Stribog

Around 980 a prince set six carved figures on a hill above the Dnieper, and the monk who wrote them down a century and a half later cared far more about the blood at their feet than about who they were. Perun stood first, wooden, with a beaten silver head and a moustache of gold. Then Khors, then Dazhbog, then Stribog, then Simargl and Mokosh. Six names in a row, and only the first one gets a face.

That list is roughly a third of everything the medieval record has to say about Stribog. He was fourth of six. He had an idol on the Kyiv hill. People brought sacrifices to it, and according to the same chronicler some of those sacrifices were their own sons and daughters, which may be true and may be the standard accusation a Christian writer levelled at the religion he had replaced.

The second appearance is the famous one. In The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, composed near the end of the twelfth century about a raid onto the steppe that went catastrophically wrong, the weather turns against the army and the poet stops to name its ancestry. Behold the winds, Stribog’s grandsons, blowing from the sea as arrows upon Igor’s brave troops. It is one line. It is also the only moment in surviving literature when Stribog does anything at all, and he does it at one remove, through grandchildren, off the water, into the faces of men who are about to lose.

The third text is a sermon. Sometime in the twelfth century an East Slavic preacher borrowed the name of John Chrysostom, dead seven hundred years and safely authoritative, and wrote out a scolding for parishioners who were baptised and still not behaving. Some of them, he complains, believe in Stribog, Dazhbog and Pereplut, and drink to them from horns, and caper about, and have forgotten the God who made the seas and the rivers. Hold on to that detail. Horn rims, a warm room, people dancing badly. It is the nearest thing to a rite that anybody bothered to record, and the man recording it was furious.

Nobody knows what he did. There is no myth of Stribog, no birth, no parents, no consort, no quarrel with another god, no animal, no colour, no season. Perun keeps his oaks and his thunder. Veles keeps the cattle and the underworld and a long feud that scholars have reconstructed out of folk song. Stribog keeps one line about his grandchildren and a place in a list.

What fills the gap is a century and a half of philologists arguing about the name, and the argument is livelier than most myths. Roman Jakobson split the word into stri- and bog, traced the first part to a Proto-Slavic verb meaning to spread or scatter, and made Stribog the apportioner of riches, a matched pair with Dazhbog the giver of riches. He liked that this lined up with the Vedic pair Bhaga and Amsha, and he liked that the Avestan wind god introduces himself by saying he is called the one who spreads. Aleksander Brückner rejected the wind reading outright as unwarranted, connected the name instead to a Ukrainian verb meaning to jump, produced a god who jumps, and then wrote that he could say nothing further about him.

Mark Vey proposed that stri- was the worn-down remains of the Indo-European word for father, which would make Stribog a Slavic sky father, cousin to Jupiter and Zeus and Dyaus. Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov backed him. Most linguists since have not, on the grounds that the sound change the theory requires never happened in Slavic. Dmitry Zelenin read the root as one meaning to annihilate and got a god of war. Vittore Pisani matched it to the Latin word for frost and got a god of cold. Stanisław Urbańczyk went to a Moravian dialect word for a hard wind and got a god of creaking and swishing, which is at least a sound you can hear.

Michał Łuczyński, working through the place names, made the observation that does the most work. Whatever Stribog meant, it stuck hardest to water. Strybozh sits in Zhytomyr, Stribozh in the old Novgorod lands, a Strybozhskaya river ran in the Kyiv country, a Striboc stream near Tczew was written down in 1282, and a village called Strzyboga stands in Poland to this day. Names that outlive a conversion tend to be names people still understood, and if his clung to rivers and streams then the root probably had to do with running and flowing rather than jumping or fathering. It is thin evidence. It is also spread across a thousand kilometres, which is more than a single chronicle list can manage.

Aleksander Gieysztor, hunting for any Slavic wind cult at all, came back with folk names rather than gods. A Bulgarian wind called the darkener, which brings blackness and blinds whoever it catches. A south wind in Serbia known as the one-eyed. Neither of them is Stribog. They are the kind of residue a wind god leaves behind, and Gieysztor offered them in exactly that spirit, as the shape of an absence.

In 988 Vladimir was baptised and the hill was cleared. Perun got the ceremony: lashed to a horse’s tail, dragged down the slope to the Dnieper with twelve men beating him with sticks the whole way, then shoved out into the current while people ran along the bank after him. The rest were cut apart and given to the fire. Stribog’s idol burned somewhere on that hill and not one line survives to say what shape it had been. A church went up on the spot.

Take him at the strongest reading his sources will bear and the power is real enough. The winds belong to his line. Weather in that country arrives across an enormous quantity of flat ground and does as it pleases to armies, harvests and roofs, and the single recorded intervention by his family is a slaughter on the Kayala. If the apportioning reading holds, he also had a hand in who got what, standing beside Dazhbog at the moment when fortune is divided rather than simply handed over.

His limits are not the sort gods usually have. No hero binds him, no weapon touches him, no trick catches him out. What beat Stribog was the paperwork. Perun lasted into folklore because the peasantry went on quietly handing his thunder to the prophet Elijah. Veles lasted because he had livestock and money attached to him and people never stop caring about either. Stribog had no story to hide inside, so when the idols came down he went into the ground under the names of a few villages and a couple of streams and stayed there. The winds off the Black Sea kept blowing. Nobody wrote down whose they were after that.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Stribog?

Stribog is an East Slavic god named in three medieval texts, the earliest of which lists him among the six idols Prince Vladimir set up on a hill at Kyiv around 980. The other five were Perun, Khors, Dazhbog, Simargl and Mokosh. No surviving source explains his function, which makes him one of the most cited and least understood figures in Slavic religion.

What is Stribog the god of?

Stribog is most often called a wind god, because The Tale of Igor’s Campaign describes the winds as his grandsons, but no source actually assigns him a domain. Roman Jakobson read the name as “apportioner of riches” and paired him with Dazhbog, the giver of riches. Other scholars have argued from the same name for a sky father, a war god, a god of cold, or a god of things that flow.

Why are the winds called Stribog’s grandsons?

The phrase comes from a single line in The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, a poem composed at the end of the twelfth century about a failed raid onto the steppe, where the winds blow from the sea like arrows against Igor’s men. It is the only place in medieval literature where Stribog is connected to anything he governs. Everything later written about him as a lord of the four winds is built on that one sentence.

Where does Stribog appear in medieval sources?

He appears in three East Slavic texts: the Primary Chronicle, in the list of idols Vladimir raised at Kyiv in 980; The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, where the winds are his grandsons; and a twelfth-century sermon falsely attributed to John Chrysostom, which complains that people still believe in Stribog, Dazhbog and Pereplut and drink to them from horns. His name also survives in village and river names across Ukraine, Russia and Poland.

Is Stribog an ancient god or a modern invention?

Stribog is genuinely ancient and securely attested, unlike several figures who circulate in modern Slavic pantheon lists. What is modern is nearly everything said about him: his role as ruler of the four winds, his imagined appearance, and his place in a tidy pantheon are all inferences drawn from three short medieval passages that describe none of it.

Related Entries

Perun, Dazhbog, Khors, Simargl, Mokosh, Svarog, Veles, Rod, Sventovit, Triglav, Vayu, Anemoi, Zephyrus, Njord, Dyaus