“Our child is not here.  There is nothing to be done, save for you to turn back.  Perhaps he shall return, and the Narts will prosper and thrive.  Perhaps he shall be forever lost, and the Narts will perish.”

With his head hung in dejection, Tlepsh returned to the Narts.

Significance of this myth

The veneration of trees was at one time widespread across Eurasia.  The Norse told of the world tree, Yggdrasil; the Celts had their Druids and sacred oaks and groves; and the Romans recognized a special link between their supreme god, Jupiter, and the oak.  The Greeks worshiped in sacred groves; one of their gods, Dionysus, had a tree incarnation; and there is evidence for local tree goddess cults.  The nomadic Iranians of classical antiquity, who roamed the steppes of Central Asia and the Ukraine, have left a burial at Pazyryk in Siberia, which shows a goddess on a throne holding a tree while a horseman pays homage to her; and in India, a pole festooned with flowers and ornaments, called “Indra’s Tree,” is the center of a round dance.  This Indic tree has a clear parallel in the European practice of dancing around the Maypole, which must have been a tree originally.   Tree images abound in early Mesopotamian art and, of course, the Bible itself makes good use of trees.  To this day, in the Caucasus, the Abkhazians, kinsmen of the Circassians, have sacred trees and groves.

The Circassian myth provides us with an excellent insight into why trees were so venerated.  In an age prior to technology, man was utterly earthbound.  He could attain heights only by climbing a mountain or a tree.  In fact, in all the world only trees had the essential ability to span all three realms: with their roots, they reached deeply into the earth from which all vegetative life, and hence all life, seemed to spring; with their branches, they reached high into the realm of air and hence had a natural communion with the heavens and the celestial objects in them; and with their trunks, they occupied that realm which belonged to man, offering him shape, wood, bark, and fruit.  The tree’s unique ontological status is obvious in this myth.  More surprising are a host of other features whose closest parallels are found in the Norse world tree.

Both the Circassian and Norse trees are cosmic in their grasp: their branches lead up to heaven, encompassing the stars; their trunks occupy the world of man; and their roots extend downward into the subterranean realms.