Tutyr

Tutyr is the wolf-lord of the Caucasian Nart Sagas. No wolf takes a sheep from an Ossetian flock without his leave. To call his name during a wolf attack is to make the wolves stop and break off. To insult him by neglecting his feast is to invite his wolves at the flock for the year that follows.

He is one of the cleanest survivals of an Indo-European type that scholars call the wolf-master or wolf-shepherd, the figure who owns the wolves of a region the way a shepherd owns sheep. The Slavs preserved the type in Saint Sava, Saint George, and Saint Nicholas depending on the region. The Greeks preserved it in Apollo Lykeios, the wolf-bright god. The Italics preserved it in the Hirpi Sorani, the priests of Soranus on Mount Soracte who walked barefoot across burning fir-coals once a year as the wolves of their god. The Ossetians of the Caucasus preserved it in Tutyr.

The name

His name is a Christianised borrowing from Saint Theodore Tiron, the early-fourth-century Roman recruit-martyr venerated throughout Eastern Christianity. Theodore Tiron was a young soldier in the imperial army at Amasea in Pontus, refused to sacrifice to the gods of Rome, set fire to the temple of Cybele, and was burnt alive around the year 306. His Orthodox feast falls on the first Saturday of Great Lent, the same week that holds the Ossetian Tutyrtae. The temporal alignment is the cleanest possible link between the saint and the festival.

The borrowing reached the Caucasus through the Byzantine-Alanic conversion. The medieval Alans, ancestors of the modern Ossetians, were Christianised in stages between the sixth and tenth centuries through Byzantine missionary work running up the trade routes from the Black Sea coast. The Ossetian liturgical form is Uats Tutyr, Holy Tutyr, on the same pattern as Uastyrdzhi (Holy George), Uacilla (Holy Elijah), and Donbettyr (Holy Peter). The Byzantine missionaries gave the saints’ names. The Alans kept the older functions and pasted the new names onto them. Theodore Tiron in his Greek cult was the patron of common soldiers. The Ossetian Tutyr was, and is, the patron of wolves.

Vasily Abaev in his Historical and Etymological Dictionary of the Ossetian Language (Vol. III, 1979) treats the name as a straight borrowing from Theodore. The function he treats as pre-Christian and Scythian-Alanic in its substance, on the standard pattern that the saint’s name is the veneer and the wolf-cult is what was already there.

The Tutyrtae feast

The festival in Tutyr’s honour is Tutyrtae (Тутыртæ), held in the first week of Orthodox Great Lent. In civil-calendar terms this lands in late February or early March, depending on the year’s Easter. There is also a smaller Fall Tutyrtae in October, but the spring observance is the major one and is sometimes called Great Tutyr.

The first three days of the week are the strict ones. A goat or ram is sacrificed on the eve of the festival. Tutyr is petitioned not to send wolves against the flocks for the coming year. Failure to observe the rite is believed to anger him, and an angered Tutyr orders his wolves to exterminate the cattle and the careless herder along with them. The Ossetian ethnographer Alina Bestaeva records the formula in her work on the south Ossetian calendar.

The mood of the rite is propitiation. You do not anathematise Tutyr. You ask him politely. The wolves are his herd, and you are negotiating with their owner for safe passage for your own animals.

This is one of the ways the Ossetian tradition reads differently from the Christian western European tradition that surrounded it. The post-Reformation Western imagination treats the wolf as the enemy of civilisation, the predator that must be hunted down and removed. The Ossetian imagination keeps the wolf in the world as a thing whose owner can be reached and whose owner has rules. The wolf is dangerous, which is a different category from evil.

The festival is still observed in North Ossetia today. The South Ossetian presidential administration’s official calendar of traditional Ossetian observances lists it among the central rites of the year. The Assianism (Уацдин) revival movement keeps it on the calendar as one of the foundational dates.

The wolf milk and Soslan

The cycle does not stage the moment of borrowing. But the most-told birth-story in the entire Nart cycle, the tempering of Soslan in wolf milk by the smith god Tlepsh / Kurdalægon, runs through Tutyr’s domain whether his name is spoken or not.

Satanaya delivered the stone-born infant Soslan to the smith. The smith placed him in a trough of wolf milk and heated it until it 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.

Whose milk could that be, in the Ossetian world, if not Tutyr’s? Nothing wolf-derived crosses to a human without the wolf-lord’s leave. The cycle does not stage the negotiation. The implication is unavoidable to a listener who knows the world the saga is set in.

The lost eye of Fælværa

The most-told Tutyr story, the one Ossetian children grew up hearing, is the story of Fælværa.

Fælværa is the patron of small livestock, the sheep-god of the Ossetian pantheon, named for the Greek martyr-saints Florus and Laurus. He is one-eyed. The story of how he lost the eye is the story of the wolf-and-sheep relationship in Ossetian folk thought.

Tutyr struck out Fælværa’s left eye. He did it so that wolves could come at the flocks from the blind side, where the shepherd-god could not see them. The shepherd-god is half-blind by design. The wolves take what they can take from the side that is not watched. The herders pray to Fælværa for the eye that still works.

The story is etiological in the strict sense. It explains why wolves get sheep at all. The world is built so that they sometimes do. The half-blindness of the shepherd-god is a structural feature of the cosmos, arranged by the wolf-lord himself.

This is the kind of story the Western reader trained on Aesop or on the medieval bestiary often misses. There is no moral. The story does not punish the wolf for taking the lamb or blame the shepherd for losing his eye. The world has wolves in it, and the world has sheep in it, and the negotiations between them are the work of the herder’s whole life.

The Indo-European wolf-master type

The wolf-master is one of the well-attested Indo-European religious types, surviving in several daughter traditions in clear and recoverable form.

Apollo Lykeios is the Greek case. The epithet Lykeios derives from λύκος, wolf. He was worshipped under the title at Athens (the Lyceum gymnasium took its name from his sanctuary), at Argos, at Sicyon, and elsewhere. The cult was double-natured. Apollo Lykeios protected the herder against wolves, but Apollo Lykeios was also wolfish himself, the bright wolf-god to whom the Athenian ephebes sacrificed before going out on the wild-edges patrols that constituted their initiation into citizenship. Daniel Gershenson in Apollo the Wolf-god (1991) is the major comparative study.

The Hirpi Sorani of Mount Soracte are the Italic case. Once a year the priests of Soranus, conflated by the Romans with Apollo, walked barefoot across burning fir-coals carrying the entrails of sacrificed animals. They called themselves hirpi, an Oscan word for wolf. They were exempted from military service and from taxation by Roman law because they were the wolves of the god, and you do not draft a god’s wolves into the legions. Pliny the Elder records the practice in the Natural History.

Saint Sava is the South Slavic case. The Serbian ethnographer Veselin Čajkanović argued in 1924 that the medieval cult of Saint Sava had absorbed the older Slavic wolf-shepherd deity, often identified with Veles. In modern Serbian folk tradition Sava walks the forests with a herd of wolves. The wolves are his hunting dogs. He gives them the right to take what they take. Saint George plays the same role in much of Romania and Bulgaria, Saint Nicholas in Russia and Ukraine. The Christianised name varies. The wolf-master function survives intact across the whole Slavic-Orthodox zone.

Tutyr is the Caucasian case. Same type, same function, same surface-Christianisation pattern. The Ossetians took the Greek martyr-saint Theodore Tiron the way the Serbs took Sava and the Russians took Nicholas, and used the new name to keep speaking about something that was already there.

Dumézil established the Indo-European depth of the type over half a century of comparative work. The wolf-master is older than any of the daughter cultures that preserve him.

The figure today

The Tutyrtae is still observed in North Ossetia. The Assianism revival keeps it on the calendar. Old herders in the central Caucasus still call on Tutyr by name when the wolves come to the flock at night, the way a Serbian shepherd in the Šumadija will call on Sava and a Greek shepherd in the Pindos will call on Saint George.

When an Ossetian fisherman pulls in a good catch he may thank Donbettyr. When an Ossetian herder loses a lamb to wolves he may say Tutyr was angry that year. The phrase is not metaphor. The framework is intact. The wolves still belong to someone, and the someone has rules, and the rules can be observed or neglected with material consequences either way.

The cleanest survival of an Indo-European wolf-lord anywhere in Europe is in a mountain village in North Ossetia where the herder ties a red thread around the gate-post on the first Monday of Great Lent and waits for the wolves to pass.

For the wider mythological context, see the parent article The Nart Sagas of the Caucasus. For the steel hero whose tempering passed through Tutyr’s domain, see Soslan. For the smith who handled the wolf milk, see Tlepsh / Kurdalægon. For the river god who shares Tutyr’s pattern of pre-Christian function under a Christian saint’s name, see Donbettyr.

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. Историко-этимологический словарь осетинского языка / Historical and Etymological Dictionary of the Ossetian Language, Vol. III (S-T’), Moscow-Leningrad: USSR Academy of Sciences, 1979
• 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. Осетинский эпос и мифология / Ossetian Epic and Mythology (Russian trans.). Vladikavkaz: Nauka, 2001
• Gershenson, D. E. Apollo the Wolf-god. Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph No. 8. McLean, VA: Institute for the Study of Man, 1991
• Čajkanović, V. О српском врховном богу / On the Serbian Supreme God. Belgrade: Srpska kraljevska akademija, 1941