Fairy Treat- Water Fairies- The Undine

The Undine

"Undine" means wave, and undines are the sea fairies of ancient Greece, who appeared in the Aegean Sea as seahorses with human faces. More usually they have the appearance of a beautiful human, but they lack souls. The idea of a "soul" in Christian tradition is tied in with damnation and salvation---that undines have no soul means that they are outside human laws.

A story is told of a handsome knight called Huldebrand, who fell in love with Undine, whom he met in an enchanted wood. He took her home as his bride, but water sprang everywhere from beneath her slender feet, and folk began to whisper that she was not human. Huldebrand turned to his old sweetheart Bertalda, whom the other water fairies began to torment. Undine trapped the fairies in a well, and Huldebrand took her back. However, to pay for a trinket that the fairies had stolen from Bertalda, Undine pulled a coral necklace from the Danube for her. Seeing this, her husband accused her of still being a fairy and not fit to be with humans, whereupon Undine sadly disappeared beneath the waves. He and Bertalda planned to marry, but on their wedding morning Huldebrand was seen embracing a misty form near the waterside, whereupon he fell dead.

In this, as in many stories, union with a water fairy probes fatal to a human. There are several meanings to this. It is true that contact with fairies can be "fatal" (or nearly so) to the modern, rationalist outlook, for the world of enchantment does not operate by logic. This would appear to be most dangerous to men, who are presumable most tempted by the magical because it is opposite to their usual way of thinking and being. However, folktales also reflect a Christianity-induced fear of what were really the old goddesses and gods of Nature. The undines are often prepared to meet us halfway, but we must accept that their fluid world, where images dissolve in a watery prism and nothing is as it seems, is as valid as ours. We must let it teach us about beauty and mystery, and never expect to understand it. Paradoxically, in this way we may come to know it, deep in our souls.