In legends about the “female army” (including among the Turks as “kyrk kyz” – “forty maidens”, among the Hungarians as “bosorkany”, among the Slavs as “virgin glades”, in Ukrainian songs – “rusalka (mermaid) army”, in Germanic sagas – “valkyries”, among the southern Slavs – “vily” or “samovily”, and all of them are, in fact, intermediaries between the worlds) the fact of the existence of a tradition of age classes in some societies is attested, when in the process of initiation into an adult full-fledged class it was the youth of both sexes who were entrusted with the protection of their land.
