Zirnitra

Also Known As: the runes on the left of the same object were read as glit in 1771 and as Zica in 1768; the short form Zir and the variant Rosvodiz circulate in modern popular listings only
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Wendish Mythology, Slavic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A winged bronze dragon made to be socketed on a pole, described in its only source as a battle standard rather than a being with any powers at all.
Role in Mythos: None in any recorded Wendish tradition; the name enters the literature in 1768 as runes punched onto one figure in a hoard of eighteenth century forgeries.
Relation to Humans: The man who published the object stated plainly that he could find no trace of anyone worshipping it. What it has instead of worshippers is readers, passed from a Berlin copperplate folio into two centuries of dictionaries, games and websites.

It weighs a pound and thirteen Loth, and it does not lie straight. The tail is wound into a coil and finishes in a double barb that turns outward, the way a hook is made for something large. A hollow tube runs through the middle of the body, in between the feet and out through the back near the nape, and that tube is the whole argument. A thing with a socket through it was meant to go on a pole.

Andreas Gottlieb Masch, superintendent of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, knew what to do with a socket. Thietmar of Merseburg, writing around 1018, had recorded that the field standards of the Wends were kept in the temple at Rhetra and taken out only for war, when they were carried in front of the foot soldiers. So when Masch came to catalogue the bronzes in 1771 he did not put the dragon among the gods. He filed it under sacred implements, in the same section as the offering bowls and the sacrificial knives, and he called it the Wendish field standard.

Then he wrote the sentence that should have ended the matter. It is doubtful, he said, whether the Wends venerated this standard as divine. They certainly held it holy and placed great confidence in it on campaign, but of religious worship he could find not the slightest trace in any writer, nor on any of the other offering gear. He supposed they regarded it much as the Turks regard the banner of their Mohammed. The man who put the name Zirnitra into print says outright that nobody prayed to it.

His description of the object runs to five sections and is the best thing about him. The head is bent upward and the jaws stand open on many teeth set close together. Round the neck runs a kind of border, like a collar. The feet are short and covered in scales, with four claws on the right one, and both are bent so that they close around the tube passing between them. Under the right claw lies a beetle on its back, head turned down, six legs spread wide, its tail made of five leaves lapped over one another like the plates of a crayfish. Under the left claw a small bust sits on the tube. One wing is broken away and the other is spread upward. Along the ridge of the back there are two more busts, a man’s face mostly turned toward the tip of the tail and a woman’s with a great deal of curled hair, the cloth at her neck falling something like a Roman stola. Beside the man’s face is a patch burned in a fire, and Masch thought it looked as though a third face had been there.

The name is punched into the metal along the right side of the body and neck. On the left, under the throat, is a second word. Masch read it as glit and admitted he had no idea what it meant. Three years earlier, in the first written description of the same object, the Neubrandenburg physician Hempel and the jurist Pistorius had read those same runes as Zica. They also saw the tail tip as arrow shaped rather than barbed, and counted one bust with two faces where Masch counted two busts and the ghost of a third. Two careful men, one small piece of metal, three years apart, and they cannot agree on what is stamped on it.

As for Zirnitra itself, Masch conceded that the word does not sound Wendish. He took the first syllable to be the name of a god Zir, which he had constructed earlier in the same book out of a Gothic gloss where thyr or zir is rendered as servant. The ending he traced to a little known Greek word for a long drawn thread. Zirnitra would therefore mean the standard of the god Zir, under whose favour a war is carried on unbroken, like a thread. That is the entire origin of the name. There is no folk tale under it and no cult, only a Lutheran superintendent with a Greek lexicon and a run of punched marks to account for.

The first man to say so in print was Johann Thunmann of Halle, in 1772, one year after the book appeared. His complaint was precisely this habit: that Masch looked at one alphabet and saw now Wendish, now Gothic, now Greek, whichever suited the reading he wanted. Zirnitra is the charge with a picture attached.

The find itself was never more than a family story. An ancestor had been planting a tree in the parsonage garden at Prillwitz, near the water south of Neubrandenburg, and turned up metal. Some of it went to the founder when Neubrandenburg cast a new bell. At least one piece was melted down to see whether there was anything precious in the alloy, and there was not, which is the only reason the rest survived. The remainder stayed inside a Neubrandenburg goldsmithing family, passing to the goldsmith Sponholtz through his father in law, the goldsmith Pälcke. Masch printed all of this at length, he explained, in order to head off the suspicion that the whole thing had been invented.

He was pressed on that suspicion and he had answers. Were these puppets shaped by an artist in recent times, he wrote, they would certainly be in a quite different taste. And supposing some craftsman had made the figures to work a fraud, he would either not have cut runes on them at all, or, if the idea had occurred to him, he could not possibly have known the foreign and dead languages. Which goldsmith, Masch asked, knows Wendish, Gothic and Greek?

A goldsmith did not need to. He needed a copy of Masch. Around 1777 the younger brother of the man who had sold the bronzes, Gideon Sponholz, decided to make good the loss of the family idols by producing more. The potter Pohl of Neubrandenburg modelled them in clay. A journeyman in the brother’s workshop, Christian Friedrich Neumann, secretly moulded them and cast them in metal, then sat with the Woge and Masch plates open in front of him and punched the runic legends on with a shot punch, copying the names off the engravings. Gideon finished them with borax so that they came up green, in the colour of something old. Every name he used but one is in the folio.

Neumann was seventy eight when the ducal commissioners called him in at Neustrelitz in October 1827. He had come to the Sponholz brothers in 1765, at fifteen, and stayed six years an apprentice and seventeen a journeyman. He told them what he had cast, went back the following July to say he had decided to tell them the rest, and swore to it before the city court in the autumn of 1828. Asked whether any of the learned men who visited the house had supplied the designs or written out the runes for Sponholz, he said he did not know it and could not believe it of them.

Here the story turns awkward, and the awkwardness is worth keeping. Neumann’s confession covered the second collection, the one Count Potocki had catalogued on his tour in 1794. The commissioners, reporting to the grand duke in October 1829, drew the obvious line: little of that second collection could still be called genuine, whereas the first collection, the pieces Masch published, had come through the investigation without spot or reproach. Zirnitra is in the first collection. It was among the thirty five pieces the physician Hempel bought from Jacob Sponholtz at the very beginning of 1768, and it was already in print that year in a Hamburg newspaper before Masch ever saw it. No one has ever confessed to making it. It is condemned by the company it keeps, by the reasoned verdict Konrad Levezow read to the Berlin Academy in January and July of 1834 and published the year after, by Franz Boll’s hundred and eighteen page reconstruction of the whole affair from the court files in 1854, and by every judgement passed since. The Slovak scholar Ján Kollár was still defending the hoard when he died in Vienna in 1852. The bronzes are now in the store of the folk museum at Schwerin-Mueß and are not put on show.

What the modern accounts give it instead is a promotion. Zirnitra has become a black dragon and a god of sorcery, with a name that supposedly means magically empowered and a war banner flown against the Saxons. The banner at least has a source, since Masch cites older historians for the flying dragon carried by Germans and Wends into the field, derives the whole design from the snakes on his own figure of Wodha, and thinks it is where the Danish and Mecklenburg griffin came from. The sorcery has none. It appears in neither the 1768 description nor the 1771 book nor the nineteenth century investigation, though it is fair to note that Potocki, unable to decipher the runes on any of the pieces, fell back on calling them charactères magiques.

The powers of the thing are the powers of a good invention, and they are real. The name is short and strange and looks like a word from a lost language. The gloss flatters whoever repeats it. It has outlived its exposure by nearly two centuries and now sits above most genuinely attested Slavic beings in a search result. Its weakness is that there is nothing at the bottom of it. Ask for one mention of Zirnitra before a Neubrandenburg goldsmith’s counter in 1768 and there is no chronicle line to produce, no place name, no song, and no villager in Lusatia or Mecklenburg who ever said the word.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who or what is Zirnitra?

Zirnitra is the name punched in runes onto a small bronze dragon, catalogued as Figure 34 in Andreas Gottlieb Masch’s 1771 book on the Prillwitz idols. Masch classed it not as a god but as a battle standard kept in a temple. Later popular accounts turned the label into a Wendish black dragon and a god of sorcery.

Was Zirnitra a god of sorcery?

No source before the modern internet says so. Masch, who introduced the name, wrote that he could find no trace of any religious veneration of the object in any writer, and he filed it among sacred implements rather than among the gods. Neither the 1768 description of the same figure nor the nineteenth century investigation of the hoard mentions sorcery.

Are the Prillwitz idols genuine?

They are eighteenth century forgeries. The goldsmith Christian Friedrich Neumann confessed under oath in 1827 and 1828 that he had cast many of them from clay models made by the Neubrandenburg potter Pohl, on the orders of Gideon Sponholz, punching the runes on by copying Masch’s own engravings. The collection is now kept in storage at the folk museum in Schwerin-Mueß.

What does the Zirnitra figure look like?

It is a winged dragon of mixed metal, six inches long as it sits and nine inches if the coiled tail is measured along its length, with open jaws full of close set teeth and a collar like band round the neck. Its short scaled feet grip a hollow tube that runs through the body so the figure could be fixed on a pole. A beetle lies on its back under the right claw, and busts of a man and a woman sit along the ridge of the back.

Where does the name Zirnitra come from?

Masch built it himself. He admitted the word did not sound Wendish, took the first syllable as the name of a god Zir that he had derived from a Gothic gloss, and traced the ending to a Greek word meaning a long drawn thread, giving a standard under which war continues unbroken. In 1772 Johann Thunmann attacked exactly this method of reading Wendish, Gothic and Greek out of the same set of runes.