Foreword to the Past: A Cultural History of the Baltic People

Endre Bojtar's study is a standard scholarly cultural history of the Baltic peoples, with its third part devoted specifically to pre-Christian Baltic mythology, working from the same kind of indirect evidence, later chronicles and collected folklore, that defines reconstruction of any pre-Christian European mythology without its own surviving native scripture. This record notes that evidentiary limit as a real constraint on the field rather than treating reconstructed material as equally secure as a documented native record. Use it for established facts about Baltic mythology as scholarship reconstructs it from these indirect sources; a claim about a specific deity's function carries the same real uncertainty this kind of source material carries generally.