Egle—Queen of Grass-Snakes
By Jurga Saltanaviciute
Belgium-born anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss introduced a new trend in the study of myth: structuralism. He applied F. de Saussure's method of the structural study of language to the analysis of myth. In his theory, C. Levi-Strauss compares myth to language and speech and argues that myths are created according to a certain logical model (which accounts for the similarity of myths around the world), and that the model can be reconstructed by breaking the story into its main constituent elements, or mythemes, and identification of relationships between them (The Structural Study of Myth, pp. 50-51). In the paper I am using Levi-Strauss's methodology to analyze the Lithuanian mythological fairy-tale Egle, Queen of Grass-snakes. Thus, I will identify the gross constituent units in the story, establish binary oppositions and organize them into the logical structure, which will help us discover a possible meaning of the fairy-tale in the Lithuanian culture. My analysis will be highlighted by the explanation of cultural meanings of given elements.
Once by the Baltic Sea there lived a couple that had 12 children: 9 sons and 3 daughters. The girls liked to swim in the sea; and once Egle (The English equivalent is a spruce) the youngest and the most beautiful one, found a grass-snake in the sleeve of her shirt that asks her to marry him in return for the shirt. She agrees.
One day a carriage driven by grass-snakes enters Egle's parents yard to pick up the bride. The parents are unwilling to give her away, and attempt to cheat the grass-snakes twice by giving them domestic animals (a sheep, a goose). However, when the grass-snakes return the third time, Egle is forced to leave in order to save her family from destruction. At the sea she is met by a young and handsome prince, Zilvinas, who is the son of the sea, and they are carried into a beautiful palace under the sea for their wedding feast.
Nine years pass and Egle and Zilvinas have four children: three sons, Azuolas (Oak), Uosis (Ash), and Berzas (Birch), and one daughter, Drebule (Asp). Egle asks her husband to visit her family and he gives her three tasks: to wear down a pair of iron shoes, to spin a mysterious tow, and to bake bread bringing water in a sieve. Egle completes the tasks with the advice from a wise old woman and is allowed to travel home with her kids for nine days. Zilvinas stays in the sea and gives them a formula how to call him so that he would take them back (if you are alive, come as a milk-white foam, if you are dead, come as a black-blood foam).
Egle is feasting with her family for nine days. However, her brothers are trying to get the calling formula from the children and kill Zilvinas, so that their sister would stay at home. The three boys do not tell them anything; the small daughter, when threatened by the uncles, betrays her father. The men go to the sea and kill the grass-snake when he emerges from the water.
Finally, Egle and children travel to the sea and call Zilvinas. When the black blood foam arrives and they discover the name of the betrayer, Egle accurses the children and herself—they turn into trees: she becomes a shawled spruce, the boys strong trees, an oak, an ash, and a birch, and the daughter is turned into a shivering asp.
At first, in the Lithuanian story we cannot distinguish Levi-Strauss's basic opposition, i. e. nature vs. culture, as we find culture both in the earthly, Egle's family' s life, and in the under-the-sea world, where there is a fancy palace, feasting, etc. Thus, the basic opposition in this story is ordinary vs. extraordinary (heroic) life, and the basic characters can also be opposed according to the possession or absence of such qualities. In the story we have extraordinary events, such as Egle and her family's life in a house by the sea, Zilvinas's death from Egle's brothers' hand; and extraordinary happenings, e.g. Egle's marriage to a grass-snake and her transportation to the under-the-sea world, her trip home after nine years, and the transformation of human beings into trees. At this point our system of binary oppositions expands into a more complicated structure as we discover that another opposition is life vs. death, however, of ordinary or extraordinary character: Egle's life with her family is juxtaposed to her extraordinary marriage and life in her husband' s palace, which means death in ordinary sense; Egle's trip home means regaining ordinary life, and Zilvinas receives ordinary death, while Egle's curse of the children and herself has a double meaning: on the one hand, she denies them human(ordinary)social life, and on the other hand, the transformation into trees means reincarnation of human beings and healing. On the role and meaning of trees in Lithuanian culture see: Marija Gimbutas, The Balts, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963, pp. 191,194.
Zilvinas is killed by Egle's brothers. Thus, I will try to formulate the underlying idea of this logical model in the light of Lithuanian culture and history.
It is known that pre-Christian Lithuanian (and Baltic in worldview was characterized by the presence of abundant extraordinary or supernatural elements: gods, ghosts, spirits, etc. Lithuania was the last European country to officially accept Christianity in 1387, but pagan religious traditions were still practiced by villagers as late as the 16th century (worship in sacred groves) and some survived in their almost original or modified form into these days (e.g., the summer solstice celebration became St. John' s day. I remember my grandmother telling me about a very ancient custom that survived into fairly recent times—some serfs still kept grass-snakes in their cabins in the 19th century.
Thus we see that common people were very reluctant to give up their traditional religion, which becomes obvious in the discussed story: if we say that Zilvinas's domain of extraordinary character represents the old system of beliefs and worldviews, then it is clear that the story offers that its rejection is punished by death or the person should find the way back through healing. In other words, people lose their ordinary life as they reject its extraordinary element. The fairy-tale must have been an enlightening story in the epoch when the people faced the conflict of two religious systems and were striving to maintain their original religion.
In conclusion, I demonstrated how Claude Levi-Strauss's structural method of myth analysis helped me to reconstruct the meaning of a Lithuanian fairy-tale. However, the complex structure of the story and the interweaving of different elements required the modification and expansion of Levi Strauss's binary opposition model. Furthermore, although C. Levi-Strauss denies the importance of cultural information in the analysis of myth and argues that mythological thinking is universal, my conclusions would have been impossible without cultural and historical knowledge: awareness of the events as well as people\rquote s reactions to them and resistance to innovations, understanding of the meaning of certain objects in the old Lithuanian worldviews, and cultural intuition. Thus I discovered the validity of C. Levi-Strauss's structural method in the study of myth, however, I also became convinced that a holistic knowledge of culture is necessary to arrive at a culturally valid and scholarly meaningful interpretation
