Sons of Earth and Fire; The Strange Case of the Narts’ Metallic Men

Batraz blasts down from the heavens, landing in the hearth of the Narts, the force of it burying him to his thighs, by artist Andrew Jones. Image commissioned for this article.

They are curiously kindred. Ossetian Shoshlan and his cousin, Batraz, are beings of steel and fire who become metal by being placed in a forge by a heavenly blacksmith. In the tradition of heroic tales of the northern Caucasus these figures also share a trove of contradictory and redundant traits that raise my myth-reading eyebrow and pose serious questions, starting with: why does a mythology need two metal men? They have alternately been understood as solar and storm figures, but they are also associated with stone, with fertility, and tantalizingly, with stars falling from the heavens and landing in the earth. Who are Shoshlan and Batraz, and where do they come from?

Ossetia is a region that straddles the Greater Caucasus mountain range south of Russia and north of Georgia. The people of Ossetia and their Circassian neighbors have a tradition of legends and myths about a superhuman race that mixed with gods and fought against monsters. These heroes go by the name of the Narts, a term that means manly hero, but is used in the tales almost as an ethnic or racial identity. A few months ago I interviewed translator and Caucasus expert John Colarusso about his translation of the Circassian Nart tales, but I enjoyed the stories so much I dove directly into Colarusso’s edition of the Ossetian Nart tales, which expanded on characters I found fascinating in the Circassian corpus: the men whose bodies were made of steel.

Shoshlan and Batraz have unusual origins and were both put into forges as children, turning their bodies into steel, each with a vulnerable spot. Shoshlan was born red hot from a stone, suggesting a myth about smelting iron, and blacksmithing. Shoshlan Batraz was born fiery hot from a lump in his father’s back, suggesting—I don’t know what! Batraz’s mother, a little person from the water people, divorces her husband for breaking a vow and “blows” the developing baby into his body. Batraz comes out of his father’s back and lands right in the sea, causing it to evaporate and beginning his short, strange career as an aquatic figure. Russian Ossetian scholar Vaso Abaev differentiated the tempering of Shoshlan and Batraz, suggesting that the element of wolf’s milk in Shoshlan’s hardening represented a shamanistic tradition, while Batraz was made steel through the raw technology of the forge. However, Batraz’s forging required dragon bones to superheat the forge. Surely this diverges from the notion that Batraz’s forging is meant to represent purely technological power.

Fiery Origins

Shoshlan and Batraz have their skin hardened in the forge by the heavenly smith Kurdalagon. Image by by Makharbek Tuganov.

After their forging, Shoshlan and Batraz’s paths diverge. Though he has plenty of heroic stories, Shoshlan’s steel skin does not figure prominently in them until his death, which exploits his only weakness, his knees, which were not hardened to steel. Batraz, however, is aglow in stories that recall his fiery birth and his steel skin. His steely body and its tendency to overheat feature prominently in tales. It makes me wonder whether the seemingly redundant detail of the blacksmith and hardening of their bodies represents a point in the oral storytelling where bards had begun to conflate the two. Perhaps writing the tales froze the figures in place before all of the stories about Shoshlan began to be associated with Batraz, at least in the Ossetian tales of the Narts.

Ossetian Batraz already has a buffet of curious attributes and associations that seem a bit too multifarious to me to belong to a single figure of myth. Myths help explain greater truths. The Scandinavians told the story of Thor’s hammer to explain thunder. The Greeks told the story of Persephone in the underworld to explain winter. It is hard to pinpoint just what Batraz’s many attributes would be used to explain. Born fiery, Baraz is doused in the sea and lives among his watery kin until he is coaxed out of the water to live with his father’s people. Stories of his childhood with the Narts repeatedly place him near the hearth, where he is often sooty and warming his feet. After he goes to the heavenly smith Kurdalagon to have himself hardened in the forge, the detail arises that he spends most of his time in the clouds and that when he is needed for help, one must send a bird as a messenger to call him down.

Projectile Hero

When he doesn't fly himself, he still finds a way into the air. “Batraz on the Arrow” by Makharbek Tuganov.

Batraz in battle is superhuman, but his kryptonite is his own heat. Though his steel fists pummel or crush adversaries—in one tale he is is even shot on a giant arrow and he breaches a castle wall like a cannonball—he overheats in combat and must cool himself. In one tale he has his horse kick him into the sea. Another tale begins with him on a glacier fresh from fighting. Batraz is finally defeated and killed when his enemies deprive him of a watery refuge and his one flesh intestine—hitherto unmentioned in the tales—burns up.

When I spoke to Colarusso he shared his theory that Batraz’s Circassian cousin Sosruquo (rendered Shoshlan in the Ossetian corpus) might share a common heritage with those nigh-invulnerable figures of European legends, Achilles, Cuchulainn and Sigurd, all of whom are either dark-skinned or connected with a blacksmith in some manner. At the time we were only discussing Colarusso’s translation of the Circassian Nart tales, as I had not yet read the Ossetian tales. Everything Colarusso said of Circassian Sosruquo applies even more appropriately to Ossetian Batraz. Batraz is described as dark and dusty from the hearth he plays in as a child. He relates more directly to the Irish Cuchulainn, who overheats in battle, and in one tale is thrown in successive barrels of water, which explode or completely evaporate until his body is cooled down. But these details only tie the Circassian Shoshlan and Ossetian Batraz to the forge.

Shoshlan’s Circassian tales, while omitting much of Ossetian Batraz’s superheroic flying and overheating, more than once place him in the realm of fertility figure. He recovers grain stolen by an ogre-like figure in one tale. In Circassian and Ossetian corpuses, when his enemies cannot kill him, they simply bury or entomb him alive, where he goes on living forever after blessing various animals with his strengths. Ossetian Batraz likewise has the markers of a fertility figure. In one tale he melts a glacier to cool his overheating body, the water runs from his face and falls on the earth. As already noted, he evaporates a sea when he is born, and Earth’s system of precipitation relies on evaporation. While he is not caught, Batraz’s enemies do try to bury him once and notably, in “Batraz and Tykhyfyrt Mukara” when “[Batraz flings] himself down from the heights and [falls] right into the fireplace of the Narts” landing so hard he buries himself “up to the middle of his thighs in the hearth.”

In a private email, Colarusso said that Batraz does seem to be an offshoot of Circassian Shoshlan and also that in formalizing the Ossetian corpus into the coherent cycle we have today, Abaev stripped out old details, the accretion of oral transmission over many generations, that would confuse readers. In reading and being able to compare the Ossetian and Circassian tales in Colarusso’s collections, this has been my impression. The Circassian tales retain a wildness that is embodied in details that seem significant, but go unexplained and may even contradict one another. This is not a criticism of the Ossetian corpus, which does have fun mysteries and contradictions, particularly when previously unmentioned divine figures make appearances.

Sky Iron

Iron does occasionally fall from the sky in the form of hot, burning meteorites. “The Terrible Comet” from the Augsberg Book of Miracles, 16th century, private collection, Wikipedia.

While Batraz and Shoshlan may have come by their metal and accompanying traits via associations with thunder and the earth’s fertility, another, wilder idea has occurred to me. I’ve left it for the end of this piece to segregate it from my firsthand reading and reporting of details from the Circassian and Ossetian Nart corpuses because I feel it is fanciful, but I also feel it is worth thinking about. And while he did not go so far as endorsing the theory, Colarusso (via email) did support the premise, which is that the earliest iron to be forged was that to be found in meteorites. It was hard for me to read about a figure whose early tales so connected him with fire and metal and then so abruptly shifted to having him crash down from heaven and embed himself in the earth without thinking about meteorites, those rocks that breach our atmosphere and strike the earth. I had remember in the Circassian corpus another story that seemed to be about a meteorite, associated with Shoshlan. In “How Sasruquo Plucked Down a Star” Sasruquo (a Circassian variant spelling of Shoshlan) fires a lead-weighted arrow into the sky and pulls it down to earth for the purpose of warming his comrades, who are freezing. Later in the same tale, when he returns with a brand of fire to make a fire, he is described as “glowing like a falling star.” The story struck me as unusual in that I could not recall other legends that seemed to be about meteorites. Could fiery, stelling Batraz’s (or Shoshlan’s) origins have been in a hunk of hot metal that fell from the sky?

With the origins of Shoshlan and Batraz so intertwined with the forge and metal, it is worth considering that before the advent of smelting, meteoric iron was the only source for the metal. Artifacts made of meteoric metal have been found in Asia, Africa and the Americas. The Tutankhamun dagger, found in the Egyptian king's 14th century BCE tomb, is only one of the known examples of meteoric iron being forged into an object. Inuit hunters in the Americas are known to have topped a narwhal tusk with meteoric metal and an axe head made of the metal was found in Ugarit in Syria. The articles I’ve found on the worship of meteorites are dated, but more than one scholar has written of instances of meteorite worship by peoples around the globe. Hubert Newton’s “The Worship of Meteorites,” published in Nature in Aug. 12 1897, considers the instance of the black stone in the Kaaba of Mecca (which has never been proven to be a meteorite) and other tales from antiquity. Oliver Farrington, in the Journal of American Folklore, 1900, tantalizingly, relates a story that proves that meteorites have sometimes been considered the physical remains of thunderbolts. This would connect Batraz and Shoshlan’s storm god statuses with hunks of hot metal falling from the sky. Farrington quotes from a letter to the British Museum that accompanied the Nejed meteorite, from Najd, Saudia Arabia. The letter writer Hajee Ahmed Khane Sarteep, refers to the meteorite and other meteorites as “thunderbolts.” (From “The Worship and Folk-lore of Meteorites”)

I don’t mean to lay out a treatise on meteoric worship in this piece, and I also can’t think of another instance where a meteorite was personified as Shoshlan or Batraz would have been if this theory could be proven. It seems unlikely that such characters would arise only in one mythology, but the correspondances seem worth studying. While the theory seems, at the moment, farfetched, it is fun and I will continue to research the matter.

Stealing Fire: John Colarusso and the Tales of the Narts

A fountain in Vladikavkaz, Russia with the Nart Sosruquo, dancing on the edge of a magic bowl. (Image courtesy Lhiten Hatko.)

A range of mountains cuts diagonally across the body of land between the Black and Caspian Seas. It is a land rich in folklore and may preserve details of myths that we have lost from the canon of Western knowledge. The Nart tales, stories of superhuman men and women who strove against monsters and gods, are popular and beloved among the people of the Caucasus and those in diaspora around the globe, but these stories have only been available in English to the wider reading public for twenty years or so. Their availability to English readers is largely the responsibility of one scholar, Canadian linguist and anthropologist, John Colarusso.

The Greek myths tell of a people in the wondrous east, a land of female warriors and sorcerers. Circe and the Amazons and the land of the Golden fleece were all inspired by the people of the Caucuses. Those Caucasian peoples in turn told stories that seemed to look to the west: of a demi-god punished for stealing the holy fire by being bound to a mountain; of a hero who fought a cyclopean giant in his cave and freed its prisoners by lashing them under the monster's sheep. But the stories you aren't likely to recognize are perhaps the greater value. The stories that point to lost pantheons, lost elements of the western cycles of mythology and stories that teach us that women are not only equal to men; sometimes they are greater.

The “Narts” of Colarusso’s Nart Sagas; Ancient Myths and Legends of the Circassians and Abkhazians are heroes. They are said in some tales to predate and to be larger than modern humans. The word Nart translates to “manly man,” or heroic man, and is related to the Indo European root that gives us the Greek root andro- for man (though it is used almost as an honorific before the names of males and females in the stories). Reading the tales I was struck by certain elements that mark them as folk tales and other elements that struck me as interconnected mythology. For instance, there is a tale early in the collection reminiscent of Grimms’ “The Golden Bird,” wherein three brothers stand watch over successive nights by an apple tree, but only the youngest witnesses a bird stealing the apples. The Nart tale’s mythological component is that the apples play a role in the fertility of Nart women. It is reminiscent of Idunn’s youth-restoring apples. Furthermore, the youngest of the sons in the Nart tale is Warzameg, a recurring character who becomes the leader of the Narts. The tales are a motley and exciting bunch in this regard and also in that they vary between prose and verse. They seem to me an opportunity to read stories that have been documented at a point where they may be on the verge of becoming something else. It is important to note for those with some knowledge of Nart stories that Colarusso has also edited a collection of Ossetian Nart tales that have been available in English longer and seem to be in a more developed literary state, closer to an epic cycle, with characters and likely tales that overlap with those of the Circassian and Abkhazian collection. I have not yet read the Ossetian tales and my descriptions and comments deal solely with Colarusso’s translations of the Circassian and Abkhazian tales.

Sosruquo returns to his men with fire by Murat Dyshek, National Museum of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Nalchik.

When I started researching this article, and rereading Colarusso’s Circassian and Abkhazian Nart tales, I discovered that everything I found in English regarding Narts was related to Colarusso’s work. I first read the collection four years ago and would post online about stories I found exciting or unusual, and the Narts seemed to be as new and unknown to my friends. Given that since that time I’ve never seen folklore and mythology-savvy people mention the Narts, and all Nart materials only related to one scholar, I began to wonder, briefly, if I had stumbled upon a work of fiction meant to look like folktales and had been tricked! This is not the case. If one speaks Russian or at least reads some Cyrillic, they will find no difficulty in locating information about Narts online. But Colarusso’s almost unique status in the field in English is worth noting. “I seem to have kicked the door open,” said Colarusso.

Colarusso is a man who was destined for scholarship in some field. He started in physics, but the vicissitudes of scholarship grants and programs saw him shift to philosophy, where he had to learn Greek, and, eventually, he found himself studying linguistics. The Harvard linguistics program at the time required him to learn a language and become an expert in that language’s family. He chose Circassian, because he was drawn to the complexity of the grammar and phonology. Colarusso conjectures that it is likely the difficulty of Circassian languages that has kept English speakers from bringing the Nart tales to a wider English-speaking audience. A Circassian speaker is able to hear and distinguish roughly twice the number of consonant sounds than the twenty-four an English speaker regularly uses. The story may not be fair to the language, but Colarusso said that his brother-in-law, a medical doctor, once rushed into his room at the sound of the language. “The very first time I recorded some words...I was playing the recording and my brother-in-law came running into the room thinking I was throwing up. And I said ‘No, no, these are the sounds I recorded today and I am not sick.’”

Nart horsemen by artist Umar Mizhalani. (Image courtesy Lhiten Hatko.)

Colarusso says that his ability to hear and learn Circassian and other languages (he listed five or more other languages, living and dead, that he has learned or worked in, in addition to the northern Causasian tongues he is expert in) likely owes itself to his childhood in understanding his father's mother, who only spoke an Italian dialect. “It’s a queer savant ability, nothing to do with intellect, really.” Colarusso also credits his mother and grandmother with his interest in mythology. While he isn’t a trained folklorist, Colarusso’s knowledge and interest in Indo European mythologies is sprinkled through Nart Sagas, where, in his notes, he does not seem to miss an opportunity to make connections between any detail in a story that seems to reflect a connection to another tale. In this way, mythology enthusiasts will get many references to Greek, Celtic, Germanic and Indic tales.

Colarusso’s Nart Sagas text grew out of his desire to cement his Circassian language skills. He earned a grant to translate regional cycles of Nart tales and did so with the help of ex-pat Circassians living in New Jersey (and later Austria). Colarusso said that they would provide him with suggestions of tales to work on and would supply him with “pidgin English” crib sheets that were indecipherable as English, but helped him to further understand Circassian. English-speaking Circassians know Colarusso’s work. When I was searching for art to run with this piece, the admin of a Circassian cultural group online immediately recommended I speak to Colarusso. Colarusso’s linguistic and cultural knowledge in the Caucasus have also been tapped by two U.S. administrations. When the Nart project was over, though, the tales went into a file drawer and sat for a decade until his wife discovered the files and told him to publish them.

Respect Your Wife!

The Nart sorceress Qaydukh, lighting her husband's way across the linen bridge. (Image courtesy Lhiten Hatko.)

The consequences of disrespecting or undervaluing one’s wife was one of the more surprising themes in Colarusso’s collection. In two of the tales, a husband who disrespects his wife’s contribution to the household dies when she unexpectedly revokes that help. My favorite version of the tale had a passage that so articulated the invisible labor of women that I posted it on International Women’s Day a few weeks ago: “[Psabida] set off in the night. He wore a coat made by Qaydukh and shoes made by Qaydukh. She was the woman who did all that for him. She is the woman. If not for her, he could not have done those things for himself.” Psabida’s horse so loves his wife (who cares for it when Psabida returns from a raid) that it rebels against its master because he had a fight with his wife. In this and another version of a similar tale, the husband dies, but defying my expectations for this sort of a story, the wife is rewarded rather than punished. In each version she gets a better husband, who respects her. There is a sentimental spin on the theme in another tale in which the head of the Narts feels he must divorce his wife because people say he derives his greatness from her. The conclusion brought tears to my eyes.

The Smith and the Invulnerable Hero

Nart Lady Setenaya and the divine smith Tlepsh at the birth of the hero Sosruquo in a painting by Marina Bekaldy. (Image courtesy Lhiten Hatko.)

The most memorable hero of the collection, for his conception and birth, is the Nart Sosruquo, the invulnerable man. The story is retold with slightly different details in regional versions in Colarusso’s collection, but Sosruquo is generally birthed from a stone by the Nart blacksmith Tlepsh, a figure who also stands apart in the tales as a divine though he lives among men. At birth Sosruquo’s flesh is searing hot to the touch and Tlepsh alternately hammers and douses the child, hardening his flesh to the toughness of metal. In one version he dips the newborn in molten iron and feeds it to him by the bowlful. The following detail also makes Sosruquo interesting as a matter of comparative mythology: Sosruquo’s legs are vulnerable because that is where Tlepsh holds him with his tongs. This, of course, recalls the flawed heel of the Greek Achilles, a hero also burned in divine fires to remove his mortality.

The association of more than one nigh-invulnerable European hero with heat, fire or a smith, makes Colarusso believe that the Sosruquo story preserves an element that may once have applied to all of them. The Irish hero Cuchulainn, for example, derives his popular name from the smith Culann; he is “the hound of Culann.” Furthermore, Cuchulainn’s body heats up in battle to the extent that he must be repeatedly dunked in water afterwards, causing much the same result as dousing hot metal: the water rapidly boils. Cuchulainn and Achilles are both also described as dark of skin, perhaps a detail left over from a forging tale similar to Sosruquo’s. Sigurd the dragon slayer, from the Volsung Saga, derives his limited invulnerability by covering himself in the blood of a dragon, but he too is raised by a blacksmith. Like Achilles and Sosruquo, he is vulnerable in a spot that he missed.

It is more often though the unprecedented detail of the Circassian and Abkhazian Nart tales that delights, as with the tales of wives who gain the upper hand. I may also have buried the lede on Sosruquo’s conception, which is the only long-range projectile insemination I have ever read. And if that isn’t enough to entice you, yet another tale might well be retitled, “How the Narts Stopped Throwing their Elders from the Cliff.” The Nart tales are fresh and fun and may well prove themselves indispensable to the study of Indo European mythologies.

The images in this article were provided by Lhiten Hatko, administrator of the Circassians UK group on Facebook. Hatko and members of the group were indispensable in researching the artwork.