Thunderer–devil conflict in Baltic folklore

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Perkūnas (1909)

The thunderer–devil conflict in Baltic folklore is a complex of legends, beliefs, charms, folktales, and seasonal customs in which the Lithuanian Perkūnas or Latvian Pērkons pursues a chthonic opponent called velnias, velns, jods, or by a Christian name for the devil. Thunder is the noise of the pursuit, lightning is the pursuer's weapon, and struck trees, stones, buildings, people, and animals are places where the fugitive has hidden or objects caught in the attack. The tradition belongs chiefly to Lithuanian and Latvian folklore, with close parallels around the Baltic Sea.

No single recorded text contains a complete canonical myth. Lithuanian legends preserve the fullest hunting sequence: a storm overtakes a hunter, who sees the thunderer's opponent darting into a hollow tree, beneath a stone or turf, or into water while mocking the sky between thunderclaps. The hunter loads a gun with silver and kills the fugitive; Perkūnas then appears in human form, thanks the hunter, and gives him an inexhaustible weapon or another reward that must be used under strict conditions. A related dialogue enumerates one hiding place after another until water or the underside of the earth offers the opponent a refuge that thunder cannot readily penetrate.

Latvian legends retain the pursuit, transformation, stone-throwing, and hiding motifs, while Latvian verbal charms apply the same imagery to healing and protection. Pērkons, several thunders, or thrice-nine thunderbolts drive a devil, disease, swelling, or malign influence under a stone, into the sea, or beyond the inhabited world. Other narratives explain the feud through a stolen axe, knife, pipe, vehicle, goat, stones, bullets, or thunder instrument. These openings are less stable than the chase itself and include fragile recordings collected through school questionnaires.

The conflict also structures beliefs about the first thunder of spring and conduct during storms. The first thunder was said to shake, move, or purify the earth, end a dangerous winter interval, and open the season for sowing, grazing, bathing, and direct contact with the ground. Historical storm practices sought to deny the fugitive a hiding place through closed doors, expelled black animals, blessed vegetation, smoke, prayer, and avoidance of certain trees, stones, water, field boundaries, and open furrows. Scholars have interpreted the complex as weather aetiology, a seasonal encounter between atmospheric and chthonic powers, a moral narrative about order and transgression, and part of a wider Circum-Baltic and Indo-European field; the fragmentary and often Christianised evidence does not establish one unchanged prehistoric plot.

Terminology and scope

The analytical name thunderer–devil conflict covers a family of traditions, not a title used by the original narrators. Lithuanian scholarship commonly calls the relationship Perkūno ir velnio nesantaika or Perkūno kova su velniu, meaning the enmity or struggle of Perkūnas and the devil. Jonas Balys used the broader title Griaustinis ir velnias Baltoskandijos kraštų tautosakoje, “Thunder and the Devil in the Folklore of the Balto-Scandinavian Countries”, for his 1939 comparative monograph. The English word thunderer permits discussion of Lithuanian Perkūnas, Latvian Pērkons, personified Thunder, God, and Christian successors without treating every name as evidence for one identical divine figure.

The Lithuanian noun velnias and Latvian velns are conventional translations of “devil”, but the folkloric figure combines several historical layers. It may be a Christian tempter or inhabitant of hell, a dead-associated or water-associated chthonic being, a wealthy gentleman, a foolish trickster, an animal-shaped fugitive, or an opponent of the thunder god. Latvian records also use jods, “black man”, “big man”, and other indirect designations, especially in charms where naming a harmful being could be avoided. Capitalisation varies in translations because the same vernacular term can function as a proper name, a class-name for devils, or the Christian Devil.

The relevant evidence belongs to several genres whose forms and uses differ. A memorate may report what a named person saw during one storm; a legend supplies a short explanatory plot; a belief reduces the plot to one or two sentences; a charm turns pursuit into a spoken act intended to remove disease; and a wonder tale expands the relationship into repeated adventures. Motifs can cross those boundaries, but a healing formula was performed for a different immediate purpose from a fireside legend or an answer to a collector's questionnaire.

The term Baltic refers here to the related Lithuanian and Latvian traditions and to evidence recorded among speakers of those languages. Old Prussian sources preserve the thunder-god name but do not provide an oral narrative corpus comparable with the Lithuanian and Latvian collections. Circum-Baltic comparison includes Finnic, Sámi, Scandinavian, and neighbouring Slavic traditions when a tale type or motif has demonstrable regional distribution. Such comparison establishes contact, shared narrative patterns, or inherited elements only when the distribution and textual history support those conclusions.

Sources and collection history

Genres and archival scale

The Lithuanian corpus is unusually large because Perkūnas remained a productive figure in nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative folklore. Nijolė Laurinkienė counted about twenty plot types in which Perkūnas acts as a principal character, excluding types that mention thunder only as a natural phenomenon. Individual types range from solitary recordings to groups of seventy or eighty variants, and their texts range from developed narratives to statements barely longer than beliefs. Balys's earlier publication Perkūnas lietuvių liaudies tikėjimuose alone contained about one thousand belief records concerning Perkūnas.

Legends of the pursuit form the densest narrative evidence, while beliefs about lightning, first thunder, hiding places, and storm safety supply the social setting in which those legends were understood. Proverbs, riddles, curses, place legends, calendar customs, and wonder tales preserve related attributes or transformed plot elements. No surviving record permits the entire complex to be read as the transcript of a single ritual recitation.

Latvian evidence is distributed between belief legends, Pēteris Šmits's published tale and legend corpus, and verbal charms. Šmits arranged twenty-one variants under the heading “Thunder pursues the devils”, thereby identifying a recurrent Latvian narrative group before later digital classification. His heading is an editorial grouping of variants and does not imply that every version contains the same sequence.

Nineteenth-century publication

Fricis Brīvzemnieks published the first comprehensive collection of Latvian charms in 1881 as part of his Ethnographic Materials of the Latvian People. He began collecting for the work during a Moscow-funded expedition to Latvia in 1869 and later relied on a network that included teachers and farmers. Calls in the Latvian press in 1877 brought further material before publication. The finished collection named fifty contributors and contained 717 charm texts or text units.

Much of the charm material came from western Latvia, especially the Skrunda area. Jānis Pločkalns submitted more than two hundred texts, and his mother Anna Pločkalna learned charms orally from local healers before dictating them to her son and, after learning to write in her sixties, recording material herself. Seventeen of the thirty-seven pursuit-related charms selected by Aigars Lielbārdis came through Pločkalns, so their concentration reflects both regional tradition and the shape of one collecting network.

Printed folklore could re-enter oral and manuscript circulation. Brīvzemnieks gave copies to active collectors and sold the book publicly, and some texts later arrived in the Latvian folklore archives among school and university collections of the 1930s. Similarity between an archival text and an earlier publication can therefore record traditional stability, copying, memorisation from print, or a mixture of those processes.

The Lithuanian questionnaires

Around 1935 Balys circulated a twenty-eight-question survey entitled “Perkūnas ir velnias” through the Lithuanian Folklore Archive. The questionnaire reached many teachers and school pupils while beliefs about Perkūnas still circulated in rural communities. It preserved facts that might otherwise have disappeared and created a concentrated body of testimony on thunder, the devil, lightning, and storm customs.

The method also created source problems. Some answers repeat the wording or assumptions of a question, omit the teller's explanation, or provide incomplete information about collector, informant, and locality. Laurinkienė therefore tested isolated statements against independent records and treated unique school texts with deficient metadata cautiously. Developed legends with multiple analogues carry greater evidential weight than a lone sentence that may be an elicited answer or a collector's synthesis.

The problem is especially acute in accounts of the feud's origin. Several Kybartai school records say that a knife, axe, stone, pipe, bicycle or two-wheeled vehicle, or goat was stolen, but their documentation is incomplete and their plots are undeveloped. One tale about two brothers throwing a shared axe across a river has thirty-six analogues as a giant legend but only one recording in which the brothers are Perkūnas and his companion. The recurrent chase is consequently more securely attested than any single catalogue of stolen property.

Major studies

Balys's 1939 monograph assembled Baltic and Scandinavian material on thunder, devils, hiding places, lightning strikes, and related tale types. Its comparative breadth and extensive corpus established the conflict as a major problem of Baltic folklore research. Balys interpreted much of the Lithuanian legend tradition as comparatively late, while Norbertas Vėlius later argued that Christian influence had altered a durable and substantially archaic complex.

Vėlius's 1987 monograph analysed the Lithuanian folkloric devil across legend, belief, tale, and minor genres. His study placed the opponent's animal forms, waters, stones, wealth, trickery, relations with the dead, and hostility to thunder inside a broader chthonic semantic field. Laurinkienė's 1996 monograph then examined Perkūnas through names, historical notices, folklore, ritual, material attributes, seasonal custom, and relations with other beings. Its chapters on the cause of the feud, the pursuit, hiding-place dialogue, first thunder, storm protection, and Christian successors provide the fullest integrated analysis of the Lithuanian evidence.

Frog's 2011 study separated the regional tale type “The Theft of the Thunder-Instrument”, ATU 1148B, from the wider category of divine conflict. The article compared Sámi, Finnic, Baltic, and Germanic narratives and treated the Circum-Baltic distribution as a product of historical contact and exchange. Patrice Lajoye's 2018 article compared Lithuanian hunter legends with Polish and Russian versions and proposed that their shared sequence preserves a fragment of a Balto-Slavic heroic myth. Lielbārdis's 2019 study demonstrated how Latvian charms preserve the same pursuit as a compact therapeutic and protective action.

Principal figures

Perkūnas and Pērkons

Perkūnas and Pērkons are the Lithuanian and Latvian forms of the inherited Baltic name of the thunder god. In folklore the name can designate a deity, personified thunder, the thunderstorm itself, or the lightning bolt that acts as his projectile. The resulting grammar allows a narrator to say that Perkūnas rides, shoots, becomes angry, or speaks, and also that “the Perkūnas” struck a tree as a meteorological event.

The thunderer occupies the upper and mobile side of the conflict. He travels in the sky on horseback or in a wheeled vehicle, and the rumble of wheels, hooves, stones, weapons, or a celestial road can account for thunder. His weapons include an axe, hammer, knife, sword, club, bow and arrows, bullets, stones, and lightning itself. The variation reflects both old divine attributes and the replacement of an archaic projectile by the firearms familiar to later narrators.

Perkūnas can act independently, as a servant or agent of Dievas, as Dievas's son, or under a title that merges him with a heavenly father. These alternatives belong to different records and historical layers, and they do not yield one fixed genealogy. In Christianised narratives God may order the attack, forgive collateral victims, restore damaged property, or appear as the speaker who answers the fugitive's proposed hiding places.

The pursuit expresses a judicial as well as a meteorological function. Perkūnas punishes thieves, liars, oath-breakers, malicious people, and beings that obstruct the ordered use of the world. A lightning death could be interpreted as the result of sheltering the devil, yet other beliefs treated a person struck by lightning as specially marked, difficult to bury, purified, or taken by a divine power. The tradition therefore joins danger, justice, sanctity, and accidental proximity without reducing every strike to moral guilt.

Velnias, Velns, and Jods

The opponent occupies the lower, enclosed, wet, or hidden side of the narrative landscape. He enters hollows, roots, turf, stones, wells, rivers, lakes, bogs, and the ground beneath a person's feet. His movement is horizontal and evasive, in contrast with the descending strike and sky-road of the pursuer.

The fugitive repeatedly changes form. Lithuanian examples include a black cat, dog, goat, fox, raven, duck, pike, small man, gentleman, and a figure marked as foreign by dress or speech. Latvian legends likewise give the devil black or red colouring, animal limbs, glowing eyes, a tail, and the shapes of a dog, cat, hare, ram, goat, bird, or well-dressed traveller. Shape-changing explains how the same adversary can be encountered in a tree, beside water, under clothing, or among domestic animals.

Smallness is a recurrent tactical feature. A devil reduced to a mouse, fish, cat, insect-like creature, or little man can hide in a fold of clothing, under a skirt, in a trouser leg, or close to a person whom lightning may then strike. The motif converts ordinary storm precautions into part of the chase, because shaking out garments or releasing an unexpected animal exposes the pursuer's target.

The opponent's Christian features coexist with older chthonic associations. Crosses, prayers, saints, hell, and fallen angels belong to the Christian narrative vocabulary, while waters, dead souls, cattle, stones, subterranean wealth, and animal transformation connect the figure with a wider lower-world domain. Folklore records do not preserve a clean boundary at which a pre-Christian Velnias ends and a Christian Devil begins.

The human helper

The human participant is commonly a hunter, although wood-gatherers, travellers, pupils, shepherds, and other witnesses also enter the legends. The hunter belongs simultaneously to the ordinary landscape and to the thunderer's mode of action: he tracks moving prey, carries a projectile weapon, and can strike from the ground where lightning has failed to reach. Laurinkienė interprets him as an earthly counterpart or assistant of Perkūnas within the story.

The helper's decisive resource is often silver. He fires a silver coin, button, blessed bullet, or other exceptional load at a creature that ordinary lightning or ammunition cannot kill. The exceptional material distinguishes the effective shot from ordinary ammunition, and Lajoye compares the special projectile with a broader European repertoire of weapons used against supernatural beings.

The helper is neither permanently divine nor automatically virtuous. He may be rewarded for courage and accuracy, then lose the gift by boasting, measuring the inexhaustible supply, shooting a human being, hunting on a prohibited day, or testing the weapon irreverently. The closing prohibition brings the cosmic chase into the ethics of human hunting and use of power.

Narrative complex

Causes of the feud

Most pursuit legends begin after the hostility has already become permanent. Thunder sounds because Perkūnas is hunting the devil, and the teller need not explain the first offence. Where an explanation appears, theft is the most common organising idea, but the stolen object varies sharply between records.

One eastern Lithuanian legend says that the devil stole Perkūnas's bullets while the thunderer slept. The theft explains both the anger and the continued shooting, while a moralising close warns that a person who shelters evil may be struck together with the hidden fugitive. Another record transfers a stolen axe, chisel, saw, and hammer to Elijah and Enoch, Christian figures who perform Perkūnas's thunder function in later legends.

Stone theft has stronger links with the landscape but remains textually uneven. Two north-eastern Lithuanian records say that the devil stole one stone from Perkūnas's heap and used it in the foundation of his own dwelling. The fuller version continues with the devil's hiding places and storm precautions, which makes it more securely connected with the pursuit complex than the isolated statement. Place legends in which a devil carries stones to destroy a church, build a bridge, dam a river, or cross a lake belong to a much wider narrative field and do not necessarily contain a theft from Perkūnas.

Several school records combine the dispute with the Christian story of fallen angels. In those versions God expels one figure from heaven, or Perkūnas departs with tools and animals, after which the attribution of theft and guilt becomes confused. The narrative logic of expulsion differs from the more stable logic in which a lower-world fugitive hides from an already active thunderer.

The devil can also provoke the chase through insolence instead of theft. Between peals he dances, grimaces, protrudes his tongue, exposes his backside, bleats, or emerges from cover to mock the sky. The repeated alternation of concealment, mockery, and renewed thunder gives a visible rhythm to the pauses and returns of a storm.

Theft of the thunder instrument

ATU 1148B, “The Theft of the Thunder-Instrument”, is a related but separately definable tale type. In its fullest form a devil or giant steals the sleeping thunder god's musical, mechanical, or symbolic instrument and hides it in a lower-world household. The god enters the thief's service in disguise, is invited to play because the household cannot use the instrument properly, and recovers his power by performing on it. The successful performance destroys or scatters the hostile company and restores thunder.

The tale type is concentrated in the Circum-Baltic region among Sámi, Finnic, Baltic, and North Germanic traditions. Its presence across Indo-European and Uralic languages points to long-term regional transmission, not a distribution explainable solely by descent from one Proto-Indo-European narrative. Individual traditions emphasise different episodes, instruments, helpers, and relations between thunder and rain.

A Latvian tale recorded in Ilūkste in 1933 gives God a tinderbox and trumpet that produce thunder. Devils steal the objects while he sleeps, and thunder ceases for seven years. Disguised as a shepherd, the owner enters the devils' cave, where they fail to play the trumpet and eventually allow him to try. His performance restores the sound and scatters the devils.

Lithuanian evidence for ATU 1148B is fragmentary and frequently lacks the recovery episode. The stolen object may be a knife, wood-axe, tool, building stone, pipe, money, or another possession, while the consequence is simply Perkūnas's lasting hostility. Frog interprets this pattern as a loss of narrative information within a tradition where the pursuit itself remained more culturally prominent than the instrument's recovery. That interpretation accounts for the varying objects without treating every isolated theft report as an intact version of the full tale.

The instrument tale and the storm hunt share a hostile devil, stolen power, concealment, and the restoration of thunderous action. They nevertheless organise those elements differently: ATU 1148B follows loss, disguise, performance, and recovery, while the pursuit legends follow storm, concealment, human intervention, reward, and prohibition. Their contact in Baltic tradition permits fusion, but one plot cannot be reconstructed merely by filling the gaps of the other.

The storm hunt

The best-developed Lithuanian hunting legends belong to tale-type LPK 3452. A hunter or traveller is caught by a storm in a forest, beside a lake, on a hill, or near a river and seeks shelter beneath a tree or close to a stone. The recorded settings repeatedly combine an exposed path or shore with nearby trees, stones, and water that can shelter the fugitive.

Lightning repeatedly strikes near an animal, small man, gentleman, or other anomalous creature without killing it. The creature leaves cover during the pauses, mocks the thunderer, and hides again before the next blow. The witness eventually recognises that the apparent animal or stranger is the devil.

Ordinary ammunition is ineffective in many variants. The hunter uses a silver button, coin, blessed bullet, or other exceptional projectile and kills or wounds the fugitive. In some texts Perkūnas himself shoots arrows or carries an archaic weapon, while later versions give both divine and human hunters rifles.

After the shot, the storm clears or an old, large, bearded, or otherwise imposing man approaches the hunter. He reveals himself as Perkūnas, explains that he had pursued the creature for an extraordinary period, and thanks the human marksman. Durations of three, seven, nine, fifteen, twenty-three, or more years magnify the fugitive's resistance and the helper's achievement.

The legends attribute the creature's survival to concealment in a shelter that blocks the thunderer's direct access. A hollow, stone, water body, stump, turf clod, or living host blocks direct access and exposes the surrounding object to the blow. The ground-level hunter sees the exact opening, angle, or transformed body concealed from the sky.

Hiding places

Hollow trees are among the most frequent refuges. The devil may enter an oak, spruce, willow, stump, or rotten trunk, and a lightning-struck tree is then explained as a shelter broken open by Perkūnas. Oak belongs strongly to the thunderer in cultic and poetic tradition, yet a hollow oak can simultaneously shelter his opponent because the cavity, not the species alone, determines the immediate danger.

The Perkūnas Oak in Plungė, Lithuania. Folklore could associate an oak both with the thunder god and with a hollow in which his opponent hid.

Stones provide cover, weapons, and material traces. The devil sits on, under, or beside a boulder; Perkūnas throws stone projectiles; and a split or marked rock becomes evidence of the chase. Place legends add footprints, handprints, broken surfaces, and scattered stone fields to the remembered geography of supernatural pursuit.

Water is the most persistent limit on the thunderer's reach. The fugitive enters a lake, river, bog, well, or the space beneath a log in water, where the bolt may be dispersed or the enemy may remain below the surface. The same association links the folkloric devil with fish, ducks, frogs, wet meadows, drowned places, and subterranean waters.

Human bodies and domestic space can become temporary refuges. The fugitive hides beneath a person, near livestock, in a garment fold, behind an open door, under a threshold, or close to a chimney. A strike that injures a person, animal, or building is then interpreted as an attack on the concealed being and not as the thunderer's chosen destruction of the visible object.

The refuge dialogue

Tale-type LPK 3453A converts the chase into a dialogue about possible hiding places. The devil proposes a person, horse, cow, house, tree, stone, or another living or material shelter, and the heavenly speaker answers that each can be struck, compensated, restored, or forgiven. The exchange continues until the fugitive names water, the underside of the earth, or a comparable lower-world refuge.

The dialogue supplies a narrative cause for lightning striking a person, animal, house, tree, or stone that appears blameless to an observer. It also protects the thunderer's justice by supplying restitution for collateral loss: an animal can be replaced, a house rebuilt, and a dead person's sins forgiven. Christian ideas of divine compensation and absolution have entered the form, but its ordered descent through beings, structures, trees, stones, and water retains the spatial logic of the pursuit.

The final answer varies. Some versions leave the devil in water because that is his proper place, while others allow pursuit after the water has frozen or after the fugitive comes ashore. The varying endings leave water as a temporary or conditional refuge, not a uniform final defeat of either figure.

Reward and prohibition

Perkūnas's reward usually extends the hunter's own skill. It may be an inexhaustible supply of powder or shot, a small but infallible gun, unfailing accuracy, money, or a weapon exchanged for the hunter's ordinary rifle. The marvellous object can bring game without normal labour and thus raises an immediate problem of restraint.

The giver imposes a precise rule. The hunter must use only one grain of powder, avoid looking into or measuring the supply, aim without touching the trigger, refrain from shooting people, keep the gift secret, or observe a sacred day. The conditions vary, but every form distinguishes authorised use from curiosity, pride, sacrilege, or violence.

Violation ends the privilege. The weapon disappears, becomes ordinary, is reclaimed by the old man, injures its owner, or reveals that the apparent abundance depended on obedience. In Laurinkienė's analysis, the broken prohibition places the hunter under the same divine demand for lawful conduct that the legends assign to Perkūnas.

Recurrent forms of the thunderer–devil conflict

Narrative or ritual form	Lithuanian evidence	Latvian evidence	Distinctive structure
Storm hunt	A hunter sees an animal or man evade lightning, kills it with silver, and receives a conditional reward.	Short legends preserve pursuit, shape-changing, and concealment, but the rewarded hunter is less central in the published Latvian material.	Storm → repeated hiding → human shot → revelation → gift → broken prohibition.
Refuge dialogue	The fugitive proposes people, animals, buildings, trees, stones, and finally water or earth as shelters.	Beliefs and legends stress water, swamps, trees, and stones as refuges without always preserving the full dialogue.	Question and answer organise the landscape from exposed human space to a lower-world limit.
Theft of the thunder instrument	Mostly fragmentary theft reports explain hostility but often omit recovery and restored thunder.	A developed Ilūkste version preserves stolen instruments, seven silent years, disguise, performance, and recovery.	Loss → entry into enemy household → performance → restoration of thunder.
Verbal charm	Pursuit imagery occurs in beliefs and protective formulas but is not represented by a Lithuanian charm corpus analysed on the scale of Brīvzemnieks's Latvian collection.	Thunder, multiple thunders, or iron thunderbolts drive a devil, disease, witch, or envious force into stone, sea, or wasteland.	Naming and expulsion turn mythic pursuit into a performed cure or defence.
First-thunder custom	The first spring storm moves and purifies the earth; rolling, washing, sowing, grazing, and health practices follow it.	Latvian pursuit beliefs connect thunder with the expulsion of devils from water, stone, and tree refuges, although the cited charm study does not present an equivalent full first-thunder custom cycle.	Seasonal thunder reopens inhabited and cultivated space.

Lithuanian tradition

Distribution and narrative form

Lithuanian records supply the largest connected body of legends in which Perkūnas personally pursues Velnias. The material was collected across several regions and preserves dialectal names, local landscapes, and different levels of Christian vocabulary. Its numerical strength does not make every motif equally old or reliable, because a recurrent developed type and a solitary questionnaire answer have different documentary histories.

Many Lithuanian texts stand between belief and legend. A statement that thunder strikes because a devil is hiding nearby may be followed by only one practical warning, while a longer version identifies the witness, gives dialogue, describes several failed bolts, and concludes with a reward. The short and long forms circulated in the same belief environment and can preserve different portions of one recognised narrative situation.

The thunderer's name is often retained even when the surrounding theology is Christian. A teller may place Perkūnas beside God, make him execute God's command, or alternate his name with Elijah in related variants. The coexistence of names demonstrates adaptation within oral tradition, not a simple chronological sequence in which one figure disappeared before another appeared.

Perkūnas, Dievas, and moral order

Lithuanian sources assign Perkūnas an important but variable place in relation to Dievas. Some call him Dievas's son, servant, or messenger; others call him Old Father or use a divine diminutive that can express either rank or affection. The terminology leaves open whether a particular narrator imagined hierarchy, kinship, functional cooperation, or near-identification.

In the pursuit legends, the practical division is clearer than the genealogy. The upper power detects, judges, and attacks; the lower being steals, mocks, changes shape, and seeks concealment; the human helper acts at ground level. God can authorise the action or compensate its visible costs, while Perkūnas performs the noisy and dangerous enforcement.

The opponent is frequently associated with morally suspect conduct, but the legends are not an exhaustive doctrine of good and evil. Velnias can be comic, helpful, wealthy, cheated, or linked with cattle and the dead in other genres. The storm narrative activates his role as fugitive and transgressor while leaving the wider ambivalence of the folkloric figure intact.

Place legends and local memory

The conflict attaches itself to named boulders, fields, lakes, hollows, and buildings. A footprint or split on a stone may be attributed to a devil leaping away when thunder caught him, and a line of boulders may mark stones dropped from a torn sack during pursuit. Such legends explain visible irregularities through a brief episode that localises the cosmic adversaries.

The famous Puntukas boulder belongs to a widespread story in which a devil carries a stone to destroy Anykščiai church but drops it when a cock crows. This plot does not require Perkūnas, although variants that add a thunder chase bring the stone-carrier into the conflict complex. The distinction illustrates how local legends can exchange motifs without becoming versions of one original narrative.

Latvian tradition

Legends and beliefs

Latvian legends preserve Pērkons as a pursuer of devils who hide in trees, stones, waters, swamps, and human surroundings. The devil may change into a black animal, a bird, a gentleman, or a small being and can be betrayed by movement or speech during a storm. The recurrent opposition between airborne thunder and low, wet, enclosed refuges matches the Lithuanian landscape pattern.

Latvian versions do not merely copy Lithuanian narrative structure. Their published evidence gives greater prominence to compact pursuit statements, to stones and water, and to the use of the plot in verbal charms. The Ilūkste thunder-instrument tale also preserves a developed recovery sequence absent from the fragmentary Lithuanian theft reports.

The Latvian folkloric devil carries several overlapping identities. He can assist in creating the world, guard treasure under a stone or in a lake, rule or inhabit hell, resemble the German-speaking landed class, or flee from Christian prayer and the sign of the cross. Black and red colouring, horns, tail, mismatched animal legs, and glowing eyes occur beside more ordinary human disguise.

Pursuit in verbal charms

Lielbārdis selected thirty-seven texts from Brīvzemnieks's 1881 collection in which the devil, Thunder, or a recognisable pursuit motif appears. The selection includes formulas against fever, abscess, stabbing pain, swelling, nightmares, fright, envy, and witchcraft. It excludes charms in which a biblical figure removes evil without the distinctive thunder-and-pursuit structure.

A charm can name the pursuer as Thunder, a large man, several thunders, or a force armed with iron. The adversary may be the devil himself, a “black man”, a witch, an envious person, or the illness treated as an animate intruder. This substitution allows the mythic chase to function as a model for expelling whatever harms the patient.

Numbers intensify the action. Three, nine, or thrice-nine thunders and thunderbolts surround, strike, or drive the harmful being away. Iron helmets, shirts, boots, clubs, bullets, and bolts give the spoken attack a hard material vocabulary comparable with the thunderer's weapons in legend.

The destination of expulsion is normally outside inhabited and cultivated space. The charm sends disease or devil beneath a stone, to an unworked field, into a swamp, beyond roots, or to the sea. The sea functions as an anti-place associated with distance, death, and the cessation of social contact.

Christian elements are integral to many surviving performances. A formula may end “in the name” of the Trinity, employ the sign of the cross, or combine thunderbolts with God, Christ, Mary, and saints. The spoken cure does not preserve a sealed pagan text beneath those endings; it joins inherited pursuit imagery with the religious authority available to the performer.

Genre and transmission

Charms compress narrative because their efficacy depends on a performable verbal action. A full account of why Pērkons hates the devil is unnecessary when the formula needs only the pursuer, weapon, target, and destination. Legends and beliefs supply the omitted knowledge by explaining the devil's shapes, refuges, and fear of thunder.

The 1881 printed collection influenced the later archival corpus, and concentration in Pločkalns's submissions may reflect the repertoire of a particular network of healers. Lielbārdis therefore compares formula, collector, region, and publication history instead of treating every archived copy as an independent survival. This source-critical method parallels the scrutiny applied to Lithuanian questionnaire texts.

Landscape and material imagery

Trees and woodland

Trees occupy both sides of the conflict. The oak is a principal tree of Perkūnas in historical testimony, place names, ritual practice, and folklore, while rowan, hazel, spruce, willow, and other species acquire local protective or dangerous meanings. A thunder-struck tree can be revered as a place touched by heavenly fire, feared as the site of a violent pursuit, or broken into splinters used for protection and healing.

The hiding motif depends more on structure than botanical classification. A hollow, split, root-space, stump, or rotten interior offers the lower being an enclosed cavity even when the living tree belongs symbolically to the thunderer. Narratives can therefore warn against standing beneath a hollow oak without weakening the oak's wider association with Perkūnas.

Species-specific rules vary by district and record. One belief treats spruce as dangerous because the devil hides in it, another assigns protection to spruce or oak, and another recommends hazel, rowan, or a small tree that lightning supposedly avoids. The contradictions show the coexistence of several organising principles: sacred association, observed strike patterns, local vegetation, the presence of hollows, and remembered legend.

The forest is also the hunter's testing ground. It removes the human witness from church, village, and cultivated field, surrounds him with potential refuges, and permits an encounter with an animal whose identity is uncertain. The storm then turns ordinary shelter-seeking into participation in a supernatural hunt.

Stones and thunderstones

Stone links projectile, refuge, boundary marker, and archaeological-looking object. Perkūnas can throw stones or stone axes, while Velnias hides beneath a boulder or carries stones through the landscape. A split rock, footprint, groove, or displaced boulder supplies a durable surface on which a local legend can be anchored.

Objects called thunderstones were identified with projectiles fallen from the sky. The category could include prehistoric stone axes, unusual pebbles, fossils, or other finds whose shape suggested a bolt, wedge, or weapon. Such objects were kept in houses, placed near livestock, applied to the body, or used with water because contact with the thunderer's weapon was believed to convey protection and vitality.

The devil's relation to stone is equally strong but differently valued. He guards treasure beneath it, leaves bodily marks upon it, uses it in unfinished construction, or dives under it when thunder approaches. The same boulder can consequently be called Perkūnas's stone because it was struck, the devil's stone because he occupied it, or both through different local narratives.

Water, bog, and sea

Water is refuge, boundary, and lower-world medium. Lithuanian legends place the fugitive in rivers, lakes, wells, bogs, pools, and beneath floating wood, while Latvian legends and charms repeatedly send him or the disease identified with him to swamp or sea. The element's depth and concealment distinguish it from the exposed land opened by the first spring thunder.

The refuge is not always safe for the human observer. Bathing before the first thunder, standing near water during a storm, or sheltering beside a wet hollow could bring a person close to the fugitive. Seasonal and immediate storm taboos thus apply the same narrative map at different scales.

In Latvian charms the sea is often the terminal destination. A disease driven there loses access to the patient's body and to the productive social world of house, field, road, and kin. The formula may place it under a stone or beyond a root at the shore, combining lower, distant, and enclosed space.

Fire and the lightning-struck object

Lightning fire was distinguished from an ordinary household flame. Beliefs about whether it could be extinguished with water, milk, earth, or special means vary, but they consistently treat the blaze as the material continuation of a heavenly strike. The fire may consume the fugitive's shelter, purify a place, or endanger anyone who approaches it incorrectly.

Splinters and charcoal from struck wood could be retained for apotropaic and medicinal use. A fragment placed in the house or used in treatment carried the force of an event in which Perkūnas had acted directly. The practice transforms the residue of destructive weather into a controlled protective object.

First thunder of spring

Opening the warm season

The first audible thunder marked the arrival of “real spring” in Lithuanian rural tradition. It opened a new period of farming and animal husbandry, and some communities delayed sowing, planting, or the first release of livestock until it had occurred. The ground was said to have been moved, shaken, awakened, or made ready by God or Perkūnas.

Before the first thunder, winter's hold was not merely climatic. Harmful beings were thought to remain on the ground and in water, so people in some districts avoided sitting or lying on bare earth, walking barefoot, kindling an outdoor fire, or bathing in a river or lake. A stone could be included in the prohibition because it was another refuge of the devil.

The first storm expelled those beings from the surfaces used by people and livestock. Laurinkienė interprets the event as a yearly consecration of earthly space, in which the thunderer removes dangerous lower-world forces and restores vitality. The interpretation joins the pursuit legends with customs that begin only after the storm.

The timing of thunder also served as a forecast. Direction, month, day, weather, and the condition of rivers or vegetation could predict harvest, rainfall, cold, livestock health, or the character of the coming season. Because local rules differ, the first thunder functioned as an omen system whose meanings were learned within particular communities.

Contact with the earth

After the storm, direct contact with the ground became beneficial. People rolled, lay down, or turned somersaults on a meadow or field to gain health, luck, courage, protection from lightning, or relief from back and shoulder pain. Some instructions require three turns or a naked body, intensifying physical contact with the newly awakened earth.

The action also entered agricultural symbolism. Women rolled so that flax would grow as tall as a human body or so that root crops would prosper. The accompanying explanations connect the person's height and bodily contact with the desired height or fertility of the crop.

Other health customs brought stone or iron into contact with the head. A person rubbed the head with a stone picked up at the first thunder or tapped it with iron to prevent headache and weakness. Laurinkienė relates the use of stone and iron to the hard projectiles and weapons attributed to Perkūnas.

Livestock entered the renewed landscape through the first spring pasturing. Blessed herbs could be tied near a cow's horns, and herders used protective plants or objects when the animals first left the byre. The customs combine fertility, veterinary protection, and defence against the same harmful beings expelled by thunder.

Snakes and the lower world

Snakes and grass snakes belong to the lower, winter-bound side of several spring beliefs. Thunder was said to awaken, release, frighten, or drive them from their hidden places. Their emergence marks the same seasonal opening as the departure of devils from earth and water.

Vėlius compared the folkloric devil with snake and grass-snake imagery and proposed that parts of the devil figure developed from an older serpentine complex. The proposal helps explain some animal transformations and lower-world associations, but most Lithuanian pursuit legends name a devil or animal disguise instead of a single cosmic serpent. The recorded evidence consequently supports comparison without replacing the vernacular characters by a reconstructed dragon in every version.

Conduct during thunderstorms

Denying the fugitive shelter

Storm precautions often assume that the immediate danger comes from the fugitive's proximity. A person was advised not to stand beneath a hollow tree, beside a large stone, near water, at a field boundary, by an open furrow, or at another place associated with concealment. Laurinkienė connects these avoided places with the refuges enumerated in pursuit legends and beliefs.

Garments had to be kept closed and orderly in some traditions. Rolled trouser legs, an uplifted skirt, loose folds, and open clothing could hide a mouse-, cat-, or fish-shaped devil. Accounts in which a small creature jumps out and is immediately struck make the connection between clothing rule and pursuit explicit.

Black animals could be driven away from a house or person during thunder. The colour and species correspond to common disguises of the devil, especially black cats, dogs, goats, and birds. The recorded rules apply during thunder and identify dark animals as possible temporary disguises of the pursued being.

Householders closed doors, windows, chimney openings, and other passages in some local traditions. Enclosure prevented the fugitive from entering and reduced draughts or openings through which lightning and storm were imagined to move. Other customs opened or altered parts of a building for practical reasons, so no single architectural rule applies to the entire Lithuanian area.

Blessed vegetation, smoke, and sound

Christian ritual objects were widely used against storms. Householders burned or displayed branches and herbs blessed on Palm Sunday, at Corpus Christi, or at the Assumption, and the smoke was directed through rooms or towards the approaching cloud. Candles, prayer, holy water, the sign of the cross, and sacred images could accompany the plants.

The vegetation belonged to both church calendar and older plant lore. Rowan, juniper, hazel, spruce, and other locally valued species appeared in bunches, switches, wreaths, or smoke, while their blessing supplied explicit Christian authority. The resulting practice cannot be divided into a purely pagan plant and a purely Christian rite without losing the form in which it was recorded.

Bell-ringing, metal sound, and spoken prayer could repel storm or harmful beings. Sound parallels the thunderer's own acoustic power and also belongs to Christian liturgical protection. Frog notes wider Baltic associations between the devil's fear of thunder, mills, and powerful repetitive sound, while the exact relationship varies among genres and regions.

Contradictory safety rules

The recorded rules are not a coherent early safety manual. One informant recommends a tree that another avoids, one ritual closes the house while another uses smoke or sound through an opening, and one belief values lightning-struck material while another fears all contact with the struck site. Local ecology, church practice, family transmission, practical observation, and narrative explanation all contributed to the variation.

Modern physical safety cannot be inferred from the folklore. The historical value of the rules lies in their demonstration that a thunderstorm was interpreted as an active pursuit unfolding through the household and landscape. The same event joined meteorology, religious action, fear, inherited narrative, and decisions about animals, clothing, fire, plants, and shelter.

Christianisation and religious change

Christian figures enter the conflict by substitution, coexistence, and narrative fusion. The prophet Elijah is the most important successor in Lithuanian material, especially where thunder comes from a fiery chariot, wheels, horses, a whip, or weapons used against devils. Enoch may accompany Elijah, and God can direct both figures or lend them tools.

Perkūnas does not vanish wherever Elijah appears. Variant traditions can assign the same action to either figure, identify them, or place them in the same cosmology with different ranks. Their shared chariots, celestial noise, weapons, and pursuit of devils made functional transfer especially easy.

Saint George enters through spring, livestock, fertility, and the opening of the earth. His feast was associated with first pasturing, field rites, protective vegetation, and the renewal of growth, all of which overlap with the effects of the first thunder. The link is strongest in seasonal function and custom, not in a large body of legends where George directly replaces Perkūnas as the shooter of devils.

The Christian Devil also reshaped the opponent. Fallen-angel stories, hell, sin, prayer, the cross, and divine forgiveness supply motives and institutions absent from a narrowly reconstructed pre-Christian duel. At the same time, the Christian figure inherited waters, stones, animals, treasure, dead-associated places, and evasive transformations from the vernacular chthonic tradition.

Religious change is therefore visible inside the grammar of individual texts. A legend may name Perkūnas but give God the final judgement, while a charm may unleash pagan-named Thunder and close in the name of the Trinity. The recorded forms are historical combinations produced by performance and belief, not damaged copies from which every later element can be mechanically removed.

Interpretation

Weather aetiology

At its most immediate level, the conflict explains observable features of a thunderstorm. Repeated peals are repeated shots, pauses allow the fugitive to move or mock, lightning selects a hiding place, rain follows the action, and split trees or stones retain its traces. The narrative joins sound, flash, impact, movement, and aftermath in a sequence with intentional agents.

The pursuit also explains apparent misdirected strikes. A tree, animal, house, or person is hit because the invisible opponent has entered or approached it. The refuge dialogue adds compensation or forgiveness so that the heavenly attack remains just despite visible loss.

Weather explanation does not exhaust the texts. The same pursuit determines when the ground is safe, why a hunter receives a gift, where disease is expelled, and how moral and seasonal order are renewed. Its explanatory power comes from linking several domains through a stable opposition between exposed sky and concealed lower space.

Vertical and seasonal opposition

Perkūnas represents height, movement, fire, sound, weaponry, and the warm-season opening of the earth. Velnias represents depth, enclosure, water, stone, root, animal disguise, and places associated with winter or the dead. Their conflict is spatially asymmetric because the upper figure attacks downward while the lower figure survives through concealment and transformation.

The first spring thunder converts that opposition into a yearly transition. Lower beings concentrated during winter are expelled, the earth becomes available for work and bodily contact, and livestock return to pasture. The storm's rain and shock contribute to fertility, while its violence purifies by forcing concealed danger away from inhabited surfaces.

The victory is recurrent and incomplete. The devil can reach water, return in another shape, or require pursuit in the next storm and season. Repetition explains both the continuing existence of the opponent and the recurring need for thunder.

Fertility and agriculture

Thunder and rain belong to the growth cycle of an agricultural society. The first thunder authorises sowing and pasturing, and customs performed after it seek strong bodies, tall flax, productive root crops, healthy cattle, and a favourable season. The pursuit removes obstacles to cultivation while the storm itself supplies moisture and vitality.

Some comparative reconstructions make stolen cattle, water, or fertility the original object of the opponent's offence. The Lithuanian archival record, however, more often names tools, bullets, stones, or unspecified wrongdoing than a stable theft of cattle. Agricultural interpretation is strongest in the seasonal customs and consequences of thunder, not in the claim that every pursuit legend once contained the same stolen herd.

Moral and social order

The conflict opposes authorised force to theft, mockery, concealment, and misuse. Perkūnas punishes the fugitive, but the human helper must also obey the conditions attached to divine power. The hunter who boasts or turns the gift against people repeats the pattern of transgression at a human scale and loses the reward.

Property and restitution appear throughout the complex. Theft starts some feuds, the hiding-place dialogue promises replacement of animals or houses, and the gift supplies game or wealth under a use restriction. The stories address possession through relations among heavenly authority, chthonic appropriation, and limited human entitlement.

The thunderer is not made harmless by his judicial role. His attack can burn, split, kill, or terrify, and correct ritual conduct seeks protection from the pursuit's physical effects. Justice and danger remain joined because divine enforcement takes place through an uncontrollable storm.

Genre and performance

Each genre selects a different minimum from the shared complex. A belief needs a cause for a strike, a legend needs an encounter and outcome, a charm needs an empowered expulsion, a place legend needs a visible mark, and a wonder tale needs repeated tests and rewards. Differences between texts can therefore result from genre economy as well as historical loss.

Performance also alters agency. In a legend the narrator reports Pērkons's old pursuit, while in a charm the healer summons or restages thunder so that the disease is driven away in the present. The patient's body takes the place of threatened landscape, and the sea or stone receives the expelled adversary.

Collector intervention forms part of the textual history. Questionnaires can produce direct answers that lack narrative context, while printed charms can be recopied into later archives. Source criticism must therefore compare variants, metadata, genre, collector, and prior publication before a motif is used in reconstruction.

Balto-Slavic and Indo-European comparison

Lithuanian pursuit legends have close Polish and Russian analogues in which a thunderous old man or Elijah needs a hunter's special shot and rewards him with a marvellous weapon. Lajoye reconstructs a sequence of supernatural prey, storm, failed divine attack, successful human shot, divine recognition, weapon gift, impious use, and withdrawal. He proposes that the shared structure preserves a fragment of an old Balto-Slavic epic or mythic narrative.

Lajoye compares the helper and weapon gift with Indo-European heroic material, including Arjuna's acquisition of divine weapons in the Mahābhārata. The comparison identifies a rare pattern in which a god rewards a human combatant with a supernatural arm. It remains a comparative proposal because the Baltic legends were recorded in modern oral settings and do not preserve an epic poem or an independently datable prehistoric text.

A broader reconstruction by Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov placed a thunder god above a world tree and a serpentine opponent below it. In their model the opponent steals cattle or people, hides them behind rock, takes successive forms, is struck in tree and stone refuges, and releases rain or water after defeat. Lithuanian and Belarusian folklore supplied major evidence for that reconstruction.

The model illuminates the vertical landscape and serial hiding motif, but it is more complete and uniform than the Lithuanian records themselves. The archival legends do not consistently contain a world tree, stolen cattle, a serpent, released waters, and a final victory in one text. Modern analysis therefore distinguishes a comparative reconstruction from the actual variant clusters on which it is based.

Circum-Baltic exchange

ATU 1148B supplies the clearest evidence for a regional Circum-Baltic narrative network. The tale occurs in distinct conventional forms among Sámi, Finnic, Baltic, and North Germanic populations and crossed linguistic family boundaries. Frog argues that its persistence reflects historical contact and adaptation within the Baltic Sea region.

Regional transmission did not create identical versions. Sámi forms can emphasise the thunderer's imprisonment and relation to rain, Finnic forms service in the thief's household, Germanic forms a stolen hammer or instrument, Latvian forms recovery through music, and Lithuanian fragments the theft as a cause of pursuit. The variation records each tradition's adaptation of a shared narrative resource to its existing gods, genres, and social uses.

The Circum-Baltic and Indo-European comparisons answer different questions. A regional distribution can demonstrate contact across Baltic Sea cultures, while a structural parallel may suggest deeper inheritance or recurrent mythic organisation. Neither method licenses the assembly of every thunder-god narrative into one universal original.

Reflections in wonder tales

Lithuanian wonder tales about dragon combat preserve transformed structures comparable with the thunderer–opponent conflict. In tales of ATU 300, ATU 300A, and related types, a hero fights a many-headed dragon near water, a bridge, hill, or oak and frees a princess or captive resource. Several variants introduce thunder, lightning, or a violent storm at the moment the dragon appears or dies.

The tale hero may be a hunter, forester, soldier, shepherd, fool, prince, or a man named George or John. An old man or God gives him a sword, horse, armour, switch, or other means of victory, recalling the divine donor in the hunter legends. The roles of thunderer, human helper, and donor are redistributed among tale characters instead of preserved under their legend names.

One analysed tale places a dragon in an oak and makes water pour from the tree after its heads are cut off. The sequence of storm, oak, chthonic monster, human victory, freed maiden, and released water resembles the broad comparative thunder myth. Laurinkienė presents the resemblance as a possible mythic layer within the wonder tale, not as proof that every dragon tale derives directly from one Baltic cult narrative.

Wonder-tale transformation demonstrates the mobility of the complex. A belief about lightning can become a hunter legend, a divine donor can become a fairy-tale old man, and the elusive devil can become a many-headed dragon whose defeat closes a marriage plot. Genre change preserves relations among storm, lower-world opponent, special weapon, and human assistance while replacing the immediate religious explanation.

Scholarship and significance

The conflict has shaped several major approaches to Baltic mythology. Balys used comparative folktale geography, Vėlius analysed the semantic world of the chthonic opponent, and Laurinkienė integrated narrative with ritual, season, place, and divine function. Later work has focused on tale-type transmission, genre ecology, archival reliability, and the relation between Baltic and Slavic hunter legends.

The topic is valuable because unusually rich late folklore preserves relations among named deities, natural phenomena, household conduct, and local topography. It also exposes the limits of reconstruction: recurrent motifs can be robust while the beginning of a plot, identity of a stolen object, or genealogy of a god remains unstable. The strongest account separates recorded variants, genre conventions, collection history, and comparative hypotheses before drawing historical conclusions.

Laurinkienė's Lithuanian monograph was published in English in 2023 as The God Perkūnas of the Ancient Lithuanians in Language, Folklore, and Historical Sources. Asta Skujytė-Razmienė's review emphasises both the breadth of the evidence and the continuing need to evaluate the archival circumstances of individual records. The English edition makes the conflict, first-thunder customs, and Christian transformations accessible within the book's nineteen-chapter account of Perkūnas.

Archival preservation and access

The Lithuanian Folklore Archives preserve the manuscript collections cited by sigla such as LTR and LMD in published scholarship. These records retain collector, informant, locality, date, and questionnaire information when it was supplied, allowing later researchers to distinguish independent variants from weakly documented answers. The archival item remains the primary record even when a legend is known chiefly through a scholarly paraphrase.

The Archives of Latvian Folklore preserve manuscript and later copies of the Brīvzemnieks charm tradition. Digital catalogues permit comparison of texts, collectors, regions, and classifications, although digitisation does not remove the historical dependence of some copies on print. Reliable use therefore combines access to the text with attention to its route into the archive.

See also

• Baltic mythology
• Lithuanian mythology
• Latvian mythology
• Perkūnas
• Velnias
• Veles (god)
• Perun
• Indo-European serpent-slaying myth
• Thunderstone (folklore)
• Weather lore

Sources

• Balys, Jonas (1939). "Griaustinis ir velnias Baltoskandijos kraštų tautosakoje: lyginamoji pasakojamosios tautosakos studija" [Thunder and the Devil in the Folklore of the Balto-Scandinavian Countries: A Comparative Study of Narrative Folklore]. Tautosakos darbai (in Lithuanian). 6: 3–236.
• Beresnevičius, Gintaras (1999). "Lietuvių dievų tarpusavio santykiai" [Mutual Relations of Lithuanian Gods]. Kultūros istorijos tyrinėjimai (in Lithuanian). Vol. 5. Vilnius: Gervelė. pp. 176–228.
• Frog (2011). "Circum-Baltic Mythology? The Strange Case of the Theft of the Thunder-Instrument (ATU 1148B)". Archaeologia Baltica. 15: 78–98. doi:10.15181/ab.v15i1.25.
• Lajoye, Patrice (2018). "The Storm God and the Hunter: A Fragment of an Old Balto-Slavic Epos?". Studia Mythologica Slavica. 21: 27–37. doi:10.3986/sms.v21i0.7064.
• Laurinkienė, Nijolė (1996). Senovės lietuvių dievas Perkūnas: kalboje, tautosakoje, istoriniuose šaltiniuose [The God Perkūnas of the Ancient Lithuanians in Language, Folklore, and Historical Sources] (in Latvian). Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas. ISBN 9986-513-14-6.
• Laurinkienė, Nijolė (2023). The God Perkūnas of the Ancient Lithuanians in Language, Folklore, and Historical Sources. Folklore Fellows' Communications. Vol. 327. Helsinki: The Kalevala Society. ISBN 978-952-9534-08-1.
• Lielbārdis, Aigars (2019). "The Devil in Latvian Charms and Related Genres". Acta Ethnographica Hungarica. 64 (2): 395–412. doi:10.1556/022.2019.64.2.10.
• Skujytė-Razmienė, Asta (2024). "The God Perkūnas (Re)Introduced". Tautosakos darbai. 67: 152–161. doi:10.51554/TD.24.67.09.
• Vėlius, Norbertas (1987). Chtoniškasis lietuvių mitologijos pasaulis: folklorinio velnio analizė [The Chthonic World of Lithuanian Mythology: An Analysis of the Folkloric Devil] (in Lithuanian). Vilnius: Vaga.

External links

• Folklore Fellows' presentation of Laurinkienė's English-language monograph
• Frog's open-access study of ATU 1148B
• Lielbārdis's open-access study of Latvian charms