Soslan

Soslan, in the Iron Ossetian tradition, is Sosruko (Саусэрыкъо) in Adyghe Circassian, Sosryqwa (Сосрыкъуэ) in Kabardian, and Sasərqwa in Abkhaz. He is the most cross-culturally distributed hero of the Nart Sagas of the Caucasus. The Adyghe folk etymology breaks his name into sa (sword) + wa (hit) + sər (heat) + qʷa (son): “the son of the fiery sword-strike.”

He is, with the steel-bodied Batraz, one of the two great warrior heroes of the cycle. Where Batraz is the storm-warrior with the lightning-sword, Soslan is the solar hero with the unprotected knees. The two figures together carry the weight of the Indo-European warrior function in its Caucasian survival, and Dumézil mapped them both into the comparative skeleton he developed in Mythe et épopée (1968) and Romans de Scythie (1978).

Birth from the stone

The birth scene is the most extraordinary in any mythology I have read.

Satanaya was bathing naked at the river. A shepherd on the far bank, watching her, ejaculated onto a stone across the water. Nine months later the stone groaned. Satanaya, who had marked the stone, returned and split it open and lifted out the glowing-hot child.

She carried him to the smith god, Tlepsh in the Adyghe tradition or Kurdalægon in the Ossetian tradition, whose forge sat in a cave at the edge of a great forest where mortals were forbidden to go. The smith tempered the child’s body in a trough of wolf milk (or a hundred goatskins of milk, in another version). The trough was too short. Soslan had to bend his knees. The knees alone remained untempered, the only vulnerable spot on his entire body.

This is, structurally, Achilles. The mother tempers the child against death and misses the one small place that will kill him. The Indo-European parallel is one of the oldest and most-cited correspondences in comparative mythology.

The other parallel comes from the rock itself. Mithras in the Roman mysteries is petrogenitus, “born from the rock.” The Hellenized commentators Justin Martyr and Firmicus Maternus noted the Mithras rock-birth motif in their critical writings on the cult. Some scholars, including Littleton and Malcor in From Scythia to Camelot (1994), have argued that the Roman Mithras’s rock-birth iconography itself derives via Sarmatian intermediaries from the Sosruko stone-birth narrative. The transmission line is contested. The structural identity is striking either way. See Mithras.

The fire theft

Soslan stole fire from the one-eyed giant Inyzh, slipping a smouldering log out from under the sleeping ogre and accidentally dropping a coal that burned Inyzh’s eyebrow as he escaped. The Greek punishment never came. Inyzh just woke up confused. The Nart cycle is full of these moments where a Greek-myth-shaped story arrives at a different ending. The trickster gets away with it. The hero is not chained to a rock.

This is the Promethean fire-theft as a Caucasian comedy. The reader of the cycle has to revise the assumption that ancient mythologies always punish hubris. Some of them just laugh.

The descent to the Land of the Dead

The Soslan cycle contains the Caucasian katabasis. To win the Daughter of the Sun he had to fetch leaves from the aza tree, which grew only in the Land of the Dead. He forced his way in alive. He met his deceased first wife, who helped him navigate the underworld. He saw the sufferings of the dead as requital for their deeds during life. He took the leaves from the underworld king Barastyr, and was harassed on the way back by the shape-shifting Sirdon, who learned the secret of his immortality.

A 2022 article by Paolo Ognibene in Brill’s Iran and the Caucasus compared the Soslan descent directly to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The structural parallels are real: a living hero descends, meets the dead, sees moral requital, returns. The Soslan version predates Dante by at least two thousand years.

The death and the Wheel of Balsæg

The death is the great set piece of the cycle.

The Wheel of Balsæg, in some variants the Wheel of Ojnon (a syncretic Christian figure) or the wheel sent by the Daughter of the Sun whom Soslan had spurned, descended from the sky. The Wheel was a sentient automaton, a razor-sharp metal disk with steel teeth and flames bursting from it. It first attacked his magical horse, striking the horse’s vulnerable hooves. Then it flew at Soslan and sliced through his unprotected knees. He died on the steppe.

Scholars read the Wheel as a solar symbol: the sun-disk that cuts down the solar hero, possibly a survival from solstice ritual. Russian archaeologist V. B. Kovalevskaya, in Russian Archaeology, has argued that the Wheel of Balsæg is one of the figures in the cycle for which there is direct archaeological-iconographic evidence on Sarmatian artefacts.

The horse weeps over him. The cycle says nothing about resurrection.

The figure today

The Caucasian iconography of Sosruko survives in Adyghe and Ossetian folk art and in modern monumental sculpture. There is a famous Soviet-era statue of Sosruko in Kabardino-Balkaria that depicts him standing on a high rock, holding a bowl of fire stolen from the giant. The image of the stone-born hero with the bowl of fire above his head is the visual shorthand for the entire Nart cycle in modern Caucasian culture.

The figure also lives in the rituals of the Caucasian feast. When the third toast is offered after a successful hunt, the elder may invoke Soslan, the hunter who outwitted the giants and brought back fire.

For the wider mythological context, see the parent article The Nart Sagas of the Caucasus. For the matriarchal figure who delivered him from the stone, see Satanaya. For the steel-bodied warrior who is his counterpart in the Indo-European warrior function, see Batraz. For the trickster who engineered his death, see Sirdon.

Sources

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

• 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
• Abaev, V. I. ‘Introduction: The Ossetian Epic Tales of the Narts,’ in Colarusso & Salbiev (eds.), Tales of the Narts, Princeton, 2016, pp. xxix-lxviii
• Dumézil, G. Romans de Scythie et d’alentour. Paris: Payot, 1978
• Dumézil, G. Mythe et épopée, vol. I. Paris: Gallimard, 1968
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, ‘Šošlan / Soslan’ entry
• Ognibene, P. ‘Escape from the Land of the Dead: Nart Sagas, Divine Comedy, and the Journey Through the Afterlife.’ Iran and the Caucasus 26, no. 3 (2022), pp. 201-216. Brill
• Littleton, C. S., and Malcor, L. A. From Scythia to Camelot. Garland, 1994; revised Routledge, 2000