Perkunas appears as a bellowing bull in Lithuanian riddles, but is otherwise
pictured in human form. Simon Grunau in his Prussian Chronicle (c.1520)
says he was depicted as an angry-looking, middle-aged man with a fiery face
and a dark crinkly beard. He spits fire, and hurls an axe or (less often) a
hammer, which returns to his hand. He kills devils, or the Devil, or the goblin
or dragon Áitvaras.^6 Pe ̄rkons too fights devils; his weapon is variously given as
a mace (milna), a spear, a sword, an iron rod, arrows, or stone bullets.
Perkunas’ car is sometimes said to be drawn by a he-goat (ozˇys) or goats.^7
This is connected with a belief that a coming storm is presaged by the flight of
the snipe, a bird whose tail-feathers produce a goat-like bleating noise as it
dives through the air. In German country lore it was called Himmelsziege or
Donnerziege; in Lithuanian ‘God’s goat’ or ‘Perkunas’ goat’ (Dievo or Perku ̄no
ozˇys), and likewise in Latvian Pe ̄rkona ahsis (he-goat) or kasa (she-goat).^8
Perkunas/Pe ̄rkons has a special association with the oak tree. This is the
tree that he typically strikes with lightning, and because of this it has fire
stored up inside it which men can use. There were oaks sacred to him and
containing his idol: Perku ̄no a ̨zˇuolas,Pe ̄rko ̄na o ̄zo ̄ls, ‘P.’s oak’.^9
This is relevant to the etymology of his name. It has the -no- suffix that we
have seen to be a frequent element of Indo-European divine nomenclature,
generally interpretable as ‘master of ’. What precedes the suffix, Perku-, has an
exact counterpart in Latin quercus, ‘oak’. A Roman deity Quercu ̄ nus does
not occur, but would not have been surprising. The underlying form is
perkwu-; in Italic p––kw- became kw––kw- by retroactive assimilation, as in
quinque‘five’ from *penke. Related forms for ‘oak’ are preserved here and
there in Germanic, with the regular change of [p] to [f ].
In Celtic original [p] disappeared, probably with [h] as an intermediate
(^6) Simon Grunau in Mannhardt (1936), 195, ‘wie ein zorniger man und mittelmessigk alten,
sein angesicht wie feuer und gekronet mit flammen, sein bart craus und schwarcz’; Schleicher
(1857), 150, 182; Gimbutas (as n. 4), 471; ead. (1963), 202; Biezais–Balys (1973), 431 f.; Greimas
(1992), 47, 61–3. On Áitvaras cf. Usener (1896), 85. Lithuanian folk-tale tells of a strong smith
whose hammer fells trees. He teams up with an even stronger hero, Martin, who carries an iron
club and kills three-, six-, and nine-headed dragons: Schleicher (1857), 128 f., 135–7. The nine-
header snorts fire like lightning and roars so that the earth shakes, ibid. 137.
(^7) J. Balys, Tautosakos darbai, iii (Kaunas 1937), nos. 316 f.; Gimbutas (1963), 202, and JIES
1 (1973), 466.
(^8) Gimbutas (1963), 199, 202; C. Watkins in Cardona et al. (1970), 354 n. 43 = (1994), 455;
Grimm (1883–8), 184, 1347; West (1978), 367; (1997), 115. For Perkunas himself as a goat (in a
riddle), and the practice of hanging up a goatskin as a rain charm, cf. Gimbutas, JIES 1 (1973),
471.
(^9) Mannhardt (1936), 196, 435, 438, 534; Jakobson (1962–88), vii. 17; Nagy (1974), 114 ≈
(1990), 184. Pe ̄rkons strikes an oak in many of the Latvian songs: LD 34127, 34047, 33802,
33713, 33715 f. = Jonval nos. 7, 128, 359, 438, 444 f. It is a fact that oaks are struck by lightning
disproportionately often: Nagy (1974), 122 f. ≈ (1990), 195 f.
240 6. Storm and Stream