As Good A Theory As Any

This post may not seem like it’s about the built environment, but it is. I’ll get there eventually, just with a detour.

Baba Yaga is a woman with a considerable presence in Slavic, mostly Russian folk tales. I’ve never been clear on whether she’s a witch or even human; she can definitely be terrifying but also sometimes helpful. (Like a lot of folklore characters, she’s neither all good nor all bad.) Her most memorable feature is not actually about her, it’s about her house. She lives in a hut that walks around on huge chicken legs. Here’s a modern artist’s conception of it:

That house is a memorable image. It turns out that maybe it is not entirely a work of imagination. There’s a kind of log-built food storage building in Norway called a stabbur. And at least one of them – and probably more – was constructed using tree trunks as columns to elevate the floor, possibly to keep the food dry or reduce vermin problems:

If I didn’t know what that was, it sure looks like a hut on four birds’ legs. Is that type of construction the origin of Baba Yaga’s hut? Who knows. But it could be: a house on chicken legs is impossible and ridiculous (and so the stuff of folklore), but a house on tree stumps that resemble legs is possible and visible.