Why does ‘Baba Yaga’ fly around in a… giant mortar?

Indeed, ‘Baba Yaga’ flies in a mortar in some Russian fairy tales: ‘Vasilisa the Beautiful’, ‘Geese-Swans’, ‘Marya Morevna’ and others. "However, in written texts, a much more common characteristic of the magical old woman guarding the border between the human world and the realm of the dead should be her appearance: 'Her nose has grown into the ceiling, her teeth are on the shelf, her feet are in one corner, her head is in the other’," notes folklorist Andrei Moroz.

In many fairy tales, the old woman often simply walks. A mortar is far from her most commonly used or familiar attribute. Similarly, if you look at her image from Russian popular prints (for example, the scene ‘Baba Yaga Goes to Fight the Crocodile’), you'll see that she actually rides on a pig and holds a pestle as a weapon. So, why is it that we can't imagine ‘Baba Yaga’ without a mortar and broom anymore?

It was primarily artists in the 19th and 20th centuries who developed the image of ‘Baba Yaga’ as a flying monster. They wanted not just a scary, shaggy old woman, but a distinctive, recognizable character. One of the founders of the image of the flying ‘Baba Yaga’ was artist Ivan Bilibin. In 1900, he completed watercolor illustrations for the fairy tale ‘Vasilisa the Beautiful’, where ‘Baba Yaga’ flies through the forest in a giant mortar.

However, it was another ‘Baba Yaga’ – the one by Viktor Vasnetsov  who became iconic. A huge canvas depicting a truly terrifying witch, resembling a forest demon, carrying a child under her arm, her head thrown back limply. Since then, ‘Baba Yaga’ has been associated with a giant mortar, like a cowboy with a horse, and, in this form, she has migrated into all subsequent works, especially movies and cartoons.