Huchen and taimen appetites have also found their way into folklore. Ainu stories from Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido speak of monstrous taimen (known as chirai in Ainu) large and voracious enough to eat deer, bear, and humans whole. In Mongolia, legend tells of an especially harsh winter when starving herdsmen discovered a giant taimen trapped in river ice. Relieved to find food, the herdsmen chopped off pieces of its flesh. They survived the winter, but when the river ice melted in spring, the giant taimen came onto the land, tracked them down, and ate them all.

More taimen lore and biogeography here.

Season's Greetings in Reykjavik:

A new statue of the Icelandic Yuletide cat was revealed last weekend in Lækjartorg in the city centre. It's a five metre tall and fairly creepy statue of this strange folkloric being, known for eating children who didn't get new clothes for Christmas.

Pagan wild men of Europe: they remind me a bit of Kachina costumes in this neck of the woods. More here, though you'll have to navigate within the site on your own: look for Wilder Mann.

Via Chas, of course.

Music for monsoon season, the latest entry in Forging the Sampo's Finnish Folk Music Fridays, which I highly recommend!

And if we here in New Mexico were Uralic pagans, we'd be all over this rain prayer to Ukko.

The last mummies of Papua

"After my death, I want to be mummified," Gematsu told his children. "I have to protect you."

Gematsu is the chief of Koke, a village at 1,500 meters in the mountains of the Morobe region in Papua New Guinea. It is inhabited by members of the Angas, one of the country's 800 tribes. Mummification of the dead was a traditional custom of the Angas and was abandoned about 50 years ago upon the arrival of the first missionaries. The Angas believed that the mummies watched over them, especially those of the tribe's great warriors, which were placed on an outcrop above the village. Photographer Ulla Lohmann has visited Koke regularly since 2002, and she was with chief Gematsu for the moment which may revive the old custom. In 2005, one of the chief's granddaughters died suddenly. To Gematsu, the death of this child was a message from the ancestors. He must convince his people to resume the ritual and to restore the old mummies that were abandoned to decay. He has begun to teach his children how to go about mummification using a pig. The pig is placed on a kind of wooden scaffold, with a fire underneath constantly fed for two or three months to draw out the water and fats. Ms. Lohmann convinced Ronald G. Beckett, a professor of biomedical science from Quinnipiac University in Hamden Connecticut, to come assist the Angas in restoring dignity to their ancestors.

....The chief has resumed a conversation with [the mummy of] his father, too long interrupted. He hopes that his children will care for him with the same devotion.

Translation mine. Follow the link: the photo essay here is amazing! I've always rather fancied the idea of being mummified and put in a cliff. The western Grand Canyon would be nice, and would spare my descendants the troubles of a humid climate.

The Legend of Belovodye, the Russian Orthodox Shangri-La, often alleged to be located in the Altai Mountains. It's not hard to see why. Of course, this sort of thing is no less problematic in Russian Orthodoxy than anywhere else.

Tipped off by SummitPost, which provides the following, though without a source, alas:

The roots of this myth go back to the violent schism of Russian Orthodox Church of XVII century. The Old Believers were persecuted and their prisoner labor has been widely used in Czarist Russia since late XVII century. An imperial decree of 1737 ordered their use at the Factories and Mines of the Treasury in Siberia. In 1762 another decree offered Old Order refugees in Poland assistance to resettle in Altay. Although escapes from the mines were severely punished, by early XIX century the secret villages of Old Believers abounded in the taiga of Altay.

About the same time, Arkady Belovodsky, an impostor "envoy" from the Hidden Kingdom of Bolovod'ye, started preaching among the European Old Believers about his mystical, powerful country in the East, somewhere beyond China. The White Waters Land of Arkady's sermons retained pre-schism Antioch [sic] Orthodoxy, with seven hundred churches on a huge island. It had a distinctly Shambhala-like quality in that only the truly enlightened people could reach the White Waters.

Also about the same time, a splinter Old Order group formed the Community of Truly Orthodox Travelers, better known simply as the Runners. They moved from a safe house to a safe house using hand-written route charts.

By 1830s, these three developments crystallized together into the Old Believer quest for Altay Belovod'ye. Believers were trickling from all over Russia, guided by their route-scripts. Some sought the Hidden Land up in the highlands, where all the peaks where called, indeed, Whites. Other continued up Bukhtarma Valley and crossed the border with China. The Old Believers' searches for White Water Land did not abate until 1910s. Today's folk wisdom in Russia pretty much equates White Water Land with the White Peaks of Altay.

Old Believers, incidently, are alive and well. Mrs. Peculiar relates a story of one of her goofy, earnest Orthodox convert friends who noticed a picturesque Orthodox church somewhere in the upper Midwest and knocked on the door. He was answered by a harried, bearded fellow, who, after his visitor had tried to engage him in chat about contemporary American Orthodoxy, burst out, "Why must you yet be persecuting us?" And there are a fair number of them in Alaska. When I spent a stormy January week at a (non-Old Believer) monastary in the Kodiak Archipelago, we saw a fishing boat venturing toward the open sea in atrocious weather one morning. "Old Believers," the monks informed me, "They're always the ones heading to sea when no one else would set foot on a boat."

Endless entertainment: the Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative (thanks Languagehat!). Excellent stuff, particularly if you enjoy folk tales containing lines such as:

Upon this the fox asked the farmer, "Will you give me one of your testicles to eat if I save you from the bear?"

There's lots of music, too! What is it with Turks, foxes and testicles, anyway?

Here, via Languagehat, is a wonderful series of four posts (1, 2, 3, 4) regarding the Ob-Ugrian languages, that is Mansi and Khanty. Some of the purely linguistic talk is dense even for me, who have studied a Finno-Ugrian language, but there remains much to be enjoyed: bear taboos, the Ob-Ugrian's lack of polite terms for body parts, river-related vocabulary ("Further, n?luw, meaning ‘in the direction of (down to) the river/downriver’ can also mean ‘towards the fire’, which is in the centre of the hut."), a chilling poem about the forced conversion of the Mansi, and a splendid folk story about a mouse, which concludes thus:

the mouse is offered food by children in the village, but refuses the perch because the bones will stick in his throat. At the third village he is offered roe broth, the favourite dish of his father and grandfather. The mouse eats and drinks so much his stomach bursts. The children sew it back up with a needle and some roots. The mouse gets in the boat and rows off. He meets a reindeer, and they play hide and seek in the forest. The reindeer accidentally swallows the mouse. The reindeer suggests that the mouse come out through his eyes, but his eyes are full of sleep. The mouse cannot come out through the reindeer’s mouth, because it is too sputum-y. And the reindeer’s ears are full of wax. So the mouse goes into the stomach, gets out his little knife, and cuts a hole in the reindeer’s belly. The reindeer dies, and the mouse strips the meat and fur, runs home and summons his wife and their daughters and sons. The mouse family collect the reindeer flesh and meat, and take it home, where they ate and lived well for a long time. And they all lived happily ever after.

Happily ever after is rendered in Ugrian idiom as They are still alive, if they did not die. The end.

Some previous Finno-Ugrian posts: Finnish Kanteletar, Khanty Bear Feast Song.

Struwwelpeter: a collection of hideous German children’s rhymes, clearly intended to edify, appall and delight the younglings simultaneously. Edward Gorey fans will be delighted. Bugs Bunny fans may be pleased as well.

Oh yes, almost forgot, Magic Flute review. To put it succinctly, it was bloody good, not afraid to have fun. Natalie Dessay was excellent as Pamina, particularly in the Act II Finale. The real star, however, was the snake at the very beginning, jolly fine snake, Tamino proclaiming helplessness from well inside its jaws. Es lebe die Schlange!