Cú Roí and Svyatogor: A Study in Chthonic
Grigory Bondarenko
Ulster University
Abstract
Both Early Irish and Russian mythological traditions demonstrate a particular example of an extraordinary character showing supernatural features as well as the features of a chthonic monster: it is Cú Roí mac Daire on the Irish side, and Svyatogor on the Russian side. We have to be careful before arguing that these two mythological characters reflect one particular archetype of a monstrous chthonic creature (cf. views expressed by Henderson (1899) in Ireland and Putilov (1986) in Russia); on the contrary, one has to consider both heroes as complex and independent entities who appear in the two quite distinct mythologies (Early Irish and Russian). This is especially true in relation to the Russian tradition of bylinas which have been preserved orally until the first published editions of the nineteenth century.
An authentic term for bylina among Russian performers was starina (‘ancient story, history’, an exact equivalent of OI senchas). Both the Early Irish and Russian mythological traditions as they have survived in the textual forms (notwithstanding the differences of their background) bear clear traces of a Christian world-view which makes it even more difficult to establish certain pre-Christian religious or ritualistic patterns allegedly connected with the characters discussed. Nevertheless, archetypal typological similarities between these two heroes make them look like distorted reflections of an ancient chthonic creature/titan, well known in the basic myth. For example, the Indian myth of the heroic god (deva) Indra who fights the arch-titan (asura) (Namuci or Vṛtrá) was one of the sources for Coomaraswamy’s interpretation of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, a mediaeval romance based on ‘beheading game’ reflected in the early Irish tale Fled Bricrenn (Coomaraswamy 1944: 105-106). The aim of the present paper is to trace these typological similarities which sometimes will lead us to different characters and plots both in Early Irish and in Russian material.