Note 99 — Chapter II

The word koshchei, says Afanasief, may fairly be derived from kost’, a bone, for changes between st and shch are not uncommon—as in the cases of pustoi, waste, pushcha, a wild wood, or of gustoi, thick, gushcha, sediment, etc. The verb okostenyet’, to grow numb, describes the state into which a skazka represents the realm of the “Sleeping Beauty,” as being thrown by Koshchei. Buslaef remarks in his “Influence of Christianity on Slavonic Language,” p. 103, that one of the Gothic words used by Ulfilas to express the Greek δαιμόνιον is skôhsl, which “is purely Slavonic, being preserved in the Czekh kauzlo, sorcery; in the Lower-Lusatian-Wendish, kostlar means a sorcerer. (But see Grimm’s “Deutsche Mythologie,” pp. 454-5, where skôhsl is supposed to mean a forest-sprite, also p. 954.) Kost’ changes into koshch whence our Koshchei.” There is also a provincial word, kostit’, meaning to revile or scold.