mistress of the wooded mountains, the personification of what appears in
Gothic as fairguni.
PerúnIn Slavonic lands the thunder-god was called Perún, Old Russian Perunuˇ,
Belorussian Piarun, Slovak Parom. The word also meant ‘thunderbolt’, and in
this use it survives in the modern languages: Russian perúny (plural), Polish
piorun, Czech peraun. There are Russian, Ukrainian, and Slovenian impreca-
tions parallel to the Lithuanian ones featuring Perkunas: ‘may Perun (or
Perun’s bolt) kill you (or take you)’. The importance of the god in tenth-
century Kiev and Novgorod is attested by a series of documents, and already
in the sixth century a Byzantine historian mentions the Slavs’ worship of ‘the
maker of the lightning’, considered to be the one in charge of everything.^14
He is similar in character to Perkunas. He has a tawny beard. He is located
high up, on a mountain or in the sky, and sends his axe or arrow down on his
victim below.^15 He has a close association with the oak: he strikes it, he puts
fire into it, and there are sacred trees called ‘Perun’s oak’.^16
Scholars have naturally looked for a connection between his name and
that of his Baltic neighbour Perkunas. One solution has been to treat it as a
taboo variant: people avoided speaking the dread name by suppressing the
velar consonant in the second syllable.^17 Taken on its own, Perunuˇ can be
satisfactorily explained as ‘the Striker’, from the Slavonic verb per‘strike’ and
the common agent suffix -unu ̆ (from -u ̄nos or -aunos). This is the com-
monly accepted etymology. To make the connection with Perkunas, it has
been proposed that the per root had a by-form with radical extension,
per-kw-. Perkunas too would then be the Striker. But this conflicts with
the more obvious derivation from perkwu- ‘oak’ with the -nos suffix. The
attempt has been made to square the circle by deriving the tree-name from
the verb, the oak being the tree that gets smitten, the tree that is dedicated
(^14) Procop. Bell. Goth. 3. 14. 23; S. Roz ̇niecki, Archiv für slavische Philologie 23 (1901), 488–93,
503, 509. Cf. Grimm (1883–8), 171 f.; von Schroeder (1914–16), i. 550; Unbegaun (1948), 401 f.;
Gimbutas (1971), 154–7, 166 f.; N. Reiter in Wb. d. Myth. i(2), 189–91; Puhvel (1987), 233–5;
Nagy (1974), 113, 117–19≈ (1990), 183 f., 187–9; Vánˇa (1992), 71–5.
(^15) Schrader (1909), 38; von Schroeder (1914–16), ii. 627; V. V. Ivanov–V. N. Toporov in Jean
Pouillon–Pierre Maranda, Échanges et communications. Mélanges offerts à Claude Lévi-Strauss
(The Hague–Paris 1970), ii. 1182–4.
(^16) Grimm (1883–8), 172; Ivanov–Toporov (as n. 15), 1183 f.; Jakobson (1962–88), vii. 17;
Nagy (1974), 115 ≈ (1990), 184.
(^17) Watkins in Mayrhofer et al. (1974), 107. Peru ̄ ́nas is apparently attested in Lithuanian
as a substitute for Perku ̄ ́nas: Jakobson (1962–88), vii. 19. One might compare archaic English
‘Odds-bobs’ (= God’s body), ‘Ods-life’, etc.
242 6. Storm and Stream