Vila

The Vile were once the most beautiful spirits in the South Slavic forest. They taught children prayer and advised heroes with counsel and deed. They blessed fields and mountains. In a tale told in 1834 by an old sexton in Šamac, on the Slavonian Military Frontier, a Vila was just as likely to tie a shepherd to the top of a poplar so high that nails had to be hammered into the trunk to bring him down. Friedrich Krauss reprinted that tale in 1908 to show how the old belief in the Vile had turned into belief in evil demons.

Appearance

The Vile (plural of Vila) appear as beautiful young women, usually in white, often with long unbound hair. Krauss calls them, in the older songs, the embodiment of all female beauty. Many local accounts collected by the ethnologist Tihomir Đorđević spoil that beauty at the feet. In Ivanić-Grad the Vile had goat hooves under a long white gown. In Lonja they had horse hooves hidden by the hem of their dress. In Poljica, on Hvar and in Bukovica in Dalmatia they had the hooves or legs of a mule, and in Lovreć the feet of a donkey. Đorđević sets beside them the Greek Nereids, who also danced with goat hooves or donkey legs. In Zaostrog a man who saw a Vila must never say he saw her hooves, “for she would gouge out his eyes for that.”

A report from Vidovec in Croatia, quoted by Krauss from the Arkiv za povjestnicu jugoslavensku, sorts witches into three kinds and gives each the old name of a class of Vile. Krauss calls this threefold division fairly recent. The air witches, “otherwise zračne vile”, are very malicious: they frighten people and confuse them at night. The earth witches, “otherwise pozemne vile”, are gentle and noble, give people wise advice, and like best to pasture herds. The water witches, “otherwise povodne vile”, treat people well on land. Anyone they catch in or near the water they whirl around or ride until he drowns.

Krauss himself rejected a separate class of water Vile. He called it an error of some mythologists and wrote that the people do not know the term vodne vile. In his account a single Vila serves as a ferryman at one water. She is called Vila brodarica (from brod, a ford), vodarkinja, or baždarkinja, the toll-collector. The water she guards is a well, a spring, a lake, or one stretch of a river. The price varies by version. In a song from the Croatian Zagorje she wants the trespasser’s head. In a variant from the lower Danube she demands both his arms and all four legs of his horse.

Marko Kraljević, the great hero of South Slavic epic, meets her in several of these songs. In Krauss’s own recording and in the Danube variant he beats her only by a trick. In the Zagorje version he cuts off her head with a single blow.

Origins

Krauss wrote that one could still clearly trace the path by which the old belief in the Vile, the South Slavic forest women, was turned into belief in evil demons. The older songs, he says, show them as blessing-givers of fields and mountains. They stood by heroes “mit Rat und Tat”, with counsel and deed. They taught the little ones “Gottesfurcht und fromme Sitte”, fear of God and pious custom. In his account the change came as a purified Christianity and Western culture took deeper root among the South Slavs and pushed the old belief aside. The same beauty that had once meant blessing now meant peril.

The change was never complete. The nineteenth-century records hold both pictures side by side. On Mount Ključ in Montenegro a man lay sick for five years with a Vila-arrow. His household carried him to a Vila spring, and he called on the Vile as his sworn sisters. They took pity and healed him with mountain herbs. A shepherd who met a Vila at the wrong moment was tormented for the rest of his life.

Behavior

Krauss writes that the Vile are relentless when a vow made to them is broken. They punish anyone who disturbs their kolo, the round dance they hold on bright summer nights by moonlight, or who spies on it. Out of that belief came the saying naišo je na vilinsko kolo, “he stumbled on a Vila kolo”, used for a healthy person who suddenly falls ill. His main example is the tale of Stanko, a shepherd. An old sexton in Šamac told it in 1834 to M. Stojanović, who printed it in 1867.

Stanko was walking home ahead of his flock at dusk, playing his flute, when the village bell rang the Ave Maria. He did not pray along. He played the Ave Maria on his flute instead. At the fence at the edge of the village sat a woman wrapped all in white, a Vila. As Stanko came near, the story says, she let out einen feinen, markdurchdringenden Schrei, a thin, marrow-piercing cry, “ganz nach Vilenart”, entirely after the manner of Vile, and rose into the air. A hot gust blew over Stanko and threw him to the ground. From then on she followed him everywhere, even into his bed.

Sorcerers and sorceresses, charmers and fortune-tellers were called, and none of them could free him. This went on for three full years, and in that time Stanko’s mind slowly gave way. He was often found in the morning bound cross-wise with bast. One morning he was seen at the top of a white poplar near his farm, tied fast with linden bast. The villagers had to drive long nails into the trunk to climb up to him, and they let him down on a rope. He endured such torments for more than fifteen years. Then one morning he was found near his hut in a pit, suffocated in the mud.

Stanko himself said the Vile beat him because he refused to wander the world with them. Krauss introduces the tale as the story of a shepherd who surprised a Vila at the wrong moment. The tale ties the first attack to the Ave Maria, and the likeliest reading is that playing the prayer instead of praying it was the offence.

With her friends the Vila is generous. Krauss notes that Vile hand out advice freely, and that peasants put their own rules of good conduct into a Vila’s mouth. A hero who has a Vila as his posestrima, his sworn sister, can call on her in need. Break a vow to her or spy on her dance, and she punishes.

Vile and Krsnik

The Vile also have human favourites. The Krsnik is the Slovenian and Croatian shaman who fights witches. Krauss quotes a note from Veglia (Krk) dated 1860: “Krstnik, človek kterega vile obljubiju”, which he renders as “a Krstnik is a man whom the Vile have come to love.” He also cites a tale in which the Vile grew so fond of a young man that they took him into their hollow tree. They loved him because through him they smelled of baptism (da su po krstu dišale). Vile also carry off children who are already baptized and raise them.

Krauss reads this as the Christian-era Vila. She appears as a being cut off from salvation who seeks relief through contact with the baptized. He calls her chosen favourites the Krstniki, the Baptized, and says they could plead for their fellow humans. When the Vile turned into witches, in his view, the old friendship turned into open battle, and the Krstniki now protect the world by fighting them.

For the man-side of this relationship, see Krsnik, the Slovenian shaman whose existence depends on Vila favor.

The Vilenpfeile

Krauss explains the Vilenpfeil, the Vila-arrow, as sunstroke. It strikes after great exertion in scorching sun, and a hard summer march through the high mountains is especially risky. The high mountains are where the Vile live. The people said the Vile were angry at the intruder and shot him with their arrows. Krauss treats this as a folk misreading of a medical event. In his words the people were far from recognizing the true nature of the illness.

He gives a song as his example. Vile see a wedding procession crossing the mountains and envy the bride her handsome groom. One says to another, “Little sister Vila, let us shoot him with our arrow!” The stricken young man tells the maternal uncle in the wedding party that his head aches, and his heart too. The uncle tells him to tie a colored kerchief around his head. It does not help. He goes home, lies down and dies.

Since the people knew no medical remedy, Krauss writes, they sought protection in magic. A mother could shield her son from Vila-arrows from childhood on. She never sewed him a garment with leftover warp threads, never did weaving work on the feast of St. Paraskeva, and never spun or wound yarn on a Tuesday.

A song shows the rule at work. A mother marries off her only son, Vojin, and his aunt is jealous to death. She runs into the green mountains and begs the Vila Ravijojla and all her companions, as sisters by God, to shoot Vojin with their arrows when the wedding party passes. Ravijojla refuses. Vojin’s mother, she answers, has guarded him well against the leftover warp threads and the rest.

Krauss adds one more line: Friday-children and red-bearded men are also safe from Vila-arrows.

Marriage and Death

In the South Slavic song Pošetala Jovanbegovica, Beg Jovo’s wife complains in her garden that in nine years of marriage she still does not know where her husband spends his nights. His brother Joso overhears her. He sends Jovo home and rides out to the meadow with the horses in his place. At dusk a Vila from the mountain forest comes, lays an infant beside Joso and says to the child, “Now you are with your dearest father!” Joso leaps up and cuts the Vila to pieces with his long dagger, then kills the child. When Jovo hears it, he cries out that his brother has killed his sweetheart and his baby son.

Krauss reads the Vila as the unknowing, faithful lover of a married man. Her brother-in-law killed her by treachery to save his brother from unheimlicher Gewalt, an uncanny power, as he believed. Beside the song Krauss sets a Swedish court record. On 22-23 December 1691 the district court sentenced a 22-year-old young man from Mark härad to death for unerlaubter Vermischung mit einem Skogs- oder Bergsrå, illicit union with a forest or mountain spirit. In 1701 a man named Måns Malm was still brought to court on a similar charge. In Krauss’s reading, the zeal of the new religions cut such love-bonds with a bloody sword, and Beg Jovo was lucky that his own body was spared.

The Vile of Prilip

In one song the Vile act as a band. Thirty of them live in the castle of Prilip, the Prilep of today’s North Macedonia, which Krauss says lay in ruins in his day. Their elder is Janja, the starešnica. She shoots her arrows at horses and heroes and lets no hero pass through Prilip.

The song is Pogibija Janje vile ot Prilipa, “How Janja, the Vila of Prilip, Died.” Gjuro Gjurgjević has won a bride in distant Drevent and gathers a wedding party. Miloš Obilić leads it, Relja the Winged carries the banner, and Marko Kraljević rides as gjeverbaša, the head of the groom’s attendants. Marko warns that the road runs through Prilip. Miloš answers that the Vile will not dare shoot while all the Serbian leaders ride together. On the way out the Vile let them pass.

On the way back, with the bride among them, Janja gives the order: strijeljajte Gjurove svatove, shoot Gjuro’s wedding party. Angja of Prilip, another Vila, holds her back three times. The Serbs have come into Prilip, she warns, and they will drive the Vile out. Janja draws a golden arrow for Miloš and then aims at Marko, and each time Angja stops her. Then Relja rides past with the cross banner, and Janja’s arrow brings him down.

The leaders turn back, drive the Vile out of the castle and catch Janja. Marko drags her downhill by the hair and beats her with his heavy mace. Raise Relja, he tells her, or lose your head today. She lays herbs on Relja’s wounds. Relja springs up and cuts Janja in two. The Serbs plunder the castle, and Marko settles at Prilip.

Krauss noted that the number thirty was not a literal count. Three, seven, thirteen, thirty, hundred, three hundred, all stand in South Slavic folk speech for an unspecified larger or smaller crowd. A reader who counts thirty Vile in Prilip is reading a peasant phrase as an inventory. Krauss also thought the guslar, Kuzman Bjeletić from Herzegovina, had made up the Vila castle himself. He needed a reason for a wedding party to ride through the wild mountains, and the name of Marko’s own castle came to hand. In Krauss’s judgment the new tale stands in sharp contradiction to the older tradition.

Anatomy of a Slain Vila

On 3 February 1885 Krauss wrote down a song from the guslar Mišo Kósović of Gacko in Herzegovina, in the village of Ročević near Kozluk. It tells what was found inside a Vila’s body. Marko Kraljević, parched on a hunt, is sent by his Vila sworn sister to a green lake at the foot of a withered fir on the mountain top. There the toll-collector Vila keeps watch. She takes a hero’s arm from his shoulder and a horse’s leg from its knee. Marko drinks, waters his horse and rides on singing, and the Vila wakes. She bridles a stag with a mottled snake and chases him. She refuses his gold ducats.

They wrestle until midday, and Marko begins to lose. He calls on his sworn sister, the Vila of the mountain. The toll-collector turns to look for the helper, and in that moment Marko throws her to the ground. He slaughters her like a töricht Lämmchen, a foolish little lamb, and out of wonder he cuts her open.

Inside he finds three hero-hearts. The first was a little tired. The second was only beginning to stir. On the third lay a sleeping snake, šargan guja ljuta, mottled and fierce. At the sight of the snake Marko fled over the mountain and rode home to his castle at Prilip.

Krauss took the scene as a stock formula and saw little in it beyond poetic expression. The three hearts stand for courage, and the snake on the heart stands for cunning. For him the song mattered for another reason. It shows that Vile can die.

The Vila of the Sava plain

At the start of 1862 the society for South Slavic history in Zagreb published a list of questions, and answers came in from across Croatia. They were printed in 1863 in the seventh volume of the Arkiv za povjestnicu Jugoslavensku, the society’s journal edited by Ivan Kukuljević. Three of the answers describe the Vila.

Gjuro Stjepan Deželić, writing from Ivanić-grad on the Sava plain, gave the Vile goat’s feet under a long white robe. He said the thin white threads that fly through the air in summer and autumn, especially when the sun comes out after rain, were called vilinska svila, fairy-silk, and that some people called them the Vile themselves. B. Modrušić of Lonja gave them horse’s hooves hidden by the hem of the robe and golden hair down to the ground. When they foretell misfortune, he wrote, they come close enough for their singing to be heard, and a dog that hears it must start and howl. That is an omen of death, fire or some other harm. V. Lorković, writing from the country around Karlovac, split them in two. The mountain Vile were good and once helped people work the fields and tend the cattle. They withdrew into the forests and mountains when people grew proud and began to curse. The water Vile were evil. Their voice stuns anyone who comes near and leads him to ruin, and in the evening by moonlight they dance and sing near a well or a brook until the roosters drive them off.

Modrušić also set down a tale of two boys. On an Ascension Day they were sent on an errand to a nearby village, drank well there, and walked home through the wood. Near an old shepherds’ lodging they heard two-part singing and sat on a stump to listen. One guessed they were Vile, and both ran. The Vile cut them off and wound the kolo around them. To the one who listens, Modrušić wrote, the heart blossoms, but the one who watches feels himself turning to marble stone. His limbs go numb, his skin bristles, and fear breaks his bones. The two boys wandered about eight days in the woods and gorges before an elder found them, beaten and scratched, and brought them home. Against the blows of the Vile there is no quick cure, Modrušić wrote, but after long doctoring by the old-faith women of Lonja a man can still be pulled back from the grave, as these two were.

Cross-Cultural Connections

Krauss placed the Vile, together with the samovile and samodivi, in one family of wood and field spirits. In that family he named the moss-folk of central Germany, the Tyrolean Fanggen, the Swedish skogsnufvar and the Russian leshy. Of the Vile in one heroic song he wrote that their “primary likeness” to the old Germanic Valkyries was plain to see. Đorđević compares her with the Greek Nereids, beautiful dancers with the wrong kind of feet. Both are comparisons, and they show a shared pattern: a beautiful spirit-woman bound to wild places, dangerous when disturbed and generous to those she favors.

What stands out in the South Slavic record is how late the testimony runs. Krauss wrote down Vila songs from guslars in 1885. The Croatian answers of 1862 describe her feet, her singing and her kolo as local knowledge.

She survives in place names. In Montenegro the waters where the Vile gathered are called Vilina Voda, Fairy Water, and Vilin Izvor, Fairy Spring, and Đorđević notes that there are many of them. They are believed to heal. The one on Mount Ključ is where the sick man was left by his family and called on the Vile as his sworn sisters.

Sources

• Friedrich S. Krauss, Slavische Volkforschungen (Wilhelm Heims, Leipzig, 1908)
• Tihomir R. Đorđević, Veštica i vila u našem narodnom verovanju i predanju (SANU, Belgrade, 1953)
• Odgovori na pitanja družtva za jugoslavensku povjestnicu i starine, in Arkiv za povjestnicu Jugoslavensku VII (Zagreb, 1863): the 1862 questionnaire answers of Gjuro Stjepan Deželić (Ivanić-grad), B. Modrušić (Lonja) and V. Lorković (Karlovac district)
• Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (1818, expanded 1852)
• Tihomir Đorđević, Vampir i druga bića u našem narodnom verovanju i predanju
• Slobodan Zečević, Srpska etnomitologija (Službeni glasnik, Belgrade, 2008)