The Dish Songs Подблюдные песниA Christmastide fortune game of old Russia

In a candlelit log house in winter, a wide pewter dish of water stands on a linen tablecloth, half covered by a white towel embroidered in red cross-stitch. Beside it lie a gold ring, a silver ring, an earring, an amber bead and a slice of rye bread with salt. Behind are a whitewashed stove, a samovar, an icon with its lamp and a frosted window. — Christmastide: the dish of water and its embroidered cloth, the guests' rings, and bread and salt for the first song.

On the long winter evenings of Christmastide, in Russian homes from village huts to noble houses, the guests would take off their rings and earrings and drop them into a dish of water. The dish was covered with an embroidered cloth. Then everyone sang. At the end of each short song the woman holding the dish shook it, reached under the cloth without looking, and drew one thing out. Whoever it belonged to, that song was their fortune for the year.

The songs speak in pictures: a falcon meeting a dove means love, a pike with silver scales means wealth, a sledge ready to go means a journey, and a pearl rolling away means loss. These are the songs and meanings written down by Russian folklorists in the 1830s and 1840s.

How to consult

Think of your question, or of the year ahead. Type it in if you like; it stays on your device.
Choose your trinket and put it in the dish with the other guests' things.
The songs are sung one by one, and after each one a trinket is drawn out from under the cloth.
When your trinket comes out, the song just sung is yours. Read what it foretells.

What the songs foretell

The 22 songs, by their old meanings. Most are about love and marriage, because the game was played above all by young women.

Your question and answers stay on this device.

Your past songs

How do we know?

✔ Written down in the 1830s and 40s. Ivan Snegirev (1838), Ivan Sakharov (1841) and Alexander Tereshchenko (1848) all describe the game and print its songs. The same songs turn up in all three, often word for word.
✔ The meanings. Tereshchenko printed beside each song, in the margin, what it foretold: "marriage to an equal", "wealth", "a departure", "misfortune". Our 22 songs and their meanings are his, checked against the pictures of his printed pages.
✔ How it was played. Sakharov describes the whole evening: the matchmaker covers the table, a dish of water is brought, the guests put in their rings and earrings with a little bread, salt and three coals, and the first song is always sung in honour of the bread. After every song comes the refrain "whose it is that comes out, for them it will come true".
≈ Meanings varied. Sakharov warns that the meanings were not the same everywhere: in different places the same meaning went with different songs. Tereshchenko himself notes that some people read the song about the rich peasants of Chigasy as foretelling death, and says they were wrong.
≈ How old it is. The writers of the 1800s thought the game was very ancient, and Sakharov compared it with a fortune game of the ancient Greeks. That comparison is a guess; what we know for certain is that it was played all over Russia in their time.
✔ What we changed. The game was played by a whole room of people. Here the other guests' trinkets stand in for them. We left out the opening song to the Tsar except for its first lines, and the songs that were only for toasting the host.
✔ Our words. The Russian is given in modern spelling. The English translations and readings are written for this app.

Songs and meanings: А. В. Терещенко, Быт русского народа, ч. 7 (St Petersburg, 1848), pp. 151–160. Compared with И. П. Сахаров, Сказания русского народа, т. 1 (St Petersburg, 1841), and И. М. Снегирев, Русские простонародные праздники и суеверные обряды, вып. 2 (Moscow, 1838). All public domain, from the Internet Archive. English: our own. Table picture: made for this app. Sounds: made in the browser.