The Legend about the Iron Wolf, from Stryjkowski’s “Chronicle”, in the Context of Foundation Myths and Tales of Magic

Abstract

The present article is an attempt to look at Stryjkowski’s story of Gediminas’, the Grand Duke’s of Lithuania, dream, involving a vision of an iron-clad wolf, in the light of its possible folkloric and mythographic context. It is natural to look at it as a foundation myth, connected with the legendary origins of the city of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The author claims that the usually postulated connection with the story of Romulus and Remus and the Capitoline She-Wolf is rather tenuous and that it makes more sense to look at the story of the Iron Wolf in the context of fairy tales about supernatural, enchanted, animals, whose disenchantment, that is, a return to the human form, is the natural and expected conclusion. Various legends, myths, and fairy tales (including literary fairy tales) are here analyzed and compared with each other on the assumption that this basically Lithuanian story has some links with a vast European narrative heritage.