First off this is an amazing collection of mythical creatures, many of them were even new to me, and the illustrations are amazing. With that said, is the information legit? I have other mythology books and sometimes I’ve noticed authors embellishing or inventing information, so I wanted to know how truthful to the real stories this book is.

by I_am_strange_

15 comments

  2. This book looks intriguing, even with my limited knowledge of Polish.

    Is it purely fantasy or a actual folklore told to polish children through the ages ?

  4. I had this book some years ago and loved it! (I probably still “have it” at my parents’ place somewhere. I can’t speak as to how legit it is, but there must be information about the sources and recopilation (?) work done to write it somewhere.

  5. Well, most of “slavic” mitology is made up by XIXth century poets and such is the case with this books as well.
    It has very pretty images, some interesting concepts and overall its very well made, but it is still a product of much later fantasy. If you look at the “sources” in the book it’s pretty open and not even hidden – there are few texts it cites older than the XIXth cent.

  7. All of that is pure XIX century fantasy. Nice to read but if you think this is legit mythology then no. Scientifically speaking, we know jackshit about the actual folklore from the past. We didn’t wrote anything, noone wrote about us. Or at least not alot.

  8. The big issue with “slavic mythology” is that most of it was made up around XX century, and its very unlikely that anyone from back then actually held these beliefs.

    The same could be said about any other mythology though…

  9. There are no legit sources. They didn’t write! All we have is some figures or four faced statues with horns of mead etc and you have to make of that what you will

  10. This book is not complete. There are descriptions of several Babas, but nothing is written about Baba Jaga!

  11. As other people mentioned about book sources – there’s a large problem with original ones. Slavic culture did not use text in general with some very rare runic exceptions. It was passed as told stories from one generation to another, so could and was distorted over time and by influence of other cultures (due to migrations).

    Catholic church also has tried to cancel old religions and due to opposition they tried to implement and assign old customs to new imposed religion (like Christmas tree). So I don’t think they publicly documented such stories in larger scale.

    I can add I have part one of it and some descriptions or illustrations look differently of what I “learned” over lifetime. I have also seen some European map as part of such study and it also didn’t have local legends from my hometown region.

  12. I highly recommend it, it’s a good read. I don’t know about accuracy tho, they seemed to have done quite a bit of research

  13. Contrary to what many people say here, which sounds like repeating something that would delegitimise slavic claim to the land they live on I’d say that writing down 19th century folklore, which was perpetuated for centuries in largely isolated villages does in fact constitute a good enough approximation of pre-christian mythology as much as can be done. Book’s pretty cool- the first part was better than the second, but still nice.

  14. When I was little, my grandma often mentioned czort/ czart, upiór, zmora, licho. And ofc Baba Jaga is familiar to polish kids.

  15. It’s for kids, a really fun book. Loosely based on most popular slavic myths/creatures.

    Unfortunately slavic mythologies are numerous, complicated and not well known. Really hard to get into it.

    Personally I can recommend Gieysztor’s monography as a starter point if you’re interested.

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