How We Know Him: Folk Song, and the Missing Centuries

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.