GermanicWriters from the sixth century on, as noted in the last chapter, testify to the
Germanic reverence for rivers, springs, and trees. Procopius (Bell. Goth. 2. 15.
23) reports that the people of Thule, by which is meant some part of Scandi-
navia, ‘worship many gods and demons, celestial, aerial, terrestrial, and
marine, as well as certain powers said to exist in the waters of springs and
rivers’. His wording is too vague to reveal whether these powers manifested
themselves in female human form. In later Germanic folklore there are water
sprites of both sexes, the males being apparently more prominent.^26
A tenth-century German source attests belief in ‘agrestes feminae quas
Silvaticas vocant’; they are said to show themselves at will to their lovers and
take their pleasure with them, and again, as the fancy takes them, to vanish.^27
These are clearly wood nymphs, with the same erotic proclivities as we have
noted in nymphs of other nationalities. There are many later stories of wood
spirits forming unions with mortal men.^28
In north Germany and Scandinavia different types of tree were under the
protection of different ‘mothers’ or ‘ladies’, who received offerings and
prayers and whose permission had to be asked if a tree was to be cut: the
Elder-Mother or Lady, the Ash Lady, the Alder Lady. In central Germany there
were tree-spirits known as Holzfräulein, Waldfräulein, Moosweiblein, and the
like.^29 Their life was bound up with the life of the trees, and they could die
in consequence of a woodcutter’s assault.^30
From the mass of material collected by Grimm and Mannhardt on
women of the wild in Germanic lore I pick out a few further points. They can
befuddle people’s wits, making them lose their way in the forest or impairing
their long-term sanity.^31 They can be paragons of beauty, as implied by the
Old Norse phrase fríð sem álfkona, ‘lovely as an elf-woman’. On the other
hand they are sometimes hairy all over, or covered with moss or foliage. In
Unter Engadin (eastern Switzerland) the sprites known as Dialen were
conceived to be good-looking and amiable but to have goat’s legs, like Pan.^32
In Danish legend the elf-women, who dance on the grass by moonlight, look
(^26) Grimm (1883–8), 433–5, 487–99.
(^27) Burchard of Worms, Decreta 19. 5 (Patrologia Latina cxl. 971c); cf. Mannhardt (1905),
i. 113.
(^28) Cf. Mannhardt (1905), i. 79, 88, 102 f., 109, 112, 135, 152 f.
(^29) Grimm (1883–8), 432, 651 f.; Mannhardt (1905), i. 10 f., 74–86. Burchard’s ‘Silvaticae’ may
represent a vernacular name of this sort.
(^30) Mannhardt (1905), i. 75, cf. 69 (a Bohemian meadow spirit), 89, 91 n. 1 (Tirol), 124; an
analogous story of an elf who resided in a tree-stump, 62 f.
(^31) Ibid. 108 f., 112, 126, 129. (^32) Ibid. 95 n. 1.
- Nymphs and Gnomes 289