Perkunas

No Baltic myth survives from antiquity in the way a Greek or Norse text does. There is no Baltic Hesiod and no Baltic Snorri. What is known of Perkunas is reconstructed from two kinds of late evidence: the enormous corpus of Lithuanian and Latvian folk songs, the dainos, collected from the eighteenth century onward, and the disapproving notices of medieval and early-modern churchmen who recorded pagan practice in order to suppress it. Both are problematic.

The songs were written down long after Christianisation and may preserve poetic convention as much as belief; the clerical reports describe from the outside and with hostility. The Baltic lands were the last corner of Europe to be Christianised, Lithuania officially only in 1387, so the survival is unusually deep, but it is survival in fragments, and every reconstruction of the "Baltic pantheon" involves a degree of scholarly inference that should not be mistaken for a preserved text.

Perkunas is one of the clearest witnesses to a reconstructed Indo-European storm-god. His name is traced to a root *Perk(w)unos, and comparative philologists set him beside the Slavic Perun, the Vedic Parjanya, and, by function if not by name, Norse Thor and Vedic Indra. Recurring across these figures are the oak, the axe or hammer, the thunderbolt, and above all the myth in which the thunderer strikes a serpentine adversary of the low and watery world, in the Baltic material, Perkunas hunting and smiting Velnias.

Some scholars (notably Ivanov and Toporov) built an elaborate "basic myth" of the storm-god versus his chthonic enemy on exactly this pattern. The comparison is illuminating but is also a caution: the neatness of the reconstruction partly reflects the scholars' expectation of finding an Indo-European storm-god, and the folk songs are richer and stranger than the tidy combat-myth allows.