Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 3 (Celtic and Slavic).djvu/343

 INTRODUCTION

INCE those records of ancient Slavic life which have survived are very superficial, it is not surprising that only scanty and fragmentary knowledge of Slavonic religions has come down to us. The native chroniclers, imbued with Christian civilization, dealt shallowly and, it would seem, reluctantly with the life of their pagan ancestors; and while writers of other nationalities have left much more thorough accounts of the religions of the Slavic peoples, yet, being ignorant of the Slavic dialects and insufficiently familiar with the lives and customs of the Slavs, their documents are either very confused or betray a one-sided Classical or Christian point of view. It must further be borne in mind that the extant data treat of the period immediately preceding the introduction of Christianity, when the Slavic nations, inhabiting a wide-spread region and already possessed of some degree of civilization, had made considerable progress from their primeval culture. Hence no inferences may be drawn from the mythology of one Slavic nation as to the religion of the Slavs as a whole.

The most ample evidence, relatively speaking, is found regarding the religion of the Elbe Slavs, who adopted Christianity as late as the twelfth century. Thietmar, Bishop of Merseburg, gives the earliest accounts of their religion (976-1018),1 and the description of the rites of the Slavic tribe of the Lutici by Adam of Bremen, in his Gesta Hammahurgensis ecclesiae pontificum (eleventh century),2 is founded chiefly on Thietmar's report. Helmold, a German chronicler of the twelfth century, who had seen the countries of the Elbe Slavs