Ahh, Russia. You know, living in North America, I feel something of a kinship for you.
Both top-heavy arctic-adjacent landmasses that get less populated the further north you go,
reaching extreme low temperatures at both ends of the year. And the similarities don’t end there!
We’ve skipped arm-in-arm through history beating up nazis, famously
deposing monarchs and devastating enormously diverse and formerly thriving indigenous
communities via european colonialism… hoo…ray…! Nowadays mostly known as the punchline to jokes
about cold weather, Siberia has historically been home to an enormous number of indigenous
communities, and currently those groups make up a growing 10% of Siberia’s population,
around four and a half million people in total. This demographic covers at least nine language
families, with significant cultural subdivion within those groups. Now I’m not the history guy
and I know my limits, so to sum up, basically it’s a really big, really complicated space of dozens
of distinct cultures and communities living in one of the most inhospitable environments on the
planet and they’re still recovering from a few centuries of Russia doings its damndest to stop
them being distinct cultures and communities so they could absorb them instead. Cool? Cool.
Now back in the early 80s there was this dude, James Riordan, an Englishman with an abiding
love for the finer things in life - footballing, sports history and communism. His passion for all
three led him to spend several years studying in Moscow and familiarizing himself with the Russian
language and culture. Along with his more standard Russian education, he also lived in Siberia for
about five months total, staying with various indigenous groups and documenting some of their
folktales as best he could, recording them in a book titled “The Sun Maiden and the Crescent Moon:
Siberian Folktales.” Riordan did this because he was very intrigued by the unique cultures
of the area, so different from the more familiar societies he grew up in - and, more immediately,
he was very worried that the unique culture of the indigenous Siberian peoples would be lost as
the rest of Russia quote-unquote “civilized” them - a reasonable concern, historically speaking. He
was also concerned about the loss of their environment, as he drops a rather haunting
concept in the preface to his book that there were plans being floated at the time to literally
nuke the Siberian permafrost and melt the arctic to unlock all the shiny precious metals and oil
deposits buried under the ice, which is certainly one way to destroy a culture’s historical way of
life. All that to say, Riordan had several pressings reasons to wanna document as much
Siberian culture as he could get his mittens on. Now I’d describe this book as a popular retelling
rather than a particularly scholarly approach. It’s not a rigidly sourced dissertation with
citations out the wazoo - and while it specifies which specific culture specific stories are from,
it doesn’t cite the storyteller or give much in the way of context. Riordan’s goal was to
preserve something he believed was worth saving by translating the stories for public consumption
and entertainment rather than rigorous academic accuracy - which is… basically what we do here,
so far be it from me to complain! So here’s your complimentary grain of salt,
and let’s get into a story from the Ket people, The Sun Maiden and the Crescent Moon!
Now our story begins very cheerfully, with a young brother and sister being tragically
orphaned at an early age. Despite this setback they grow up strong and healthy regardless and
make it to adulthood relatively unscathed, and while the sister seems pretty happy to stay home
and focus on finding enough food to live, the brother has a touch o’ the old wanderlust and
spends his days adventuring around the tundra, seeing new places, meeting new
people and generally having a grand old time. But let’s pan the camera away and take a quick
jaunt up to the heavens, where the Sun Maiden has been feeling very lonely. Nobody ever hangs out
with her on account of how bright and hot she is, a first-world problem if ever I heard one,
but one day she happens to spot a handsome young man trekking across the tundra and admiring her
beauty and warmth - who is, of course, none other than the brother from the beginning of our tale.
She’s immediately smitten with him and reaches down with her extra-stretchy sunbeam arms to
snag him and take him home with her. The brother is kind of impressed but mostly very freaked out
and homesick, as abduction by celestial bodies is a rather unusual event in any young man’s life,
and after a week he asks the Sun Maiden to send him home, but promises to visit her again, because
he really does like her, he’s just not the hugest fan of being kidnapped about it. The Sun Maiden
is distraught because she has a really bad feeling that something terrible is going to happen to him,
so before he leaves, she gives him two gifts - a whetstone and a comb. She also summons a winged
horse for him to ride back to earth on. So the brother flies back home and finds
his sister waiting for him! Huzzah! But unfortunately for all parties involved,
unbeknownst to the brother, while he was up in space hanging out with the sun,
his sister was fucking eaten by the evil witch Hossiadam, who took on her form The-Thing style
and is now disguised as her. So his “sister” greets him happily and goes to prepare food,
but does so by popping a leg off his getaway horse and chucking it in the pot. This is suspicious
enough that the brother takes a closer look, catches a hint of horror movie background music,
grabs the horse leg and books it with the witch in hot pursuit.
So he pops the leg back on the horse and takes off, but it really needed a horse mechanic to
look it over first, so the horse doesn’t make it too far. He ends up on foot and not making much
headway until he remembers the Sun’s other gifts and throws the whetstone behind him - at which
point it erupts into a huge mountain blocking the witch’s way. Unfortunately it doesn’t block
her for very long, as she chews through the rock with her metal teeth, so he keeps running. When
she closes the gap again he throws the comb behind him, which springs up into a dense forest - which
unfortunately also doesn’t stand up well to the witch’s teeth and she catches up one more time. By
now the Sun Maiden has noticed what’s going down and reaches down to grab him again, but the witch
also gets ahold of our unfortunate protagonist, and in the ensuing struggle he is pulled in half.
Now this isn’t actually as much of a dealbreaker as it might sound, since the Sun Maiden is a
superpowerful magical being and all that - but unfortunately for all parties involved, she ended
up with the half of the guy that didn’t have a heart, which means her options are limited.
Her magic can bring him back, but without a heart it can only keep him going for a few
days at a time before he dies again and she needs to start over. She tries substituting
a burning coal for his heart, but that only keeps him going for about a week.
Perpetually heartbroken and increasingly unable to bear looking at her half-dead
and constantly doomed love, the Sun Maiden banishes him to the far end of the heavens,
decreeing that they’ll only see each other on the longest day of the year. The half-man,
exiled to the dark sky, becomes the crescent moon. It just goes to show you… something.