Aha.

[ritaxis]

Parenthetical comment in the Wikipedia article about Dažbog:

(In fact, most of Indo-European smith-gods were lame; the reason for this was most likely arsenicosis, low levels of arsenic poisoning, resulting in lameness and skin cancers. Arsenic was added to bronze to harden it and most smiths of the Bronze Age would have suffered from chronic workplace poisoning)

Why yes, my cat has been vaccuumed, and waxed, and polished till he gleams. 

edit to add more gems from random Slavic history Wiki entries:

The Slavs of the Baltic had engaged in piratical activity before, while the Danes felt that trade and piracy went hand in hand, making for an interesting attempt at commercial relations.

.....

And apparently the King's Ride has some other echoes in a festival called Jarilo in which the summer (or the summer god) is celebrated with processions and men draped with green branches . . . and a woman dressed as a man (remember that the King's Ride features a subadolescent boy dressed as a woman, with a rose clamped in his teeth).  Oh, my dog, reading further (see, I'm kind of liveblogging my reading now), Jarilo is the son of Perun, the thunder god, stolen by Veles, the god of the underworld and cattle on the night of his birth (February something, the New Year) and raised in the green, wet, lush land of the dead across the sea  where he guarded Veles' cattle.  In the spring he returns to his home and walks in the fields and makes them fertile.

Okay, I think I understand the rose and the taciturnity now.  It's the silence of the dormant world in winter, and the rose is the promise of renewed life.  Okay.  And I think I understand why the boy is dressed in women's clothing too, but I can't express it yet.

Oh no, it just gets weirder.  So when Jarilo returns to the earth, the first to discover him is his twin sister, Morana, who is goddess of death and nature (summon Levi-Strauss, somebody).  They become lovers, the feud between their father Perun and Veles is resolved, and the whole world is abundant and harmonious . . . until Jarilo is unfaithful to his sister-wife and their other nine brothers kill him and she makes a house out of his body and turns into a bitter, cold, vengeful hag all winter until spring comes and Jarilo returns from the dead again.

The article calls him a "He was a fairly typical life-death-rebirth deity," and that typical in there just tells you a whole hell of a lot about myth, doesn't it?

The article author goes on to worry about how Jarilo is simultaneously described as having sore feet from walking such a long way and as coming on a horse.  Musing a bit about horse symbols in wedding songs and so forth, they conclude:" One can only guess how the ancient Slavs imagined this mythical hero to look like, perhaps as some sort of centaur.."

Give me a break.  Probably some people did picture him as a centaur,  but honestly, a god can have horse-nature and not have hoofs.  Or six appendages.

Comments

[frogs_of_war]

So interesting. The problem with Wiki (or really researching anything) is that you lose hours in it. I need to look up something about a story I'm writing, only I know that if I do, I'll look at the clock and realize that the kids are about to come home and I haven't done any of the thousand things that I need to get done.

[captain-button.livejournal.com]

I recall Poul Anderson somewhere postulating that lame smith-gods were because in the real world lame men would tend towards that profession because they were lame and couldn't work in the fields or be warriors, etc.