Mare (folklore)

The mare is attested as early as in the Norse Ynglinga saga from the 13th century.[11] Here, King Vanlandi Sveigðisson of Uppsala lost his life to a nightmare (mara) conjured by the Finnish sorceress Huld or Hulda, hired by the king's abandoned wife Drífa. The king had broken his promise to return within three years, and after ten years had elapsed the wife engaged the sorceress to either lure the king back to her, or failing that, to assassinate him. Vanlandi had scarcely gone to sleep when he complained that the nightmare "rode him"; when the men held the king's head it "trod on his legs" on the point of breaking, and when the retinue then "seized his feet", the creature fatally "pressed down on his head".[12] In Sámi mythology, there is an evil elf called Deattán, who transforms into a bird or other animal and sits on the chests of sleeping people, giving nightmares.[13]

According to the Vatnsdæla saga, Thorkel Silver (Þorkell Silfri) has a dream about riding a red horse that barely touched ground, which he interpreted as a positive omen, but his wife disagreed, explaining that a mare signified a man's fetch (fylgja), and that the red color boded bloodiness. This association of the nightmare with fetch is thought to be of late origin, an interpolation in the text dating to circa 1300, with the text exhibiting a "confounding of the words marr and mara."[14]

Another possible example is the account in the Eyrbyggja saga of the sorceress Geirrid accused of assuming the shape of a "night-rider" or "ride-by-night" (marlíðendr or kveldriða) and causing serious trampling bruises on Gunnlaug Thorbjornsson. The marlíðendr mentioned here has been equated to the mara by commentators.[15][16][17]

In Germany, they were known as Mara, Mahr, or Mare.

German Folklorist Franz Felix Adalbert Kuhn records a Westphalian charm or prayer used to ward off mares, from Wilhelmsburg near Paderborn:

Such charms are preceded by the example of the Münchener Nachtsegen of the fourteenth century (See Elf under §Medieval and early modern German texts). Its texts demonstrates that certainly by the Late Middle Ages, the distinction between the Mare, the Alp, and the Trute (Drude) was being blurred, the Mare being described as the Alp's mother.[22]

Mare from Polish folklore – graphics by Kasia Walentynowicz

Etymologically, Polish zmora/mara is connected to Mara/Marzanna, a demon/goddess of winter.[23] It could be a soul of a person (alive or dead) such as a sinful woman, someone wronged or someone who died without confession. Other signs of someone being a mare could be: being the seventh daughter, having one's name pronounced in a wrong way while being baptised, having multicoloured eyes or a unibrow (exclusive to the Kalisz region, Poland). If a woman was promised to marry a man, but then he married another, the rejected one could also become a mare at night. A very common belief was that one would become a mare if they mispronounced a prayer – e.g. Zmoraś Mario instead of Zdrowaś Mario (an inverted version of Hail Mary[23]). The mare can turn into animals and objects, such as cats, frogs, yarn, straw or apples.[24] People believed that the mare drained people – as well as cattle and horses – of energy and/or blood at night.

Protection practices included:

• drinking coffee before sleeping,
• taking the mare's hat,
• throwing a piece of a noose at the demon,
• sleeping with a leather, wedding belt or a scythe,
• inviting the mare for breakfast,[25]
• changing one's sleeping position,
• smearing feces on the front door,
• leaving a bundle of hay in one's bed and going to sleep in another room.

To protect livestock, some people hung mirrors over the manger (to scare the mare with its own face) or affixed dead birds of prey to the stable doors. Sometimes the horses were given red ribbons, or covered in a stinking substance.

A Czech můra denotes a kind of elf or spirit as well as a sphinx moth or "night butterfly".[26] Other Slavic languages with cognates that have the double meaning of moth are: Kashubian mòra,[27] and Slovak mora.[28]

In the northwest and south Russian traditions, the mara is a female character, similar to kikimora. Usually invisible, it can take the form of a black woman with long shaggy hair, which she combs, sitting on a yarn.

In Croatian, mora refers to a 'nightmare'. Mora or Mara is one of the spirits from ancient Slav mythology, a dark one who becomes a beautiful woman to visit men in their dreams, torturing them with desire before killing them. In Serbia, a mare is called mora, or noćnik/noćnica ('night creature', masculine and feminine respectively).[29] In Romania they were known as Moroi.

Some believe that a mora enters the room through the keyhole, sits on the chest of the sleeper and tries to strangle them (hence moriti, 'to torture', 'to bother', 'to strangle', umoriti, 'to tire', 'to kill', umor, 'tiredness' and umoran, 'tired'). To repel moras, children are advised to look at the window or to turn the pillow and make the sign of the cross on it (prekrstiti jastuk); in the early 19th century, Vuk Karadžić mentions that people would repel moras by leaving a broom upside down behind their doors, or putting their belt on top of their sheets, or saying an elaborate prayer poem before they go to sleep.[30]