Marzanna — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it
Evidence dossier 304 — Marzanna. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Marzanna
- Original script: —
- Pantheon: Slavic
- Convention: the tradition’s own scholarly transliteration standard
- False forms on record: 0
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 304 of 548
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Marzanna — no older script survives to transcribe, so the canonical content is the exactness of the spelling itself.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form marzanna differs from the canonical Marzanna only by convention of display — case, not content. It is acceptable everywhere: in legacy systems, in plain-text citation, in the DNS itself. What is not acceptable is what follows in the register: respellings that change the letters, not just their case.
Exhibit 3 — the physical record. Marzanna left no temples, statues, or inscriptions — the early Slavs built in wood and wrote little — so her material record is the rite itself. Ethnographic museums in Warsaw and Kraków hold collections of the drowned effigies, rescued from rivers by curators: straw women in shawls, each one a winter actually ended. The written evidence is mostly hostile: medieval Polish church synods repeatedly condemned the drowning and the songs that went with it, which lets us track the custom backward through the condemnations for centuries. Archaeology adds only indirect light — early-medieval Slavic river cult sites with votive deposits are known — but the rite's continuity needs no dig: it has eyewitnesses, from 16th-century clergy complaining about it to news crews filming it this March.
Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. The drowning of Marzanna is not folklore embalmed in a book; it is a living custom. Every March, Polish schoolchildren still braid her effigy, march it to the river, and throw it in — television covers it, ethnologists measure it, and the rite stands on the Polish national register of intangible cultural heritage.
The Convention's Own History
Every tradition in this register has its own scholarly transliteration standard, built by its own specialists over decades or centuries, and the register follows each on its own terms: the tradition’s own standard. The principle that unifies them is the one the whole project stands on: a name is evidence, and evidence is not negotiable — not for keyboards, not for convenience, not for anyone.
The Protocol's Position
Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.
The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.
The Verdict
Case closed on Marzanna: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form marzanna is the same name in another register of display — always acceptable. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /marzanna/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 5 cited sources — Máchal, Jan, 'Slavic Mythology,' in The Mythology of All Races, vol. 3 (1918), Ivanits, Linda J., Russian Folk Belief (1989), Afanasyev, A. N., Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature (1865–69).
The Register Continues
The register holds 548 entries like this one — each temple with its own ruling. Read the temple's founding dispatch for the story, its Restoration File for the philology, its Resonance File for the industries, or the whole archive end to end.
Continue the register — previous entry: Mārs (read it) · next entry: Math (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.