Poludnitsa

The harvesters of the Russian and Polish wheat fields knew an unwritten rule. Between eleven in the morning and one in the afternoon you did not work in the open field. The reason was not the heat. The reason was that the Poludnitsa was walking, and if she found you in the wheat she would put a question to you, and if you could not answer she would twist your head until your neck broke, or strike you with sunstroke, or simply lead you in circles until the village found you the next morning lying in the row.

Her name is built from poludne, the Slavic word for noon, and the ending that turns a moment into a person. The Russians called her Полудница. The Poles called her Południca. The Czechs called her Polednice. The Lusatians called her Připołdnica. The Düringsfelds, working in Ragusa in the 1870s, found her on the Adriatic too, where the locals called her podne roga, the noon horns, and used her as a children’s bogey to keep the kids indoors during the burning hours of the Mediterranean afternoon. The Düringsfelds noted her precisely because she was the proof that the South Slavs of the coast had not lost the demon of the North Slavic wheat field. From Smolensk to Ragusa the Slavs feared the same woman at the same hour.

Appearance

She is tall. The harvesters who described her to the Russian folklorist Aleksandr Afanasyev in the 1860s said she was the height of a wheat sheaf standing on end, taller than any woman in the village. She wears white. The whiteness is the colour of the noon sun on the bleached wheat, and it is the colour the Slavs used for death and for the dead more generally. Her hair is sometimes described as the colour of the wheat itself, sometimes as black. She carries a sickle, often a sickle that looks too large for her hand. In some Polish accounts she carries shears.

The Czech Polednice in Karel Jaromír Erben’s nineteenth-century ballad version is recognizably the same figure: a tall thin woman in white who walks into a peasant cottage at noon to take the screaming child the mother has threatened her with. The mother had used the demon’s name to frighten the child. The demon had heard her name and come.

Behavior

The Poludnitsa works the noon hour. She walks the rows at the brightest part of the day, when the heat is at its highest and the harvesters are at their most exhausted, and she finds the man or woman who is still working when the others have gone to the shade. She approaches and asks a question. The question is usually about the work itself. How do you spin flax? How do you reap rye? What is the proper order of tasks for the harvest? The catch is that she expects an answer of a particular length. Some accounts say she expects the harvester to talk for an hour, until the noon hour ends and she has to leave. Others say she expects an exact technical answer with no errors. If the harvester runs out of words, or makes a mistake, or grows confused in the heat and starts to repeat himself, she takes him.

The taking is sometimes a twist of the neck. Sometimes a stroke that leaves him paralyzed in the field. Sometimes a long walk in circles that ends in collapse and death from the sun. The Russian peasants who described her to Afanasyev had a clear sense that she was the personified form of sunstroke, the noon disease that fell on field workers in the worst part of the summer when the rye was ripe and the work could not wait. She was the answer to the question of why a healthy man could walk into the field at midday and never walk out.

The Question Game

The question game is the most particular detail in the tradition. The Polish folklorist Jan Karłowicz collected several variants in the 1890s. In one version, recorded in eastern Poland, the Poludnitsa asks the harvester to name every plant in the field in order of usefulness, from most useful to least, without repeating. The harvester who answered correctly was rewarded with a gift of grain. The harvester who failed was found at sunset with his neck broken. In another variant from Lusatia, she asks the woman spinning flax to recite the entire process of flax cultivation from sowing to weaving, in detail, without skipping a step. The woman who could do it lived. The woman who could not was struck dumb for the rest of her life.

The detail underneath the game is that the Poludnitsa was the demon who tested whether you actually knew your work. A village in which the older women had taught the younger ones the full procedure of flax or rye or hemp had no fear of her. A village in which the knowledge had begun to slip lost workers in the noon hour. The folklore is teaching as well as warning. The demon is the punishment for knowledge that has not been transmitted.

The Children

She also took children. The Czech Polednice version that Erben used for his ballad is the most familiar: a mother loses her temper with a screaming child and threatens it with the noon demon. The demon hears the threat as an invitation, walks in through the open door at exactly twelve, and takes the child from the mother’s lap. The mother only realizes too late that she has handed the child over by speaking the name. When the husband comes home from the field for his noon meal, he finds the mother unconscious on the floor and the child dead in her arms, suffocated.

The same prohibition runs through Russian and Polish nursery practice. You do not say the demon’s name in the noon hour. You do not threaten a child with her. You do not speak of her in the field at noon. The Düringsfelds collected the same prohibition from Ragusa, where the podne roga was a name spoken in winter and never in summer. The Mediterranean coast had lost the wheat-field detail and kept the children’s-bogey detail, which makes sense for a population whose summer afternoons were spent indoors out of the sun while the inland Slavs were out in the rye.

Origin and the Underlying Logic

The Poludnitsa is older than her documentation. Hanuš Máchal in the 1890s and Kazimierz Moszyński in the 1930s both argued that she belongs to a pre-Christian pan-Slavic stratum of field demons that included a noon spirit, a midnight spirit, a wind spirit, and an evening spirit, each running one quarter of the day’s danger. The noon spirit was the strongest because the noon was the most dangerous hour. The Slavs farmed wheat and rye in continental climates where the summer noon could kill a worker through sunstroke faster than any other time, and the demon was the personification of that fact in a culture without thermometers or shade hats.

The deeper layer is that the Slavs, like every Indo-European agricultural culture, had a sense that the moment of greatest light was also the moment of greatest danger. The Greeks called the noon hour the meridian, and the Greek countryman feared the meridiani, the noon demons, in much the same terms. The Latin tradition gave the same hour to the daemonium meridianum, the noon demon of Psalm 91, which the church fathers reinterpreted as the demon of spiritual sloth, the acedia that struck the desert monks at the hottest hour of the day. The Poludnitsa is the Slavic version of the same demon in a wheat field instead of a monastery.

Protection

The standard protections were practical. You stayed out of the field between eleven and one. You took your noon meal in the shade of a tree at the edge of the rows or in the shadow of a haystack. You did not lie down to sleep in the open at noon, because that was when the demon walked, and a sleeping man was easier to take than a standing one. You carried iron, a sickle blade-up against the body or a knife in the pocket. You did not say her name aloud in the field.

When she did appear, the only defense was to speak. The harvester who could keep talking, who could answer her question slowly and thoroughly until the noon hour ended at one, would be left alone. She had to leave when the sun moved off the meridian. The trick was to use the time. The Russian folklorists collected several formulas the harvesters used as stalling tactics, long traditional proverbs about the seasons that could be recited slowly and that satisfied the demon’s question even when the question had been about something else. The peasants were buying time from a creature that owned only one hour, and the trick worked often enough to be worth teaching to every child who would one day go into the field.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The noon demon is one of the most widely documented spirits in European folk religion, with parallels across the Mediterranean and into Central Asia. The Greek Mesimeriatika, the Roman daemonium meridianum, the German Mittagsfrau, the French fée de midi, the Spanish duende del mediodía, and the Iranian daēna of the noon hour all cover the same dangerous moment in the day. The Slavic version is the most fully developed because the Slavic peasant economy depended most directly on the open field at the worst hour, and because the Slavs preserved the female personification of the demon in the most detail and across the largest territory.

The Düringsfelds were proud of finding her in Ragusa, because the Mediterranean coast was the last place a North Slavic field demon should have survived. The fact that she had survived there, under a Slavic name with an Italian gloss as the podne roga, told them that the South Slavic coastal population was still pan-Slavic at the level of folk religion long after it had become Mediterranean at the level of economy and language. The noon woman is the demon who proves the Slavs are the same Slavs, from the Russian black earth to the Dalmatian limestone, between eleven and one on a hot day in late June.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Otto Freiherr von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld and Ida von Düringsfeld, Ethnographische Curiositäten (1879), chapter on Dalmatian coastal superstitions, for the Ragusan podne roga
• Aleksandr Afanasyev, Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature (1865-1869), volume 3
• Jan Karłowicz, Słownik gwar polskich (1900-1911), entries Południca and Przypołudnica
• Hanuš Máchal, Nákres slovanského bájesloví (1891)
• Kazimierz Moszyński, Kultura ludowa Słowian (1929-1939)