Tlepsh

Tlepsh in the Adyghe Circassian tradition, Kurdalægon in the Ossetian tradition, is the heavenly smith of the Caucasian Nart Sagas. His forge sits in a cave at the edge of a great forbidden forest where mortals are not permitted to go. The Narts must call him three times before he answers. When he does, he hammers metal that no human smith could heat hot enough.

He forged the body of the steel hero Batraz by quenching the white-hot infant in the Black Sea after Satanaya delivered him from his father’s back. He tempered the body of the stone-born Soslan in a trough of wolf milk too short to cover the hero’s knees. He made the first sickle. He made a self-propelled sword that hunted and killed cholera personified, called Bearded Yamina. The Caucasian iron age came out of his cave.

The names and what they mean

The Adyghe Tlepsh is etymologically connected to Greek χάλυψ (khálups), the Greek word for iron and steel, which entered Latin as chalybs and survives in English in the word chalybeate, used of iron-rich mineral springs and of waters thought to convey the strength of iron to those who drink them. The same root names the Chalybes, the iron-working people of ancient Anatolia from whom the Greeks said they had learned to smelt iron. The smith god of the Caucasus and the metallurgical word the Greeks used for iron share the same Bronze Age root.

The Ossetian Kurdalægon is more layered. Vasily Abaev in his Historical and Etymological Dictionary of the Ossetian Language (1959-1989) breaks it down as Kurd Alæ Wærgon: Smith (kurd) of the Alans (Alæ), with Wærgon a divine epithet related to the Latin Vulcanus, the Roman smith god. The name identifies him as the patron divine smith of the Alans, the Iranian-speaking ancestors of the modern Ossetians. When the Ossetians named their smith god, they named him by the people he worked for. He is, etymologically, the Smith of the Alans.

Two etymologies, two cultural roots, one figure. The Caucasus mountains absorbed both the Indo-European smith-god type and the local Bronze Age metallurgical heritage and let them stand together.

The forge

The smith’s cave is in the saga’s geography always at the edge of a great forest. In some Ossetian variants the forest is the same one through which Soslan passed to reach the Land of the Dead. In Adyghe variants the cave is at the foot of a sacred mountain. Wherever it sits, the rule is the same: mortals do not enter. The Narts stop at the threshold and call. Three calls.

When Tlepsh comes to the door he is bearded and broad-shouldered, with a leather apron and hands too large for his arms. He smells of charcoal and quenched iron. He answers questions in short sentences. He almost never smiles.

He has no consort named in the cycle, no children, and no retinue. He works alone, except in the moments when a Nart or a god comes to commission a weapon or a tool.

The forging of Batraz

The most famous Tlepsh story is the forging of Batraz. The infant Batraz had been delivered by Satanaya from a glowing tumour on the back of his father Khamyts. He was born white-hot. The Narts could not handle him. They brought him to the smith.

Tlepsh placed the white-hot infant in his furnace and heated him hotter still. Then he picked the boy up with iron tongs and quenched him in the Black Sea. The sea boiled. Steam rose for miles. When the smith pulled Batraz out, the hero’s body was steel from head to toe, except in some Ossetian variants in his intestines, which the smith had not been able to reach.

This is the divine smithing of a hero into a weapon. The Indo-European parallel is exact: Tvaṣṭṛ in the Vedic Rigveda fashions Indra’s vajra, the lightning-bolt that becomes the warrior’s signature. Hephaestus in the Iliad makes Achilles’s armour. Wayland in the Norse Völundarkviða forges weapons that no other smith can make. The smith god as armorer-of-the-hero is one of the cleanest Indo-European mythological types, and Tlepsh is the Caucasian survival.

The tempering of Soslan

The other major Tlepsh episode is the tempering of Soslan. Satanaya brought the stone-born infant to the smith after cutting him from the rock. Tlepsh placed the child in a trough of wolf milk and heated him until the milk boiled. The trough was too short. Soslan had to bend his knees, and so the knees alone of his body remained untempered. They were the only vulnerable place on him. The Wheel of Balsæg eventually killed him there.

The trough being too short is the kind of small story-telling detail that signals an old, well-worn oral tradition. Western readers are used to the Achilles version (the mother holds him by the heel). The Caucasian version puts the failure on the smith’s equipment rather than on the parent’s grip. The result is the same: a hero invulnerable everywhere except one small place that will kill him.

The other works

Tlepsh is not only an armorer of heroes. He is a culture-hero in his own right, the source of useful tools.

He made the first sickle, in the saga’s own etiology. Before Tlepsh’s sickle the Narts harvested grain by hand or with stone tools. After it they had iron blades. The Narts attribute the entire agricultural revolution of the Caucasus to him.

He made a self-propelled sword that hunted and killed cholera personified, called Bearded Yamina, when the Narts could not catch the disease themselves. The sword went out at night, found the cholera in the form of a bearded man, and beheaded it. The Narts woke to find the disease gone.

He made the iron beams that hold up the gates of the underworld. He made the iron chains that bind the cosmic enemies. He made specific weapons for specific Narts that no other figure in the cycle could have made.

The list runs longer than this. Caucasian folk culture is full of objects whose origin is attributed to Tlepsh, the way Slavic folklore attributes objects to particular saints.

The Indo-European parallels

The smith god as a type is one of the most stable Indo-European figures. Hephaestus in Greek myth, Vulcan in Roman myth, Wayland in Norse and Germanic myth, Tvaṣṭṛ in Vedic myth, and Goibniu in Irish myth all share core features: divine artisans who work in caves or underground, who make impossible weapons for heroes and gods, who are sometimes lame or deformed (Hephaestus famously) but whose hands produce what nothing else can produce.

Tlepsh / Kurdalægon belongs in this cluster. He may be the cleanest Caucasian survival of the type, with the etymological evidence (Wærgon = Vulcanus) directly preserved in his Ossetian name. Dumézil treated him as a confirming case for the comparative reading of the Indo-European craft-god.

For the Greek figure, see the bestiary entry on Hephaestus. For the steel-bodied hero he forged, see Batraz. For the stone-born hero he tempered, see Soslan. For the matriarchal figure who delivered both heroes to him, see Satanaya. For the wider mythological context, see the parent article The Nart Sagas of the Caucasus.

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
• 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, ‘Kurdalægon’ and ‘Batradz’ entries