Dive into a world of creativity!
Like I said in this post, in Russian fairy tales Baba Yaga can range from helpful to occasionally murderous to actual cannibal, but @the-importance-of-being-wilde wanted to know about stories where she is friendly. So here are the ones I know:
The Three Kingdoms
The hero Ivashko Lie-on-the-Stove is sent to Baba Yaga for help after a quest gets him stranded far away from home. He calls her “little grandmother” and she lends him her giant eagle to fly back to Russia. However, this is Baba Yaga’s eagle, so she instructs him to take enough meat with him to feed it every time it got hungry, or it might start snacking on Ivashko himself… (Don’t worry, he only loses a bit of his shoulder before he gets home and even that gets magically healed.)
The Maiden Tsar
I know this is about Baba Yaga, but the Maiden Tsar sails around with a fleet of ships accompanied by her thirty foster sisters just to court an extremely beautiful merchant’s son named Ivan. It’s awesome. Of course the lovers get divided and the Maiden Tsar lets Ivan know that he can find her in the thrice tenth kingdom. Ivan cannot find it, but he does find Baba Yaga’s hut and asks her for help. She says she does not know, but perhaps her younger sister does. Her sister is described as “another Baba Yaga”, but she does not know either. She tells him to go to their youngest sister and warns him that she might get angry and want to eat him, but that if he quickly begs her for three horns and asks her permission to blow upon them everything will be alright. Sure enough, this happens and when he does blow the horns a large firebird comes to fly him to the trice tenth kingdom. (Where Ivan makes amends to the Maiden Tsar and manages to win her love again.)
Keep reading