In vocatives (forms of address), these would have reduced to puk and pug, respectively.  These are exactly the forms of the English Puck, from Shakespeare, and pug, both connoting one with a snub nose.  The terms are totally unexplained in English.  They can now be seen to be ancient borrowings from the various Circassian languages into an early Germanic language–probably Gothic, when it was spoken by the Germanic overlords of an empire in what is now the Ukraine between A.D. 250 and 450.  From Gothic these terms must have made their way into the West Germanic dialects that gave rise to English.

Another Germanic parallel between Pataraz and the return of fire can be seen in Wodan or Odin’s stealing the Mead of Inspiration from the mountain stronghold of a giant.  In some Circassian tales, Pataraz brings back wine instead of fire.  Wodan performs this theft in the form of an eagle—one should note here the raven that flies over Pataraz.  This borrowing may involve contacts with the same Goths, but it may also go back to a period when the ancestors of the Germanic peoples, the Indo-Europeans themselves, may have dwelt in the steppes north of the ancestors of the Circassians.

That these parallels are extremely old is suggested by yet another parallel between this tale and the oldest literature of India, the Rig Veda, which may be nearly four thousand years old in its original oral forms.  In the Rig Veda, Vrtra (The Strangler, usually taken to be a demonic snake) has hoarded all the world’s water in his mountaintop stronghold.  The hero, Indra, initiates his battle with Vrtra by leaping up into the air while astride his horse, just as Pataraz does.  Again, in part of the battle the hero either turns into a bird, often an eagle, or is aided by one.  Here, too, the hero unleashes an element essential for man’s survival and returns to great acclaim and rejoicing.  Indra’s mother says of him before the gathered people, “This is why I bore you.”  The mother of Pataraz says virtually the same thing under the same circumstances.

The Greek, Germanic, and Indic parallels suggest a very ancient period of contact between the ancestors of the Circassians and the Indo-Europeans, a contact that may have gone back to 3,000 B.C. or earlier.  This complex of tales is clearly centered in the Caucasus and perhaps may even be of Caucasian origin.  Clearly the notion of man or a champion of mankind liberating crucial elements—fire, water, or wine—from the clutches of an evil or whimsical godhead is one that has played an important role in Eurasia since a remote epoch.  The embodiment of evil, the forces that rank themselves over against mankind, is seen to inhabit high mountain zones, an area that at an early era in technological development must have seemed the natural seat of destructive and hostile natural forces, perhaps the seat of evil itself.