and both the hare and the wolf answer to her.
Role in Mythos: She stands fourth in the earliest recorded Lithuanian pantheon, the one goddess among the gods a thirteenth-century king went on sacrificing to in secret after his baptism.
Relation to Humans: Hunters and warriors were her people, and the places tied to her cluster within a few hours’ ride of the manors and castles of the men who were both. She was not on their side, though; the fullest reading of her makes her an obstacle to the hunt rather than its patron.

A hare broke from the grass in front of the king, and the hunt stopped.

Mindaugas had been baptised by then. There was a crown coming from Rome, a correspondence with a pope, and a chronicler in Volhynia keeping score of how sincere any of it looked. None of that weighed anything against a brown shape going away fast across an open field. He would not ride into the stand of woodland the animal had come out of. He would not, the chronicle says, dare break so much as a switch from a branch in it.

That anecdote sits inside the only early sentence anyone has about Medeina. The Halych-Volhynian chronicle, preserved in the Hypatian manuscript and reporting the events of 1251 and 1252, says the king’s baptism was a deceit and that in private he kept sacrificing to his own gods: first to Nunadievis, and to Teliavelis, and to Diviriksas, the god of hares, and to Medeina. Then comes the hare, then the untouched wood. That clause is the whole of her earliest record. Everything written about her since has been grown out of it.

Her name is transparent in the way transparent names usually are, which is to say not much help. Medeina comes off medis, a tree, or medė, a forest. A Slavonic version of the Byzantine chronicle of John Malalas, carrying a Lithuanian passage interpolated into it around 1261, has the culture-hero Sovijus institute burnt offerings to Andajas, and to Perkūnas, which is to say the thunder, and to Žvorūna, which is to say the bitch, and to the smith Teliavelis, who forged the sun for them. Žvorūna comes off žvėris, a beast. The two lists agree about the sky god and agree about the smith, and where one has Medeina the other has Žvorūna, in the same slot, doing the same work. The two names hold one goddess, and each was meant to explain the other.

Then there is the god of hares, who has been a nuisance for a hundred and fifty years. The Slavonic offers no punctuation to help. Read one way, the god of hares is a title belonging to Diviriksas, the thunder god, which fits nothing else known about him. Read another, it is a fifth deity standing in a list of four. Algirdas Julius Greimas called it a copyist’s slip. Norbertas Vėlius and most of his predecessors moved between calling it a forest god and calling it an epithet of Medeina herself. Gintaras Beresnevičius took the opposite line and argued that a hare god is no freak at all, that a relief at Carlisle shows Gaulish Silvanus horned and holding a hare beside Diana, and that the Lithuanian pair is that pair. One comma would settle it. The manuscripts do not have commas.

What none of this produces is a face. No early source describes her. She has no parents, no myth of her own, no adventure and no death; she has a name, a position in a running order, and one word of gloss meaning a female dog. The familiar portrait, the one that turns up under her name everywhere, is not medieval. It belongs to Greimas, the Lithuanian semiotician, working on Baltic material through the 1970s and 1980s: a solitary goddess, unmarried and refusing marriage yet pursued by desire and hungry for it, beautiful, a huntress attended by wolves that double as her hounds, appearing either as a well-turned-out girl or as a she-wolf. He built it from the Malalas gloss, from the folk word vilkmergė, a wolf-girl and in the dictionaries a loose woman, and from a wide comparative reach across Europe. His study of her was never finished. It is a reconstruction by a named man in a known decade, and saying so makes it more interesting rather than less.

His sharpest observation is the one that gets dropped in the retelling. She is not on the hunter’s side. She does not deliver game. She obstructs. A goddess who runs at the head of a wolf pack has already told you whose interests she represents, and they are not the interests of the man with the spear.

The ground remembers her better than the texts do. Vykintas Vaitkevičius went looking for her in the landscape of eastern Lithuania and mapped two classes of site. Five are called Hare Churches: a stone at Genionys, hills at Guronys and Purveliai, a field at Liciškėnai, a forest at Mičionys. Ten more are Wolf-footprints, granite boulders carrying shallow hollows shaped like a paw. There is a Wilkopedzie in Poland and a stone at Zhuravets in Belarus bearing the tracks of hare, wolf, bear and fox together. Rainwater stands in the hollows and freezes there in winter. Every one of the sites falls within about ten kilometres of a fourteenth or fifteenth century royal manor, state castle or nobleman’s estate, which is either a coincidence or the point.

Vaitkevičius reads them as the sites of a cult kept by warrior-hunters, and the wolf-print stones as markers claiming ground for her, and by extension for the men who held it. That fits the rest of thirteenth-century Lithuanian religion, which is the religion of a ruling military caste and not of ploughmen. Hunting and war run on one figure of thought: the beast and the enemy are the same target. Henry of Livonia, writing in 1209, says the Ruthenians fled through the woods from the Lithuanians the way hares flee from a hunter. A Curonian sword of the eleventh or twelfth century from the cemetery at Silmalciems has hares running away down both arms of its crossguard. Nobody wants to be the hare.

The calendar left marks as well. Advent and Christmas songs carry ritual hare-hunting, and in 1583 the traveller Reinhold Lubenau found himself at the Courland duke’s table after a Christmas hunt in a sacred wood where in the ordinary run of the year no beast or bird is shot and no stick is cut. They skinned the deer, roe and hares they had taken, roasted them, and laid them down a long table. Over the border, Latvian hunters gave the first kill of the year to Meža māte, the Forest Mother, on the morning of St George’s day before sunrise, pushing it into a rotted-through stump. Nothing of that kind was ever recorded on the Lithuanian side.

Later writers reached for Rome. Jan Długosz matched the Lithuanian gods to Vulcan, Jupiter, Diana and Aesculapius, and Vėlius reads his Diana as Medeina. The fifteenth-century Byzantine Laonikos Chalkokondyles reported flatly that the Samogitians worship Apollo and Artemis. By the 1580s Jan Łasicki has her filed among woodland spirits as Modeina, one item in a list of seventy-six Samogitian gods that scholars have quarrelled over ever since, some of them treating the list as gold and others as almost worthless. That is a long fall from standing fourth in a king’s private pantheon.

Her powers, on the evidence, come down to one thing done extremely well. She could stop a king. Whatever the hare meant to Mindaugas, it was strong enough to turn a man with an army behind him out of a wood he had every right to enter, and to keep his hands off the branches. Her limits are just as plain. The cult that carried her cannot be rebuilt; Vaitkevičius, who has looked hardest, says outright that the data will not support it. The first kill of the year was probably hers, and offerings were probably made to keep wolves off the livestock, and probably is the load-bearing word in both. The forests she ruled were felled. Lithuania was baptised in 1387, and the goddess who kept the game away from the hunters shrank into a woodland spirit, then into a footnote, then into a boulder in a birch stand with a paw-shaped hollow in it that fills up with rain.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Medeina?

Medeina is the Lithuanian goddess of forests, wild animals and the hunt, and one of only five deities named in the earliest surviving list of Lithuanian gods. The Halych-Volhynian chronicle, reporting events of 1252, says King Mindaugas kept sacrificing to her in secret after accepting Christian baptism. She is the only goddess in that list.

Is Medeina the same goddess as Žvorūna?

Yes. Medeina is the name used in the Halych-Volhynian chronicle and Žvorūna the name used in the Lithuanian passage interpolated into the Slavonic Malalas chronicle around 1261, and the two occupy the same position in two otherwise matching lists of gods. Medeina derives from medis, tree, or medė, forest, and Žvorūna from žvėris, beast, so each name explains a different side of the same figure.

Why is the hare associated with Medeina?

The chronicle that first names Medeina also records that Mindaugas would not enter a wood a hare had run out of and would not break a branch there. In the same sentence it lists a god of hares, and scholars have argued for over a century about whether that phrase is a separate deity, an epithet of Medeina, a title of the thunder god Diviriksas, or a copying error. Vykintas Vaitkevičius later identified five eastern Lithuanian sites called Hare Churches that he connects with her cult.

Did Medeina help hunters?

No. In the reading developed by the semiotician Algirdas Julius Greimas, Medeina hinders hunters rather than assisting them, protecting the forest instead of the people working it. She is described as running with an escort of wolves that serve as her hounds, which puts her firmly on the animals’ side of the transaction.

What does Medeina look like?

No medieval source describes her appearance at all. The widely repeated image of a beautiful unmarried huntress who also appears as a she-wolf is a twentieth-century reconstruction by Greimas, built largely on the single Slavonic word meaning bitch that glosses her alternative name Žvorūna, and on the Lithuanian folk term vilkmergė.