Donbettyr

Donbettyr is the river god of the Caucasian Nart Sagas. He is also the figure through whom the entire Nart heroic line descends. Without his daughters there are no Narts.

His name is a compound. Don in Ossetic means river. Bettyr is a Christianised borrowing from Saint Peter the fisherman (Greek Πέτρος, Latin Petrus), the apostle who was a fisherman before he was called and who became, in Eastern Christianity, the patron of fishermen and water-workers. The Ossetian river god absorbed the saint into his pre-Christian name. The result is a figure whose very name carries both his Indo-Iranian root and the Christian veneer that overlaid it after the medieval Caucasian Alans converted.

The river-name etymology

The first element of his name is the most consequential. Don, the Ossetic word for river, descends from Proto-Indo-European **deh₂nu-, which means river or stream. The same root names a striking proportion of the major rivers of European Russia and the Pontic-Caucasian zone:

• The Don itself, the great river of southern Russia, flowing into the Sea of Azov
• The Dnieper (from Iranian Dānu Apara, “rear river,” the further river)
• The Dniester (Dānu Nasdyo, “frontier river”)
• The Donets, the major tributary of the Don
• The Danube, the great river that runs from the Black Forest through ten European countries to the Black Sea

All five of these names share the Iranian/Indo-Iranian root that lives on in the Ossetic word don and in the name of the Nart river god. When you cross any of these rivers, you cross water named in Donbettyr’s language.

The same root produces the Hindu river goddess Danu, mother of the Danavas in Vedic mythology, and the Irish goddess Danu, mother of the Tuatha Dé Danann. The Indo-European river-mother is one of the deepest preserved comparative figures, and Donbettyr is the Caucasian male inflection of the type, paired with his daughters as the female river-spirits.

The underwater realm

Donbettyr’s domain is beneath the rivers, in a parallel underwater world that the Narts can enter through specific places, usually deep pools or the mouths of springs. The realm has its own architecture and its own light. Time runs differently there. Heroes who descend often return aged or unaged in the wrong direction. The Nart Akhsartag went down for a few days and came back to find years had passed.

His daughters live there. They are the Caucasian analogue of the Slavic Rusalki and the Norse Rán’s daughters: river-women, beautiful, capable of crossing into the human world, and capable of marrying mortal men. Each daughter has her own character and her own name. The two who matter most are Dzerassae and Bytsenon.

Dzerassae and the Nart line

The senior daughter is Dzerassae. She married the Nart Akhsartag in the underwater realm after he followed a wounded swan-maiden (his future wife in disguise) down into Donbettyr’s world. Donbettyr received him properly, gave him his daughter, and let the couple return to the surface. Dzerassae bore the senior Nart Uryzmæg and his lesser brother Khamyts, the twin progenitors of the heroic generation.

After both her sons grew up, Dzerassae died. Her tomb became a famous site in the Nart geography. The figure who had brought the underwater inheritance into the Nart line was buried in the surface world she had married into.

In some Ossetian variants the aged Wærhæg, the Nart founding ancestor, then married his own daughter-in-law Dzerassae after both his sons died, and produced a final child with her before dying himself within a year. The whole Ossetian Nart line therefore funnels through one woman, Dzerassae, daughter of Donbettyr.

In the Ossetian variant Satanaya is also descended from Donbettyr through her mother Dzerassae. Her father is the warrior god Uastyrdzhi (Saint George by syncretism), but the river god is her grandfather. Every wisdom-tale Satanaya tells, every cup-of-truth she holds at the feast, comes from a woman whose maternal grandfather was the master of the rivers.

Bytsenon and the birth of Batraz

The other daughter who matters is Bytsenon. She married Khamyts, the lesser of the two Nart brothers. In eight of the eighteen recorded variants of the story, she transforms into a frog at night and travels in his pocket. She is small and shape-shifting, with her origins in her father’s underwater world.

When the trickster Sirdon publicly mocked Khamyts for his frog-bride, Bytsenon left him in shame. Before she left, she breathed the unborn embryo of their son onto Khamyts’s back, where it became a glowing tumour. Satanaya later cut the white-hot infant out of that tumour. The infant was Batraz, the steel hero of the cycle.

The line is exact. Donbettyr is Batraz’s maternal grandfather. The steel hero of the Caucasus is, on his mother’s side, a river-spirit’s child.

The Indo-European water-god type

Donbettyr is one of the cleanest survivals of the Indo-European water-god type. The features are stable across the family.

The Iranian Anāhitā, the Avestan goddess of the cosmic river Aredvi Sura Anāhitā, is the patron of hero-kings and the source of the cosmic waters. She was worshipped at riverside altars throughout the Achaemenid empire and became, after the Macedonian conquest, the Anaitis whom the Greeks identified variously with Artemis, Aphrodite, and Athena. Donbettyr sits in the same Iranian religious slot translated into Caucasian mountain language and inflected as a male grandfather rather than a female patroness.

The Hindu Danu and the Irish Danu preserve the female Indo-European river-mother. The same root, the same family. Three daughter traditions of one Bronze Age river-deity: Iranian-Caucasian male (Donbettyr), Indian female (Danu), Celtic female (Danu).

The figure today

Donbettyr’s syncretic Christian identity as Saint Peter is still alive in some Ossetian fishing rituals. When a fisherman in the central Caucasus pulls in a good catch, he may thank Saint Peter, and what he means by Saint Peter is closer to Donbettyr than to the New Testament apostle. The river is older than the saint.

When a young woman drowns in an Ossetian river, the older generation may say she has gone to Donbettyr. The phrase carries no cruelty. It means she has returned to the family that, in the deep mythological sense, every Nart-descended human came from. The river takes back its own.

For the wider mythological context, see the parent article The Nart Sagas of the Caucasus. For Donbettyr’s most consequential descendant, see Satanaya. For the steel hero whose maternal grandfather he is, see Batraz.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• 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
• Colarusso, J. Nart Sagas from the Caucasus. Princeton University Press, 2002 (paperback reissue 2016, ISBN 9780691169149)
• Abaev, V. I. ‘Introduction: The Ossetian Epic Tales of the Narts,’ in Colarusso & Salbiev (eds.), Tales of the Narts, Princeton, 2016, pp. xxix-lxviii
• Abaev, V. I. Историко-этимологический словарь осетинского языка / Historical and Etymological Dictionary of the Ossetian Language, 4 vols. Moscow-Leningrad: USSR Academy of Sciences, 1959-1989
• Dumézil, G. Romans de Scythie et d’alentour. Paris: Payot, 1978
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, ‘Don’ and ‘Donbettyr’ entries