Witches, it was believed, went unbelted.

[kleenexwoman]

Lookin' up Russian folklore and fairy tales, particularly death folklore. I love Baba Yaga stories, but I realized I haven't read that many, and I conflate Baba Yaga with the fairytale function of witches in general, which naturally has been highly informed by Grimm's fairytales. Russian folklore is amazing. I wish I still had Gail around so I could ask her stuff.

This is proving to be very useful.

Comments

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

And I can't find either of the books you mentioned here anywhere. Have those even been translated into English at all, do you know? :(

[pphi.livejournal.com]

To the best of my knowledge, No. Google and various antiquarian sites all deny their existence in English (I sought for them for quite a while).
According to amazon.fr there is such a thing as "Les racines historiques du conte merveilleux" (1983) but this appears to be out of print. Pity, since my French is somewhat better than my Italian, reading the latter mostly mostly consists of guessing from similarities with French/Latin/English/musical terms. In some cases I had to lookt at the Russian text to understand the Italian...