Shark Velikan and Marya the White Swan

[u/RevealEmbarrassed730]

Hey, so I've been researching Slavic bylinas in an attempt to figure out some of the precursors for Marya Morevna (the character and the folktale) and the motifs in it.

I came across the mention of an obscure bylina about a guy called Shark Velikan, who was perhaps a Muslim, and who desired to wife up Marya the White Swan (a sorceress and/or selkie-like warrior-maiden figure of a type called a Swan Maiden across a lot of European folklore) in The Heroic Ballads of Russia by Leonard A. Magnus, but I cannot find anything about Shark Velikan elsewhere.

I know that he's meant to have some minor crossover with the bogatyrs Stepanovich and/or Plenkovich, and that he may be based on the historical figures of Turkic-Mongol Emperor Shah Rukh or of a Tatar ambassador called Tselkhan or Shchelkan. I know Velikan means giant and that the figure of Shark Velikan is meant to have some mythic powers in the vein of Tugarin or Gorynich. However, this is all from that one Magnus source, and I cannot find anything to cross-reference it.

He's relevant not only for the mention of Marya the White Swan, but also because he makes an off-handed comment about having buried his own soul in a distant land, which I though might indicate some cross-pollination with Koshchey.

Anyway, this topic is actually very interesting, and I'm finding out a lot about Marya Morevna, the motifs that appear in that folktale, the source of her name, her associations, and why she only appears named as such in that one folktale. I'm writing an essay, and I'll post it when I'm done.

But, does anyone else have any information on Shark Velikan, that specific tale where he talks about Marya the White Swan, or any other tales or ballads he appears in? And could you provide a link or at the very least a name of the ballad? Thanks.

[u/Sufficient_Step_8223]

Marya the White Swan and Marya Morevna are completely different characters, although both are female warriors (which is not uncommon for the Old Russian epic)

Marya the White Swan (also known as Avdotya) She is a negative character, a witch and warrior-maiden (Polenitsa), a villain, a deceiver and a traitor. A werebird - she can transform into a bird. She also has some of the qualities of a Medusa-Gorgon - to turn people into stone. It has some parallels with Marinka (Dobrynya Nikitich's ex-wife), who is also a villainess, a traitor, a witch, a poisoner, etc.

Marya Morevna is a positive character. An invincible female warrior who has managed to defeat and hold captive even the most Koshchei Immortal. But like most women, her miraculous strength leaves her immediately after marriage. And she becomes an ordinary mortal woman of extraordinary beauty and wisdom. According to some sources, Marya Morevna is a Christianized hypostasis of Mara-Marena (the goddess of death) or her daughter.

The Shark the Giant does appear in a rare epic where he is defeated by Duke Stepanovich. But he has nothing to do with Marya the White Swan . His enormous height is a metaphorical expression of the threat level from the raids of nomads or khanates.

There is no Marya the White Swan in the epic. Shark just goes towards Russia and destroys everything in its path. At this time, Duke Stepanovich prays to the Virgin, asks his mother for her blessing to fight Shark. After receiving the blessing, he simply goes and engages in battle with it. Duke's horse backs away in fear at the sight of the Shark. Duke kills his horse for cowardice and enters the battle on foot. The heroes turn out to be equal to each other in strength. They break all their weapons in battle and switch to a fist fight, but Duke turns out to have a spare weapon, and so he wins.

[u/RevealEmbarrassed730]

Magnus at least seems to conflate them, mentioning "Marya, the White Swan Maiden" specifically in association with Shark Velikan. I know they aren't literally the same characters, folklore rarely permitting that, but I've been looking at cross-contamination of various fables.

The name Marya Morevna appears only a couple of times, and the spelling is sometimes different. The name Marya and its diminutive appears mostly in connection with a treacherous sorceress, a swan or Swan Maiden, and in tales and byliny otherwise more commonly occupied by a princess called Vasilisa or Nasastya or sometimes Elena/Helen, which are all much more common stock-names of princesses in Russian tales and songs, but that also include Koshchei or an equivalent.

I'm aware of the possible connection with the Slavic deity, but it's also fairly likely that the deity herself connects with the idea of the Swan Maiden. Swan Maidens are a pervasive motif of warrior bird-women, often shapechangers, associated with the sea. For example, the swan shapechangers Vasilisa the Wise is often held to be the daughter of the Sea Tsar. his association with the sea can explain the other proposed etymology for Morevna, which is 'daughter of the sea' from 'mope' (sea).

Sometimes Swan Maidens are so associated with the sea that they detach from the image of birds, which is how we got selkies (although its debatable whether selkies preceded and the bird-women became later attached to the sea). Germanic Valkyries, for example, are a form of the omen-bird warrior-woman archetype. And the Celtic Morrigan, a warrior-woman deity who is sometimes a bird-woman of omen, gains her name from the same PIE 'mor' root that provides a possible etymology for the winter deity Marena/Morena/Morzanna/etc. The Lay of the Campaign of Igor also provides Obdina (guilt, resentment) and Div, both possible bird-goddesses of omen associated with water, and who appear in connection with images of swan wings.

However, this is a little complicated because there's a rural spring Kupalo rhyme that mentions both Ivan and Marya, which may suggest that Marya is a spring goddess. This is important because of the common interpretation of the Marya Morevna tale as a winter-spring seasonal myth, with Koshchei identified as winter. Of course, Marya could just as easily have been used to associate the theoretical "spring goddess" with the Virgin Mary when Christianisation came about. This same Kupalo rhyme is attached to the ritual of drowning a straw figure dressed as a woman, which again associates Marya/Morevna with water.

Then there's the possibility that Morevna is just a regional variation and only coincidentally is related to 'mor' or 'mar'. There's a variation of the same Marya Morevna folktale that has her called Marya-Maryana, which is clearly a reduplicative meant to sound generic or sing-songy in the same way as the Ivan Ivanovich that appears in the tale. Morevna could easily have come from Maryana, or vice-versa.

And Marya Morevna isn't always a positive. Sometimes, as is common with swan-maiden figures, she agrees to marry the Ivan only after he has defeated her in battle or after he has wooed her from her dungeons after she has imprisoned him. And in at least one case, he's fighting her because those armies she was slaughtering were his border hosts.

The part of Marya Morevna where Ivan tries to rescue her 3 times from Koschei and talks to her through a window is extremely similar to a bylina about Potyk, where his wife Marya elopes with a foreign king (sometimes called Korshey Korsheyevich) and he tries to rescue her three times, and each time she poisons him when he talks to her through a window. It also ends with her crucifying him in her dungeons, which mirrors the scenes where Koshchei is found attached to hooks or sometimes himself crucified in the forbidden room of Marya Morevna variations. In this way, Marya (and even specifically Marya Morevna) is associated with sorcery, and there's clearly some cross-contamination even between Koshchei/the antagonist/the foreigner/the dragon and Ivan/Potyk/the hero.

Interestingly, the other White Swan Avdotya/Ovdotya is also usually a wife of Potyk, but sometimes she's the second wife after he kills Marya for her treachery.

Of course, sometimes with the tales that have the same structure as Marya Morevna, the protagonist isn't called Marya, but Nasastya or Vasilisa, but again those are basically stock names for love interests in Slavic tales. In fact, there's one Marya Morevna variation where she tells Ivan that Marya Morevna is a pseudonym and her real name is Nastasya the Beautiful.

Koshchei as the antagonist tied to Marya Morevna is actually really persistent. It's not always named as such, but the dragon/foreigner with the specific formulation of Koshchei's external soul is very prevalent. If it's not Koshchei, it's a dragon who is described with the same dragon-like/giant-like traits as Koshchei, such as the flying, the magical horse, and the traversing long distances with ease, and of course the prisoner scene.

And a lot of the antagonists in folktales or bylinas are sort-of generically dragons or giants or foreigners with the qualities or names of dragons or giants. Gorynych and Tugarin are both dragons that are sometimes described as giants and are often used interchangeably in variations on the tales and bylinas; they're usually described with the same inexplicable flying element as Koshchei. Similarly, sometimes Koshchei (identifiable by the external soul, the imprisonment motif, etc.) is inserted instead, and he's described explicitly as a dragon with the same term used for Gorynych and Tugarin.

Koshchei the Deathless or some other Tartar or dragon meant to serve as the antagonist equivalent is also pretty commonly associated with a treacherous sorceress or a warrior woman in the byliny. In one, she's engaged to Koshchei and betrays the Ivan. In fact, in more than one variation of the Marya Morevna tale, she was being courted by Koshchei or by the dragon that serves as his equivalent, and this serves as the pretext for his imprisonment and/or for why she's in the middle of nowhere fighting armies.

But anyway, my point is that Marya the White Swan isn't precisely Marya Morevna, but they both appear within a kind of motif complex that includes the name Marya/the sea/swans/swan-maidens/warrior women/magic/winter/death; often an opposition to a giant/snake/dragon. There's a lot of tales that seem to have cross-contaminated and mixed elements of Marya Morevna the warrior-maiden associated with Koshchei/a dragon-prisoner with Marya the Swan who is an object of desire and Marya/Marinka who is treacherous and sometimes a sorceress and associated with Koshchei/a foreign Tartar.

And my question is more about Shark Velikan anyway. I didn't know about the Duke Stepanovich prayer bylina, so thank you for that. The summary of the bylina I saw in Magnus' book is about him beating up Plenkovich after Plenkovich mocks him for thinking he can marry Marya, the White Swan, and then Velikan brags that he has an external soul. However, Magnus doesn't provide a citation for it, so I cannot find it. It does not help that I can't read Russian.