"The Man Who Spoke Snakish" by Andrus Kivirähk

I can say with absolute confidence that this is the best Estonian fantasy book I've ever read.

This book is about a boy named Leemet living in the Estonian forest, where he (and all the other Estonian forest-dwellers) speak the language of snakes. Snakes, being the wisest animals of the forest, are able to control all the other animals (except insects, who don’t have enough of a brain to understand Snakish). So the people of Estonia don’t have to hunt – they can just command a deer “come over here” in Snakish, and the deer will come over, lie meekly down, and allow the human to kill it. And the people of Estonia are great friends of the forest adders, as well as being friendly with many of the more intelligent animals who can actually speak Snakish as well (such as bears).

But things are changing. Christianity has come to Estonia, and more and more people are moving out of the forest and into villages, getting baptized, and forgetting Snakish. After all, why eat venison with minimal effort when you can slave away in the fields all day instead? As the German knights and monks are quick to tell them, they are primitive people living in the backwoods, and snakes are servants of Satan.

There are two bits of history that really inform this book. One is the notion, which has a fair bit of support, that hunter-gatherer societies actually enjoyed more leisure time and a higher standard of living than early agricultural ones. The other is that Estonia was the last area of Europe to be Christianized, sometime in the 13th century – hence the Teutonic Knights and the Northern Crusade.

This is not a cheerful book. Leemet’s world is ending, and his world is a magical one that will be lost forever when the last human forgets Snakish. His people are in constant conflict with the knights and the monks come to civilize and Christianize, and increasingly with their own people as the Estonians who moved to the village become more devout and believe more firmly that Leemet and those like him are evil.

(It should be noted that this book compresses a good deal of history into a few years. It works well enough.)

This is a fairy-story in many ways, with the snakes being analogous to fairies. It’s different, it’s inventive, it’s often surprisingly funny (I particularly liked one Estonian monk who kept talking about how “all the young people like Jesus” like he was a pop singer), and it’s deeply, deeply sad.

Strongly recommended.