Chud

In the collected legends the Chud are narrated as a people of an earlier age who either were displaced by Slavic expansion and Christianization, fled into forests, went underground by digging earthen vaulted chambers and then buried themselves, or were transformed in later memory into other kinds of beings. Komi cosmogonic accounts present the Chud-era as a different order of things—an age in which crops grew by themselves, children spoke at birth, and death was absent—while Russian regional tales preserve motifs of fortification, resistance, flight, and subterranean disappearance that explain their absence from the present landscape.

Descriptions vary by tradition. Russian and northern Russian accounts often describe the Chud as short‑statured, 'white‑eyed' (chud beloglazaya) and exceptionally wealthy. Komi variants depict them living 'like animals' in forests—wearing skins and eating game—and other Komi descriptions characterize them as dark or 'black' anthropomorphic beings with shaggy hair and pig‑like legs. Some Komi cosmologies frame the Chud within a compressed, diminutive world where distances and sizes were smaller; the precise physical traits therefore differ according to local storytelling.

Attributes ascribed to the Chud are primarily collective and cosmological rather than individualized magical powers. Many tales emphasize their great wealth and the presence of hidden riches (sometimes taken underground). Komi cosmogonic motifs portray the Chud age as a world with spontaneously growing crops, early‑capable children, and absence of death—features of a different cosmic order rather than powers of persons. Other narratives record maladaptive or foolish communal behaviors (e.g., improper agricultural or woodworking practices) that provoke cosmic change. Defensive behaviors preserved in legends include building earthen fortresses and, in the face of defeat or contact, flight into forests or deliberate subterranean burial.