the unlucky marriage of one of them to the Nart hero Axsartag. She turned
them both into fishes, and so they spent a year together in the sea, but after
they went to live in his homeland disaster struck, Axsartag killed himself, and
she returned to the waters. But she was pregnant with twins, and had to go
back to the Narts to give birth to them; they were the heroes Uryzmæg and
Hæmyts. Uryzmæg was later taken to visit his relatives under the sea. In the
nineteenth century Ossete girls went to river banks on the Saturday after
Easter to pay their respects to Donbettyr’s daughters.^17
Armenian folklore knows of good fairies, the Parik, who often take the
form of beautiful women and dance amid nature. The forest is inhabited by
theMayrekin, the mistress of the cedars or of the wood. There is also a
collectivity called the Ya v e r zˇaharsunk‘, the ‘eternal brides’, who are protectors
of young life and assist brides and young mothers.^18 Hellenists will recall that
the Greek word ν3μφη, besides meaning ‘nymph’, also means ‘bride’, both in
the sense of a woman shortly to be married and of one newly married.
Greek, RomanNymphs play a major role in Greek myth, religion, and folklore.^19 They are
associated with the sea, rivers and springs, trees, caves, and mountains.
The sea nymphs, the Nereids, are a class apart; the others are less clearly
differentiated. In early epic there are references to Naiad nymphs, that is,
nymphs of flowing water (Il. 6. 21 f., Od. 13. 356, al., cf. 17. 240), tree nymphs
(Meliai, Hes. Th. 187), and mountain nymphs (Il. 6. 420, ‘Hes.’ fr. 10a. 17, cf.
Th. 130). The divine assembly in Il. 20. 4ff. is attended by all the nymphs
‘who inhabit the fair groves and the river waters and the grassy meadows’.
Circe (herself called a nymph) is attended by female servants who ‘come
from springs and groves and holy rivers’ (Od. 10. 350 f.). Hesiod includes
two catalogues of nymphs in his Theogony; one is of the Nereids (240–64),
the other is of the daughters of Oceanus, ‘who nurture men on earth with the
lord Apollo and the Rivers... widely scattered they haunt the earth and the
(^17) Sikojev (1985), 15–24, 40–2; G. Dumézil, Le livre des héros (Paris 1965), 14, ‘Au siècle
dernier, le samedi qui suit Pâques, les jeunes filles célébraient sur le bord des rivières le culte
gracieux des filles de Donbettyr, assurant ainsi aux maisons et aux écuries les vertus que recèle
l’essence puissante des eaux.’
(^18) Ishkol-Kerovpian (1986), 100, 134 f., 159.
(^19) H. Herter, RE xvii. 1527–81; Jennifer Larson, Greek Nymphs (Oxford 2001); Fátima Díez
Platas in J. C. Bermejo Barrera and F. D. P., Lecturas del mito griego (Madrid 2002), 169–328. On
the Nymphs (Νερα ́ ϊδε) in modern Greek folklore see Bernhard Schmidt, Das Volksleben der
Neugriechen (Leipzig 1871), 98–131; J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek
Religion (Cambridge 1910), 130–73.
286 7. Nymphs and Gnomes