Sirdon

Sirdon (also Syrdon) is the trickster of the Nart Sagas of the Caucasus. Georges Dumézil identified him in his 1948 monograph Loki as the closest known Indo-European parallel to the Norse Loki, closer than any other figure in any other tradition. The 1948 book is the foundational comparative-mythology study of the trickster type, and Sirdon is the Caucasian datum point on a line that runs through Prometheus, Loki, Bricriu the Irish quarrel-monger, and ultimately the deep Indo-European trickster archetype.

He is half-Nart and half-something-else. His mother in some Ossetian variants is a daughter of the river-god Donbettyr; in others a witch; in others a demon’s daughter. His parentage is liminal by design. He sits at the edge of the Nart hall, mocked by warriors who could break him in half, and yet none of them can do without him. His weapon, in the saga’s own description, is “his tongue, sharp, poisonous, and pitiless.”

The harp made from his sons’ sinews

The most-told Sirdon story is the worst story.

Sirdon had stolen something from the Narts. A cow in some versions. A magical object in others. The Narts in collective revenge captured his sons and killed them. They boiled the bodies and served them to him at a feast. When Sirdon recognised what he was eating, he did not weep. He did not rage. He went home in silence.

He gathered the bones of his sons. He stretched the dried sinews across a frame of bone and wood. He ran his hands over the strings.

He played the first song ever heard in the world.

The Narts heard the song from his hut and recognised that something new had entered the world, something they had not known existed and could not have made themselves. They forgave him. They invited him into their council as a Nart of the highest rank. The Ossetian fændyr, the harp still played at Caucasian feasts today, is in the saga’s own etiology Sirdon’s invention. The harp meant here is the duadæstænon, the Alanic corner harp: twelve pegs, eight treble strings and four bass.

This is the trickster as culture-hero. It is Prometheus stealing fire, but the punishment is the discovery itself. The pain becomes music. The Narts who killed his sons cannot un-hear what they have caused him to make.

The death of Soslan

Sirdon also engineered the death of the great Nart hero Soslan, born from a stone and tempered in wolf milk and invulnerable everywhere except his unprotected knees. The exact mechanism varies by version.

In one telling, the Daughter of the Sun, whom Soslan had spurned, persuades the wheel of fate (the Wheel of Balsæg) to slice through his knees. Sirdon’s role is to harvest the secret of the vulnerable knees from the gods and pass it on.

In another version, while Soslan is in the Land of the Dead retrieving leaves from the aza tree, Sirdon shape-shifts and tricks Soslan’s helpers into revealing the path back, then betrays the route to Balsæg.

The Loki parallel here is exact in structure. Loki engineers the death of Baldr by extracting the secret of the mistletoe (the one thing not bound by Frigg’s oaths) and guiding the blind hand that fires the dart. Sirdon engineers the death of Soslan by extracting the secret of the knees (the one place the smith god Tlepsh’s forge could not reach) and routing the death to fall there. Both figures are shape-shifters. Both, in the relevant episodes, even disguise themselves as women to extract the secret of the hero’s vulnerability. Dumézil read this as direct Indo-European inheritance: a single mythologem of trickster-engineered hero-death surviving in two daughter traditions on opposite ends of the Indo-European world.

The trickster as culture-hero

The usual account of these figures runs the other way round. The culture-hero is taken to be the older layer, the dignified giver of fire and law, and the trickster to be what happens when a later, more irreverent age gets hold of him.

The Vilnius philologists Fatima Eloeva and Erika Sausverde argued the reverse in a 2015 article in Literatūra. Reading Hesiod against the Caucasian and Norse material, they proposed a line that runs chthonic deity, then trickster, then culture-hero, and put Prometheus, Loki, Sirdon and Coyote on it. On their reading the intriguer is the old part and the benefactor the late accretion, so the gift-bringer grows out of the thief instead of decaying into one.

Sirdon is an awkward figure to argue with either way. He is the worst of the Narts in conduct and, in his single most famous act, the one to whom the Caucasus owes its music. The Narts can neither kill him nor do without him, so they seat him at the council and let him talk.

Modern echoes

The fændyr is still played in mountain villages. When it is, the older generation will sometimes mention that it is Sirdon’s instrument, made first from the bones of his murdered sons. The story gets told without flinching; the Caucasus does not euphemise its mythology.

For the wider mythological context, see the parent article The Nart Sagas of the Caucasus. For the figure Dumézil identified as Sirdon’s most direct Indo-European cognate, see the bestiary entry on Loki.

Sources

• Colarusso, J. Nart Sagas from the Caucasus: Myths and Legends from the Circassians, Abazas, Abkhaz, and Ubykhs. Princeton University Press, 2002 (paperback reissue 2016, ISBN 9780691169149)
• Colarusso, J., and Salbiev, T. (eds.), Walter May (trans.). Tales of the Narts: Ancient Myths and Legends of the Ossetians. Princeton University Press, 2016. ISBN 9780691170404
• Dumézil, G. Loki. Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve, 1948
• Dumézil, G. Romans de Scythie et d’alentour. Paris: Payot, 1978
• Eloeva, F., and Sausverde, E. ‘Culture Hero’s Intrepid Past: Prometheus, Loki, Syrdon, Coyote.’ Literatūra 57, no. 3 (2015), pp. 98-115. DOI 10.15388/Litera.2015.3.9880
• Abaev, V. I. ‘Introduction: The Ossetian Epic Tales of the Narts,’ in Colarusso & Salbiev (eds.), Tales of the Narts, Princeton, 2016, pp. xxix-lxviii
• Khetagurov, K. Ирон фæндыр (Iron Fændyr, The Ossetian Lyre). Vladikavkaz, 1899
• Tuganov, M. Пир Шатаны (Satanaya’s Feast), watercolour, undated. Nart-cycle painting