Eglė the Queen of Serpents
), but in a hurry to get rid of the persistent snake-like reptile, Eglė agrees to marry, while not fully understanding the potential consequences and the gravity of her situation.
A domesticated goose, a sheep and then a cow are given instead of the bride to the legion of the grass snakes, but once they start a journey back home, the cuckoo, who is sitting in the birch tree, warns them about the deceit.
Eglė bears four children (three sons (Ąžuolas (Oak), Uosis (Ash) and Beržas (Birch)) and one youngest daughter Drebulė (Aspen)).
In order to be allowed to visit home, Eglė is required to fulfill three impossible tasks: to spin a never-ending tuft of silk, wear down a pair of iron shoes and to bake a pie with no utensils.
After meeting the long lost family member, Eglė's relatives do not wish to let her return to the sea and decide to kill Žilvinas.
When Eglė hears her dead husband's voice and discovers how her beloved has died, as a punishment for betrayal she whispers an enchantment, which turns her fragile fearful daughter into a quaking aspen.
[17] According to Stith Thompson's reworked folktale classification, tale type AaTh 425M involves a magical formula or incantation to summon the serpent husband.
[18] In this vein, in his study, Swedish scholar Jan-Öjvind Swahn noted that, in Lithuanian and Latvian variants, the formula is "unitarily formed", which is later learned by the snake husband's brothers-in-law via the youngest child.
In his analysis of Lithuanian folktales (published in 1936), he previously classified the tale as 425D*, Žalčio žmona ("The Girl as Wife to a Snake"), with 27 variants reported until then.
[23] Folklorist Norbertas Vėlius has also developed an academic interest in the narrative and analysed its elements ("the dual nature of Egle, the attributes of the snake, the types of plants") in relation to the folklore of other countries.
[25] In this regard, in another version of the tale, the king of snakes is named Žaltys, and husband and human wife live in his palace at the bottom of the sea.
[30] Scholar Jack Zipes provided another description of the tale type, wherein, besides the serpent, a seal, a dragon or sea monster may steal the clothes of the bathing maiden.
[33] Other variations lie in the secret code the wife learns from her snake husband, and in the fate of the heroine and their children (sometimes all girls; sometimes all boys): they are either transformed into trees or into birds and disappear forever.
[47] Another view, espoused by scholar Eugenijus Žmuida, is that the tale harks back to a myth about a maiden offered as the bride to a snake (who represents a deity of waters).
[52] Although its ultimate time and place of origin cannot be settled with certainty, the Lithuanian myth has been compared with similar stories found among Native American peoples (Wayampi, Yahgan and Coos), which could be the result of an inherited Ancient North Eurasian motif featuring a woman marrying an aquatic animal, violating human laws on exogamy and connecting the terrestrial and aquatic worlds.
[61] Similarly, according to Russian folklorist Lev Barag [ru], despite Stith Thompson's opinion that the tale type existed in Lithuania, it was also reported among East Slavs (in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus), in Poland, Bulgaria, and in Latvia and Estonia.
[65] Following a less mythological approach, scholar Endre Bójtar suggested that its diffusion across Lithuania owes to the local snake cult,[66] recorded in historical sources.
[67] In a Lithuanian variant, Das Mädchen und die Schlange ("The Girl and the Snake"), a widow lives with her daughter in a house at the beach.
[81][82] Some variants begin with type AaTh 621, with the louseskin riddle,[83] and, at the end of the tale, the serpent's wife becomes a birch or aspen and her children turn into bark or leaves.
The youngest child reveals how they reach their house: their mother goes to the edge of a lake, sings a song and the snake father appears in a boat.
In this tale, titled Wie die Trauerbirke entstanden ist ("How the weeping birch came to be"), a rich man finds a louse on his daughter's hair, fattens it, kills it and makes a pair of shoes out of its hide.
The old woman places her grandchildren to bed, and, taking a saber, goes to the lake in the dead of night to summon the Black Snake (the "padishah of the jinn").
The next time the girl visits her fish lover, her little brother metamorphoses himself into a fly and follows her to spy on his sister's clandestine meeting, then reports back to their father.
[115] The tale was translated by africanist Ulla Schild [de] into German as Das schöne Mädchen und der Fisch and sourced from Nigeria.
[117] The tale was originally published as Large Eyes Produce Many Tears by Bakare Gbadamosi and Ulli Beier, and sourced from the Yoruba people.
[118] Indian scholar Suniti Kumar Chatterji summarized the Lithuanian tale and stated that it "reminded" him of the Kashmiri story about Princess Himal and Nagrai (Nāgaray), the Prince of Snakes.
[119][c] Indian scholarship states that the tale exists in the oral repertoire of the region, with multiple renditions appearing in both Persian and Kashmiri in the 18th and 19th centuries.
[121] Similarities can be found in Vodník, a story written by Czech author Karel Jaromír Erben as a poem in the book Kytice z pověstí národních ("A Bouquet of Folk Legends").
[124][125] According to researcher Svetlana Ryzhakova, professor V. Kazakevičius stated that in the Polish region of Suwałki, a legend is told of a girl named Egle or Egla who married a snake being that lived in an underwater crystal palace.
A ballet Eglė žalčių karalienė by Eduardas Balsys and numerous plays have been staged in various Lithuanian theaters, for the first time in 1960, directed by Juozas Gustaitis.
