Tlepsh (Adyghe Лъэпш ) is a mythological figure who appears (as a blacksmith and also a powerful leader) in some cycles of the Nart sagas of the Caucasus, in which his Ossetian counterpart is the smith Kurdalægon. Tlepsh's name is a borrowing from Indo-European languages into Circassian, cognate with Ancient Greek χάλυψ (khálups) borrowed into Latin as chalybs - 'iron' - Tlepsh is thus the embodiment of the metal with which he works. Description Tlepsh, as the smith of the semi-divine Narts, is a figure comparable to (among others) Hephaestos in Greek mythology, Vulcan in Roman mythology and Wayland and the Sons of Ivaldi in Germanic mythology. In many cycles he is portrayed as being close with Satanaya. finds remarkable similarities between Tlepsh and the Scandinavian deity Odin to be revealed in the tale "Tlepsh and Lady Tree" (number 17 in his anthology of Nart sagas), which tells how Tlepsh, goaded by Satanaya, sets off in quest of knowledge and not only encounters a sentient, female axis mundi, recalling the world-tree Yggdrasil, but actually begets upon her a child - the Milky Way. A further parallel to a tale from Germanic mythology is apparent in Colarusso's tale 21, "Tlepsh's Gold Cellar" as, in an episode attributed to the historic king Guntram of Burgundy (recorded in Grimm's Teutonic Mythology), the wandering soul of a hero who has fallen asleep, manifested as a small creeping creature, and aided by the hero's servant, discovers a treasure, before returning once more to his body to reanimate it, thus awakening him from his slumbers. The hero believes himself to have been on a long journey, crossing an iron bridge to reach a treasure cave, when in fact his tiny, 'soul-creature' has travelled but a short distance, crossing and re-crossing - in the Germanic version the flat of a sword laid over a little stream and in the Circassian a short length of iron laid over a water butt or quenching-bath - to reach and return from a little hole or crevice. This folk-tale motif of an externalised soul taking the form of a small creeping animal (fly / grub / worm / snake) bears out Colarusso's perception of a similarity between Tlepsh and Odin when compared with an episode from the tale of Odin's theft of the mead of poetry, in which the god shape-shifts into the form of a snake, in order to creep