Villains are the funnest characters to write.
For me, there’s really no contest.
Maybe I just have a bad-boy complex or something, but I can’t seem to get enough of them.
Especially the really pathetic ones.
Judge Frollo, Smeagol, Joffrey Baratheon, you know the type.
The more impudent, sniveling, uncertain, flawed, the better.
And it reaches a whole new level when they don’t even come off that way at first.
The discovery of that weakness in an otherwise powerful, competent villain is such an exciting
moment for me…
Which, in hindsight, could mean something weird about my psyche, but I can’t help
myself!
Villains who are fragile on the inside are some of my favorite characters in fiction,
period.
And I think I may have found the grandfather of them—one of the oldest versions of this
trope.
You may have even heard of him before: A little ol’ wizard from Russian folklore named Koschei
the Deathless.
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Koschei the Deathless is one of those characters that’s both really well-referenced and at
the same time really sort of unknown.
I don’t think if you brought him up to the lay person they’d recognize him the way
one might recognize, say, Darth Vader or Hades.
But that doesn’t stop creatives from putting him to work.
Books like The Girl in The Tower by Katherine Arden, Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente,
and Hellboy: Darkness Calls by Mike Mignola have done some really amazing things with
him.
But, then, you know, there’s also stuff like the giant spider monster from The Witcher
3 that just happens to be called a “Koschey”, or the random Viking in the MMORPG Runescape.
Surprisingly, he even shows up as a music-hating, ogre-themed Russian nesting doll in the kids’
show Little Einsteins.
So, some of these are a little more accurate, some… not so much.
To really understand the character, you have to look at the role he plays in the stories
he comes from.
And it’s folklore, so you know—there’s a bunch.
But I’ll give you a quick run-down of the two most well-known versions.
In this classic fairytale, Koschei is both a prisoner, and a powerful wizard.
The story really begins when our hero, Ivan Tsarevich, is left alone in his wife’s palace
while she’s out… warring—you know, like you do.
They sort of treat it like she’s just out getting groceries or something.
He’s given run of the house, allowed to go anywhere he pleases, except for one closet.
She tells him that he must not, under any circumstances, open that one door.
Of course, as soon as she’s gone, that’s exactly what he does.
Inside, he finds an old, emaciated man, bound up with twelve great chains.
The man begs him for water, saying he hasn’t had anything to eat or drink in ten years.
Against his better judgement, without bothering to consult his wife, Ivan brings the man one
bucketful of water after another, which he gulps down.
After the third, his strength returns to him.
He breaks the chains easily and reveals that—who guessed it—he is actually the powerful wizard,
Koschei the Deathless.
After giving Ivan his thanks, he departs in a whirlwind and kidnaps Marya Morevna, Ivan’s
wife.
As you’ll see, it’s different in other stories, but this time around most of Koschei’s
evil and longevity can be attributed to his incredible magic stallion.
Every time Ivan manages to rescue his wife, the horse alerts Koschei about it, and when
Koschei asks whether they can still catch the two, the horse assures him that they could
grow fresh crops, reap them, turn them into food, enjoy it, and still run them down with
plenty of time to spare—that’s how fast it is.
Three times Ivan rescues his wife, and three times Koschei steals her back.
The first two times, he spares Ivan’s life as a return gesture for the buckets of water
Ivan gave him.
He warns Ivan that on the third attempt, he’ll cut Ivan into pieces, seal him into a barrel,
and throw him into the sea—and that’s exactly what he does.
But, with the help of his powerful wizard brothers-in-law, Ivan is re-assembled and
resurrected.
He returns one more time to save his wife, and this time the couple take a different
approach.
Instead of running away together, which is doomed to fail anyway, Marya Morevna tricks
Koschei into telling her how he got his horse.
It was given to him as a reward by a powerful Baba Yaga for managing the impossible task
of caring for her herd of mares for three days.
Ivan sets out to do the same, but gets pretty hungry along the way and considers eating
a bird he comes across, as well as a honeycomb, and a… lion cub, I guess.
Okay, Ivan.
Reasonable.
But he chooses not to eat any of them, and that turns out to be a good thing, because
later on, while he’s trying and failing to perform the witch’s impossible task,
flocks of birds, swarms of bees, and ferocious lions emerge to help him.
They drive the mares home, which means against all odds, Ivan has succeeded.
In her way, the Baba Yaga tries to kill him anyway, but he gets his magical stallion in
the end, and races off to rescue Marya once and for all.
This time, Koschei’s horse is not so sure they’ll be able to catch up.
But with the hubris of his long life, the wizard pursues anyway.
He does manage reach them… only for Ivan’s horse to kick Koschei’s head in, and for
the couple to finish him off with a club.
They burn his body to ash, Marya takes his precious stallion, and the two ride off together
into the sunset.
So like I said, the horse is really key to this story.
Koschei is protected and enabled by his ability to run.
As soon as Ivan gets a magical horse of his own, it’s over for the old wizard.
There’s a lot more to it, and I definitely recommend giving the full version a read for
yourself, but we begin to see a theme emerging, here.
And although it’s very different, the second version of the story I want to share with
you does a lot to build on that theme.
Tsarevich Petr and The Wizard is probably my favorite story that Koschei shows up in,
and you’re about to see why.
This time around, he’s the most powerful wizard alive, unchallenged not because of
the speed of his horse, but because of his sheer might.
He doesn’t need a Baba Yaga’s help.
His fortresses are built at the peaks of the highest mountains, ringed by three rivers,
guarded by three monstrous ferrymen who demand your life and limb as a toll to cross.
As if that weren’t enough, his palace itself is encircled by an enormous sleeping serpent.
However, when the hero’s mother is kidnapped by Koschei, he learns that none of these are
the wizard’s true strength.
Through a lot of cunning and bravery and sheer force of will, Petr manages to get by all
these defenses, only to find that the wizard… is, of course, unkillable.
All he can do after his grand adventure getting into the palace is hide in fear beneath his
mother’s skirts.
Luckily, just like Marya Morevna in the first story, Petr’s mother is smart enough to
trick Koschei into revealing his weakness.
His life is not actually in his body, but hidden away someplace else.
At first he tells her it’s inside of a broom.
When she tries to “honor his life” by covering it in jewels, he tells her that it
was a lie and that his life is actually hidden inside the garden hedge.
Again, she attempts to honor him, this time by covering the hedge in gold coins.
So moved by this show of devotion is the wizard that he finally reveals the truth: his life
is hidden inside an egg, and that egg inside of a duck, and that duck inside of a hare,
and that hare inside of a great hollow log, and that log is floating in a pond on an island
far away.
So, Petr travels back through all the dangers, and ventures out to find it.
Similar to the first story, along the way he saves several animals: a bear trapped under
a fallen tree, an otter caught in a snare, a hawk tangled up in vines, and a pike suffocating
on dry land.
Later, it’s the bear who helps him split open the hollow log, the otter who catches
the hare as it tries to run away, the hawk who snatches the duck mid-flight, and the
pike who retrieves the duck’s fallen egg from the sea and returns it to Petr.
Finally, he returns to save his mother.
Just as Koschei is about to strike him dead, he reveals the egg which holds the wizard’s
life.
It’s like a voodoo doll to him, whipping him about the room as Petr tosses it from
hand to hand.
Finally, with one swift motion, he dashes it against the ground, and that is the end
of Koschei the Deathless.
As in many of the other stories, they burn the body, and return home with the wizard’s
treasures, better off than they started.
So I said there was a lot more to The Death of Koschei the Deathless?
Well I really just scratched the surface of Tsarevich Petr and the Wizard.
Read the original.
You’re missing out on palaces of copper, silver, gold, and pearl, three beautiful maidens,
two useless elder brothers, and much else besides.
But the reason I wanted to tell both of these stories is because, in all the ways they differ,
they do share a theme: here’s this powerful wizard whose entire life and magic is wrapped
up in one small thing; a horse, or even more, a fragile little egg.
We could just take this as an interesting figure in Russian folklore and call it a day.
This is the thing Koschei the Deathless does.
Cool.
Interesting character.
But that… wouldn’t really be accurate.
This is actually a thing in a lot of folk stories, extending far, far beyond Russian
tradition.
In fact, it’s so common that folklorists have even given this sort of story a very
creative title: The Monster with his Heart in The Egg.
According to the book The Folktale, by Stith Thompson, versions of the story have been
collected everywhere from Ireland to India some 250 times.
That’s… a pretty big number across a pretty wide variety of people.
There’s a Spanish version called “The Giant’s Secret”, which is really similar
to Tsarevich Petr and the Wizard, except with about five times as much shapeshifting, and
the wizard is, obviously, a giant.
There’s also a Serbian version called “Head of Steel”, which is sort of a combination
of The Death of Koschei the Deathless and Tsarevich Petr and the Wizard, except in this
version the hero gets killed like… a whole bunch.
And then there’s a Norwegian version, which is called, very frankly, “The Giant Who
Had No Heart in His Body”.
Based on all the others, I think you can guess what this one’s about.
It’s not always the same, of course—sometimes the “egg” becomes a bird, or an insect,
or a needle, and often Koschei is just a generic giant or ogre—but this idea of a dangerous
villain entrusting their life to some small protective measure which really just gives
them a false sense of security…
I mean, for it to be so prevalent, it’s got to mean something, right?
We even see it in our fiction today.
Maybe the easiest example of this is Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter.
An evil wizard who breaks up his soul and hides the pieces away in trinkets and doo-dads
all over the place.
Yep.
That about hits the mark.
But beyond that superficial similarity, Voldemort has a really interesting trait which I think
is actually pretty telling for this archetype: he is desperately afraid of death.
He’ll bring any number of curses and horrors down upon himself rather than face it.
In J.K.
Rowling’s words: “Voldemort's fear is death, ignominious death.
I mean, he regards death itself as ignominious.
He thinks that it's a shameful human weakness(…).
His worst fear is death.”
Which actually makes me think of another really interesting modern take on this story: the
Lich.
There’s… a lot of these in media, and we should probably do a video on them at some
point, but suffice it to say that they’re wizards who have used dark magic to re-animate
themselves after death.
Most often, they’ll do this with the use of objects called “phylacteries”, which
harbor some fragment of their life, soul, or power outside of their body and allow them
to reclaim it after death.
A little side-note that I found kind of interesting—“phylactery” is a Greek word that essentially means “to
guard”.
The basic idea is really similar to that of amulets found in other cultures, which are
usually pieces of jewellery, ornaments, or folded pieces of writing kept on one’s person
in order to ward off evil.
I supposed, after a fashion, we could think of the “egg” in these stories as a type
of amulet?
A safekeeping box to ward off death?
Some have even suggested that the egg—specifically when there’s a needle inside of it—resembles
a type of Turkic amulet, which were apparently egg-shaped and contained arrowheads.
I really like this idea, because the theme is so starkly represented, here.
The lich is a hideous a monster.
Undead.
Maybe they’ve bought themselves eternal life, but what kind of life is it?
Do you remember at the beginning of the video, when I was talking about delightfully pathetic
villains?
Well this is what I meant.
And although he’s not quite a lich, Koschei the Deathless and all the other monsters with
their hearts locked away in eggs have done something similar to the lich: they’ve given
up their hearts—their lives—so that they can live.
Imagine the amount of fear that would drive someone to do that sort of thing.
The blindness it would take to embark into this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
I’m sure Koschei wouldn’t die so easily in these stories if he wasn’t willing to
entrust his whole life to an egg or the speed of a horse.
But he does.
And for all his power, succumbing to fear in that way?
Letting it rule him, handing himself over to it like a willing captive?
That in itself is… sort of like dying.
And it’s really believable, too.
Humans do this.
I do this.
Fear really can make you irrational and drive you to do the strangest things.
There are certainly people out there who spend so much of their life worrying about the worst
possible outcomes, they end up forfeiting everything that would have made their life
worth living anyway.
They become paralyzed, obsessed, entrapped by their fears.
And in extreme cases, they draw a false sense of security from these reactions—as if,
instead of losing everything to their fear, they’ve gained something.
A promise as fragile as an egg shell.
If these stories tell us nothing else, it’s that submission to fear does not pay.
Think about the bravery of the heroes, how things turn out so much better for those who
would rather face death—literally rather be chopped into pieces, in some cases—than
give in to their fear.
I’m not trying to make a moral judgement here or telling you how to live.
Really, this is just a great source of motivation for characters.
So often villains are just psychopathic or extremely selfish.
But sometimes… really… they’re just afraid... and maybe a little deluded about
the remedy for their fears.
So, if this inspires you, go out there and create some…. real… pathetic villains.
I can’t wait to see what you come up with!
And… that would be where the video ends… except...
I have more to say.
There a number of interesting side notes and versions of this story that I actually had
to trim from the script for time, but…
I couldn’t quite let it all go.
I had to keep a full version of the video out there somewhere.
It seemed right.
Luckily, there is a place where we can share that stuff.
Where we don’t have to worry about streamlining our content so that it’s a perfect fit for
attention spans and algorithms.
I’m talking about our new streaming platform, Nebula.
Youtube is a weird place for educational content.
It’s hard to be as honest and open as you want to be while trying to satisfy the algorithm
and trying to dodge some kind of terrible fate like channel-wide demonetization.
So, a bunch of us educational creators got together and made our own platform where we
don’t have to worry about all of that.
You can find all our videos there ad-free, and full of additional content we normally
have to cut out for Youtube.
Including the extended version of this video.
And we’re not the only ones.
The same is true for so… many… other… amazing creators.
It’s a safe haven for the material we wish we could share here.
And the best part is that you don’t even actually have to pay for Nebula if you don’t
want to.
The good people at Curiosity Stream want to make sure we indie creators will always have
this special space, so they’ve decided to foot the bill for Nebula for anyone who signs
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It’s got thousands of titles, including videos about everything from prehistoric aquatic
monsters to the cutting edge of modern science.
But if you’re still itching for more folklore and mythology after watching this video, they’ve
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One of my favorite documentaries on the platform, Monsters and Myths, is all about classic monsters
like dragons and cryptids, and the cultures they’ve come from.
Turns out there’s a surprising amount of truth behind some of our favorite monsters…
Tale Foundry videos are a starting place for your imagination, but watch this documentary
and you will have so much more to work with, I promise.
They’ve done their best to make it all accessible, too.
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That’s just $14.79 a YEAR—not per month, per year—for both Curiosity Stream and Nebula,
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And… that’s it for this video!
There’s usually a few weeks between uploads, so if you want more Tale foundry in the mean-time,
come join our community!
We have a discord server that’s basically like a big family of creatives—a lot of
love, there.
We also run writing groups on Twitch every week, if you want to get some practice in!
You can find links to all of it in the description.
Hope to see you there!
Until then, thanks for watching, and keep making stuff up!
I’ll see you…
next time.
Bye!