Poludnitsa

A creature made of an hour

Most spirits in this material are tied to a place: the forest, the water, the house, the bathhouse. Poludnitsa is tied to a time. She exists between roughly eleven and two, in the open field, and outside that window she is not somewhere else — she is not at all.

Slavic belief treats noon as a boundary in the same way it treats midnight. The hour has no depth: shadows are short, the light is flat, the fields are empty because everyone with sense is lying in the shade. A person still out there at that hour is alone in a way they are not at any other time of the working day.

What happens to such a person is well known to anyone who has worked a harvest. The head aches, the neck stiffens, the vision goes strange, and in the worst case they collapse. The folklore does not describe this. It describes the cause: a woman in white who came along the boundary and spoke to them.

The interrogation

The encounter has a shape, and the shape is the interesting part.

She does not attack. She approaches, and she talks. In the recorded accounts she asks questions — often about work, in some versions specifically about the preparation of flax, in such detail that the answer is impossible to sustain. Keep answering and you are safe. Fail, hesitate, or try to change the subject, and she strikes: the head is twisted, the neck wrenched, illness follows.

Several versions put a scythe or a sickle in her hand, and some say she beheads. The cutting tool is doing double work. It is the implement of the field she guards and the instrument of the punishment, and the injury she inflicts — something wrong with the neck — sits precisely between the two.

A variant replaces the questions with dancing. She wakes a girl resting at the field edge and makes her dance until dawn, and nobody out-dances her — though an account collected in Russia allows that a girl who manages it is rewarded with a rich dowry. Both versions are the same trap in different clothes: an exchange you cannot win, entered into at the one hour nobody should be out.

What she looks like

The most common form is a young woman in white walking the boundary of a field. Beyond that the record does not settle:

• an old woman, not a young one
• a girl of about twelve
• a column of whirling dust moving along the edge of the grain
• in northern Russia, a figure carrying an enormous frying pan, held over the rye — to shade it from the sun in some accounts, to scorch it in others

The pan is a good illustration of how this material behaves. Two tellers in the same region give the same object opposite purposes, because what the belief actually encodes is that the rye at midsummer is at the mercy of the heat. Whether the spirit is the threat or the protection is negotiable; the heat is not.

From the field to the nursery

Poludnitsa has a second career as a figure used on children: stay out of the standing grain at midday or she will take you. Trampled grain is real damage, and a child alone in a field in July is in real danger, so the threat does two useful jobs at once.

In the West Slavic tradition she steps out of the field altogether. Karel Jaromír Erben's ballad Polednice, in his collection Kytice (1853), brings her indoors: a mother losing patience with a crying child calls for the noon witch, and the noon witch arrives. The poem ends badly, and it is the version most Czech readers meet first.

That is a literary text and should be read as one. It is excellent evidence for what nineteenth-century Czechs knew about the figure, and no evidence at all about peasant belief in the fields of Muscovy two centuries earlier.

Sister figures

She is not alone in the hot field. Russian tradition also knows the polevik, a male field spirit who appears at noon or at dusk, whose colouring matches the soil and whose height rises and falls with the crop — the same scaling rule that governs the leshy in the forest. He is reported to strangle drunkards asleep in the fields and to lead people astray in the standing grain, and to accept an offering of two eggs and an old cockerel laid in a ditch at the field's edge.

Placing them side by side makes the division visible. The polevik punishes the idle and the drunk: people who are in the field when they should be working. Poludnitsa punishes the diligent: people who are working when they should be resting. Between the two, every way of being in a field at the wrong moment is covered.

Why this one travelled

Of all the Slavic field spirits, Lady Midday is the one with the widest afterlife — in the Sorbian Mittagsfrau, in German regional figures like the Roggenmuhme, in Erben, in Dvořák's symphonic poem after him. The reason is probably that the danger she personifies is not local. The forest spirit requires a forest and the water spirit a particular river, but anyone who has worked outdoors in July recognises the noon hour, and recognises what it does to a person who does not stop.

Sources

The Russian material follows Ivanits (1989) and Vlasova (1995); Ralston (1872) is included as the early English transmission rather than as an authority. The Czech literary afterlife is Erben, Kytice (1853).

• William Ralston Shedden Ralston, The Songs of the Russian People, as Illustrative of Slavonic Mythology and Russian Social Life (1872). Ellis & Green, London
• Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (1989). M. E. Sharpe, Armonk NY
• Marina N. Vlasova, Novaya abevega russkikh sueveriy (A New Alphabet of Russian Superstitions) (1995). Severo-Zapad, St Petersburg