Myth & Folklore: The Beautiful and Dangerous Water Nixie

By Kim Rendfeld

Perhaps the legends of underwater magical creatures arose from people’s mixed feeling about bodies of water. A river could slake the thirst of humans and animals, provide the means to bathe and do laundry, provide fish and game, and bring commerce in the form of merchant barges. But those sources of survival and wealth were dangerous, too.

For Germanic people, a nixie was a being to fear. She appeared as a beautiful woman, but underneath that beauty is a diabolical, vindictive, cruel character who wielded powerful magic and bided her time to get what she wanted.

Two folk tales collected by the brothers Grimm feature nixies, and the protagonists must save themselves. There is no prince coming to the rescue; in fact, there is no mention of royalty.

In “The Water Nixie” (http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm079.html), the eponymous villain kidnaps a brother and sister who fell into a well and enslaves them. They escape while she is a church and use magic to slow her down.

“The Nixie of the Mill-Pond” (http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm181.html) is even more colorful and complicated. Here is a teaser of a tale with strong women as hero, villain, and counsel, and a man who needs to be saved.

A miller who has fallen on hard times encounters the nixie at a pond. Instead of running for his life, he stands entranced. The nixie promises to make him prosperous again if he will give what has just been born in his house.

The guy makes the promise, thinking the nixie wants a puppy or kitten. You’ve already guessed what happens next. As soon as he walks in the door, he learns his wife gave birth to a son. Either the nixie cast some sort of spell on the miller, or he is a complete dolt.

As his son grows up, the miller warns him to stay away from the pond. The son obeys, becomes a huntsman, and gets married. One day he hunts a roe and needs to wash the blood from his hands. Unwittingly, he has strayed near the pond. As soon as he dips his hands in the water, the nixie’s got him.

When he doesn’t come home, the huntsman’s wife suspects what has happened; her husband had told her about the nixie. She looks for him near the pond but sees only his hunting bag. After hours and hours of searching, she falls asleep and is told in a dream to trek over a mountain, descend to a valley, and seek the counsel of an old woman.

The huntsman’s wife is brave, tough, and persistent, and the nixie does not give up without a fight.

To us, these stories are entertaining yarns of bravery, resourcefulness, trickery, love, and loyalty. To medieval folk, they were as true as a Bible story is to a Christian. These tales might have resonated more because the characters are ordinary working people, and other than the miller inexplicably forgetting his wife is pregnant, they are a lot like us.

Sources

“The Nixie of the Mill-Pond” collected by the brothers Grimm (http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm181.html)

“The Water Nixie” (http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm079.html)

Rivers: A Very Short Introduction by Nick Middleton

Giants, Monsters, and Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth by Carol Rose

Folklore, Volume 18, Volume 27, Issue 137 of 1890- : Publications - Folk-lore Society, v. 27, editors: Joseph Jacobs, Alfred Trübner Nutt, Arthur Robinson Wright, William Crooke

Kim Rendfeld explores religion, warfare, justice, and love in her novels set in eighth century Francia: The Cross and the Dragon, in which a young noblewoman contends with a jilted suitor and the fear of losing her husband in battle, and The Ashes of Heaven’s Pillar, where a mother will go to great lengths to protect her children. To read an excerpt and the first chapter of either book, visit kimrendfeld.com. You’re also welcome to check out her blog Outtakes of a Historical Novelist at kimrendfeld.wordpress.com, like her on Facebook at facebook.com/authorkimrendfeld, or follow her on Twitter at @kimrendfeld, or contact her at kim [at] kimrendfeld [dot] com.

Myth & Folklore: Ghosts & Ghouls of Ancient Rome

by Heather Domin

For the Romans, the supernatural was as real as any other part of the world around them. Spirits were everywhere, affecting everything, and could be roughly divided into three categories. Gods and demi-gods comprised one group, including the nymphs inhabiting natural places and the spirits embodying Roman virtues. The souls of the dead comprised another: lares acted as benevolent and helpful guardian spirits, while lemures harassed the living in retaliation for unsettled scores. If a lare's family failed to honor them properly, they might make the switch to lemur, so it behooved Romans to keep the dearly departed happy; there was even a special holiday, the Lemuria, for placating angry souls and coaxing them back onto your side. The third group included supernatural beings who were neither ghost nor god: monsters, creatures, and demons, including Halloween staples like witches, werewolves, and vampires.

Erictho by John Mortimer

Witches were a particular concern for the ancient Romans, who believed strongly in the power of spells, curses, and ill omens. Magic itself was not seen as evil, but dark magic could be diabolical indeed. Creatures like sirens and harpies used magic to ensnare mortals, but much more frightening were stories of humans – usually women – who were so skilled in sorcery that they were transformed into demonic beings. The poet Lucan told the story of one such witch, Erictho, whom "even the gods feared" – her hobbies included necromancy, eating dead bodies, cutting fetuses from wombs and burning them, stealing offerings from funeral pyres to use in curses, and making out with corpses while whispering messages to the underworld down their throats. Yikes.

As for werewolves, Virgil, Pliny, and Ovid all mention them, but they're not quite the same as the modern-day version. Their werewolves were humans who'd been turned into wolves as a punishment for some heinous crime, usually cannibalism. The werewolf legend in Rome was less of a monster story than a symbol of barbarism, of savages who were neither human nor beast but something in between. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote of a Slavic tribe who transformed into wolves once every year and danced beneath the moon, but that's as close to the modern werewolf as the legend got. The word "lycanthrope", however, does come from the Greco-Roman myth of Lycaon, a king who was transformed into a wolf for killing his own son. 

The Lamia
by John Waterhouse

The Roman vampire was the lamia. The name comes from the Greek myth of Lamia, Queen of Libya, who was turned by Hera into a child-eating demon; the Romans, as per usual, took the story and created their own version, a supernatural seductress who killed not children but young, virile men. Lamiae would hang out in isolated places like marshes or lonely roads, where they would seduce travelers and then drink their blood or consume their life force. They might also appear in dreams, a forerunner of the medieval succubus. As in many vampire legends, lamiae symbolized unbridled female sexuality; in Pre-Raphaelite and Romantic art they were used to represent courtesans, mistresses, or other wanton women, often combined with snake imagery (see John Keats' poem "Lamia", where she is half woman, half snake), a cruel temptress sucking the life out of some poor innocent man. 

But while there were enough legends of ghosts, ghouls, and goblins to scare the subligar off any ancient Roman, only the lemures had their own holiday. For the Romans, of all the things that go bump in the night, the scariest were not vampires, zombies, or werewolves, but disgruntled grandparents. If you kept your ancestors happy, they would make sure none of these other creepy-crawlies could get to you.

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Heather Domin has been an Unusual Historicals contributor since 2011. She is the author of The Soldier of Raetia, set in Augustan Rome, and Allegiance, set in 1920s Dublin. Her newest title, The Heirs of Fortune (sequel to Soldier of Raetia) will be released on November 30.

Myth & Folklore: Where Did Mighty Achilles Get his Start?

By Judith Starkston

When I wrote my novel, Hand of Fire, set within the Trojan War, I thought a lot about Achilles, that troublesome hunk of a hero first mentioned in Homer’s Iliad, but popularized in countless stories and media. He was the greatest of the Greek warriors in the Trojan War. My novel focuses on Briseis, the woman Achilles took captive after sacking her city. Their relationship is at the core of my story. I used my imagination to bring Achilles to life, but I also did some historical digging.

The ruins of Troy with the plain

In the last couple of decades, we’re finding more reasons to see some accurate history in the legends of the Trojan War (Here is one link on that topic and here's another). It’s not such a leap that the heroes who fought on the plain of Troy were originally real men who lived and breathed. But there’s also been an infusion of myth and legendary grandeur into these heroes. For example, Achilles’ mother is said to be the powerful sea goddess Thetis who freed Zeus, King of the gods, when the rest of the Olympians ganged up on him. That’s some parentage. So where did Achilles’ mythological tradition originate?

Myth and legendary heroes are a lot like archaeological digs. They have many layers of complex elements that they acquire over time. I think the Hittite myth of the warrior god Telipinu accounts for part of the Achilles tradition—perhaps its starting point in the shift from man into myth.

Much of “Greek” mythology actually has its origins in various Near Eastern traditions, so it isn’t surprising to find portions of Achilles’ story arising on the eastern side of the Aegean. Moreover, the Hittites were the dominant empire surrounding Troy (in what is now Turkey) during the time when the Achilles legend would have started. The Greeks of Achilles’ time had major interactions with the Hittites. The oral tradition that reworked the stories of the Trojan War and Achilles developed over a thousand years and came to a final form around 750 BC in this same region and spans both the rise and fall of the Hittite Empire. I think the oral bards were influenced by the myth of Telipinu as they gradually took the historical reality that lies behind the Trojan War and turned it into a spellbinding tale that eventually became the Iliad we know today. 

So why do I think this? Listen for the correlations between the Greek and Hittite stories.

Here are the relevant key pieces of the Achilles’s story as we have it from the Greeks:

Achilles as healer, Attic red figure vase

1. As I noted, Achilles has divine parentage, a semi-divine status greater than that of other sons of gods, who are strong but not preeminent over all others in battle

2. Achilles becomes angry at an insult from one of the other Greek kings, Agamemnon, and withdraws from the battlefield

3. The Greek word Homer uses for Achilles’ anger means cosmic, divine anger, not the ordinary sort. When Achilles withdraws from the battle the Greeks die in droves

4. Achilles’ presence brings well being for his men, his absence destruction. The Greeks send a delegation to persuade him to come back to the fighting so they don’t all die.

5. When Achilles goes back into battle after the death of his friend, he battles a river and burns both it and its riverbanks up in the process (with some divine assistance)

6. Besides his killing prowess, Achilles is known as a healer, one who preserves life

Here are some parallel elements taken from Harry Hoffner’s translation of the Telipinu myth in Hittite Myths (Society of Biblical Literature, Ancient World Series, 1998)

Hittite Warrior god, Telipinu type

1. Telipinu is the divine son of the Stormgod. His divine skill involves making the crops grow and rains come, as well as being a warrior. He has a particularly powerful role in the well being of humans

2. Telipinu is offended by either one or more of the other gods' "intimidating words" and withdraws in anger. His father says, "My son Telipinu became enraged and removed everything good."

3. Once Telipinu withdraws, the damage is cosmic in reach. "The mountains and trees dried up, so that shoots do not come forth. The pastures and springs dried up, so that famine broke out in the land. Humans and gods are dying of hunger."

4. The gods send different delegations, including a bee and an eagle, to entice Telipinu back so that everyone doesn't die. 

5. In one version of the myth, once the gods try to bring Telipinu back, he becomes "even more angry" and he destroys springs, rivers, brooks and riverbanks.

6. When Telipinu returns, plenty, abundance and fecundity also return. The human and sheep mothrs bear offspring and the king has longevity. Telipinu heals all the damage. 

I think this infusion of a tragic Hittite god helps explain the evolution of Achilles into the torn and anguished hero we find in Homer. By nature, Achilles is all-powerful and protective, and yet he causes devastation and dies engulfed in grief.

So the next time you hear someone celebrating “Western Civilization,” you might remind yourself that, in fact, from the beginning, our most iconic heroes and ideas arose from an active interaction between all parts of the ancient world. The notion of an east/west split is an anachronism we’d do better to leave behind.
_________________________________________________________

Judith Starkston writes historical fiction and mysteries set in Troy and the Hittite Empire. She is a classicist (B.A. University of California, Santa Cruz, M.A. Cornell University) who taught high school English, Latin and humanities. She and her husband have two grown children and live in Arizona with their golden retriever Socrates. Her debut novel is Hand of Fire.

Find an excerpt, book reviews, historical background, as well as on-going information about the historical fiction community on www.JudithStarkston.com

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Visit on Goodreads Hand of Fire or Amazon 

Myth & Folklore: Lobisome, the Galician Werewolf

By Jessica Knauss 

Art by picsfair.com 

The werewolf is a manifestation of fear in folklore all over the world. Some scholars believe the werewolf legend got its start in proto–Indo-European times, when warriors wore the skins of their animal totems. Such intimacy with the spirit of the wolf leads me to believe that more than fear of the unknown, the werewolf represents the dread that comes from recognition. In ancient times, and in rural areas today, wolves come sneaking in the night to kill livestock or babies and often the only evidence of their presence is a corpse found in the morning. When our ancestors did catch sight of a wolf, it stirred something deep inside, making an eerie connection between human and wolf in spite of their eternal antagonism. Don’t we all have a little wolf in us?

If the werewolf is universal, what makes the lobisome, the Galician werewolf, special? Perhaps it’s that in Galicia, a werewolf ended up in court to answer for his crimes.

Shrouded in ancestral Celtic lore, Galicia in the northwest is the most mythic region of Spain. On a rocky, windswept coast, Galicia is pelted by rain that leaves tendrils of mist where liminal beings, neither man nor wolf, might jump out at any moment to seize a lonesome traveler.

Manuel Blanco Romasanta didn’t have to do any jumping. In 1852, he was accused of pretending to be a guide for several women and their children, sending letters to their families to let them know that the victims had reached their destination while in reality killing them and using their fat to make fine tallow soap.

Romasanta is not the only man to have been accused of the bizarre (yet plausible at the time) tallow soap accusation. He is, however, the only accused to admit to the crime and present lycanthropy as a defense.

A 2004 film dramatizing the Romasanta case.

Romasanta was Spain’s first serial killer on record, but the most interesting aspects of his case are the ones that have a mythical or folkloric feel. Just as a werewolf is neither man nor wolf, but both, Romasanta is said to have been raised as a girl until he was six years old. People perceived him as effeminate throughout his life, something his short stature (under 4' 11'') probably encouraged. He seems to have always lived in-between.

Werewolf folklore in Galicia specifies that the seventh child of any union is likely to be afflicted with a curse. If the child is a girl, she’s liable to become a witch; if a boy, a werewolf. The godfather may ward off the curse by saying certain prayers at the baptism. Generally the curse doesn’t manifest until later in life. An afflicted werewolf will feel compelled to undress at a crossroads and wallow in the mud. If a wolf has already wallowed there, the transformation occurs and the werewolf uncontrollably attacks and eats defenseless people and babies. The most reliable way to reverse the curse at this point is to take the discarded clothing and burn it. Given this preoccupation with clothes and how they show or conceal one’s identity, it’s interesting that Romasanta also worked as a tailor.

His case was brought to trial in Allariz in October 1852. Romasanta admitted to killing thirteen people while in wolf form with two other wolves. According to him, their first spree lasted five days, and when he returned to his human form, he was surprised to see that the other wolves were also men, both from Valencia.

When asked to undergo the transformation in court, Romasanta claimed that his curse had lasted thirteen years, and the time period was over just the previous week, so he could no longer transform at all.

A page from Romasanta's phrenology report,
courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The claims were believable enough that the court ordered an investigation. Using phrenology, court-appointed doctors concluded that Romasanta displayed no signs of lycanthropy and that his crimes were committed by choice. The court found Romasanta guilty of nine of the slayings to which he had confessed and sentenced him to death. A French hypnotist who had been following the case was convinced he could cure Romasanta, who was merely suffering from monomania. After a few unsuccessful appeals, the hypnotist obtained a royal commutation of the death sentence from Queen Isabel II so Romasanta could be studied.

Unfortunately, Romasanta’s psychology will always remain a mystery. He died only weeks after his sentence was commuted. Although his cause of death was likely stomach cancer, there was still enough belief in the possibility of werewolves that it was rumored Romasanta was shot by a guard who wanted to see him transform.

Having based his defense in a myth, Romasanta himself gave rise to a legend: the Sacaúntos, a boogeyman who murders children for their fat, has been scaring Galician kids into good behavior ever since.

Jessica Knauss earned her PhD in Medieval Spanish with a dissertation on the portrayal of Alfonso X’s laws in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, which has been published as the five-star-rated Law and Order in Medieval Spain. A driven fiction writer, Jessica Knauss has edited many fine historical novels and is a bilingual freelance editor. Her historical novel, Seven NobleKnights, will be published in December 2020 by Encircle Publications. Find out more writing and bookish activities here. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter, too!

Myth & Folklore: The vampire Count Dracula

By Lisa J. Yarde

Bela Lugosi as the vampire Count Dracula

Strigoi. Nosferatu. Vampire. In such terms, a reference to the undead, corpses mysteriously kept alive by the blood of the living. Tales of them have existed since the time of the ancient Persians, then popularized in later centuries. None more famous than the blood-drinker Count Dracula immortalized in Bram Stoker’s novel and brought to life on the screen by actors from Bela Lugosi in 1931 to as recently as Luke Evans in 2014 , the legend of this particular vampire is rooted in facts. Dracula was real, not a count, but a prince of Wallachia in the 15^th century. To many of his enemies and contemporaries, his deeds epitomized extreme cruelty and bloodlust that only a demonic creature like a vampire would relish.

The real-life Prince Dracula III
of Wallachia

Born Vlad Dracula in the winter of 1431, the basis of the most popular vampire myth entered the world at a dangerous time for his people. The Ottoman Turks had invaded Eastern Europe bent on conquest. When Vlad was five, his father became the voivode or prince of Wallachia. A bitter struggle to hold power ended with Turkish support, but the cost proved high for Vlad’s father. He surrendered his two youngest sons, including Vlad’s brother Radu, as hostages. From the age of 13, Vlad endured a bitter existence among his captors. While he learned their language and religion, he also faced threats to his livelihood for his insubordination and witnessed the cruelty the Ottomans practiced against enemies of the states. If they expected the experience had subdued Vlad, they soon learned otherwise. Whereas poor Radu became the plaything of Sultan Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, upon release Vlad set about freeing Wallachia from Turkish domination. As Prince Vlad III of Wallachia, he started by refusing to pay tribute and nailed the hats of Mehmed’s ambassadors to their heads. His favorite method of punishment, impalement on wooden stakes, created gruesome forests of death across the landscape. His Turkish enemies soon gave him the epithet, Kazikli Bey or the Impaler Lord. He lost power over Wallachia twice and upon a third reign that lasted only two months, he died. So how did a freedom fighter become associated with the vampire legend?

A German woodcut showing Prince Dracula eating
among the bodies of impaled victims

The Irish author Bram Stoker had spent several years researching European folklore about vampires prior to publishing his novel in 1897. A copy of William Wilkinson’s Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with Political Observations Relative to Them introduced the Dracula family to Stoker, beginning with Prince Vlad II of Wallachia, the father of Stoker’s future antagonist. Stoker would have learned how the prince’s aristocratic relatives took the name Dracula originally after he became a knight in the Order of the Dragon in 1431, defending the country against Turkish invasions. In the modernized Romanian language, the name Dracul means devil, but in the medieval period, it meant dragon. At the time of the novel’s release, Victorian society was already aware of the vampire myth through poems and penny dreadful serials. It isn’t clear why Stoker chose the final name for the novel; earlier drafts were titled The Undead with Count Wampyr as the villain’s name. If Stoker learned anything of the real-life figure of Vlad Dracula, he found inspiration for his blood-sucking vampire in the brutal acts of a bloodthirsty man, who was not only cruel to his enemies, but people under his domain who he often punished for even minor infractions with impalement. The real Dracula may have been as terrible as the vampire later portrayed by Stoker. 

Sources: Radu R. Florescu & Raymond T. McNalley, Dracula - Prince of Many Faces, Bram Stoker - Dracula. All images in the public domain from Wikipedia.

Lisa J. Yarde writes fiction inspired by the Middle Ages in Europe. She is the author of two historical novels set in medieval England and Normandy, The Burning Candle, based on the life of one of the first countesses of Leicester and Surrey, Isabel de Vermandois, and On Falcon's Wings, chronicling the star-crossed romance between Norman and Saxon lovers before the Battle of Hastings. Lisa has also written five novels in a six-part series set in Moorish Spain, Sultana, Sultana’s Legacy, Sultana: Two Sisters, Sultana: The Bride Price and Sultana: The Pomegranate Tree, where rivalries and ambitions threaten the fragile bonds between members of a powerful family. Her short story, The Legend Rises, which chronicles the Welsh princess Gwenllian of Gwynedd’s valiant fight against English invaders, is also available.