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LEGEND: Baba Yaga

·38 min·3 clips

Baba Yaga's fire leaps from a skull and burns Vasilisa's abusive stepmother and stepsisters alive.

The episode opens with the hosts discussing their childhood fear of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz and how the film Wicked reframed their perception of so-called evil women -- a framing that directly sets up Baba Yaga, the original wicked witch of Slavic tradition. Baba Yaga has appeared in written records since 1755 but may be far older as an oral tradition. Her name translates roughly to grandmother witch, with Baba meaning grandmother and Yaga connoting witch or torturer. She is described as ancient and grotesque: her nose so long it scrapes the ceiling when she looks up. She travels in a large mortar, steering with the pestle, and her house walks on chicken legs, appearing unpredictably anywhere in the forest. She has two or three daughters or sisters also named Baba Yaga with identical personalities, suggesting a single archetypal figure dispersed across multiple bodies. In the folk tales she eats people, primarily children, and is particularly hostile to men and boys but will help women who come to her with the right attitude. The central story discussed is Vasilisa the Beautiful, a 19th-century written version of a story likely far older. Vasilisa is given a magical doll by her dying mother that comes to life and helps with chores. After her father remarries, her cruel stepmother and stepsisters abuse her, and eventually the stepmother tries to get Baba Yaga to kill Vasilisa by sending her into the forest at night on an impossible errand. The episode notes that Cinderella is believed to be derived in part from this story, though Vasilisa gets considerably darker. The hosts also discuss theoretical possibilities that Baba Yaga stories reflect historical memory of real women who lived as herbalists or wise women in forests and were later demonized.

As heard by us

A Baba Yaga story that stays unsettling, useful, and morally complicated.

This episode presents Baba Yaga as the original nightmare witch, rooted in Slavic tradition as an ogre-like trickster who may eat children and decorate her house with their bones, though some stories also leave room for a guiding hand when she is treated well.

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Why you'd press play

You want a fairy tale witch who is nasty, useful, and unforgettable.

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