The House with Chicken Legs

The House with Chicken Legs is loosely inspired by Russian and Slavic folktales of the character Baba Yaga. According to these storytelling traditions, Baba Yaga is a wicked witch. She lives in a house with chicken legs, which races through the forest in search of children she can eat. She is evil, maniacal, and bloodthirsty. However, she also has positive traits that subvert literary traditions of the witch trope, and she has been called “the most feminist character in folklore” (Barnett, David. “Baba Yaga: The Greatest ‘Wicked Witch’ of all?” BBC, 20 Nov. 2022). She is a fixture in Russian storytelling tradition but has found new life in the stories of authors including Sara Tantlinger, Carina Bissett, EV Knight, and Neil Gaiman; these reimaginings are preceded by a rich literary history of the character beginning in 1775.

In traditional tales and retellings of the Baba Yaga story, Baba Yaga possesses the aspects of the traditional witch and the traditional fairy godmother characters. She is the embodiment of femininity itself—possessing good and evil, maternity and intensity, wildness and constancy. According to Lindy Ryan—editor of Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga (2022)—“The essence of Baba Yaga exists in many cultures and many stories, and symbolises the unpredictable and untameable nature of the female spirit, of Mother Earth, and the relationship of women to the wild” (quoted in Barnett).