Asrai

What it is

The asrai is a water fairy told of in English story and story-books. It takes a woman's shape, lives under lake water, and tellers group it with mermaids and with nixies, another water being. In the verse where it first appears it is pale and mild, older than humankind, hiding from light at the bottom of its lake. Later collections make it timid and very beautiful, green-haired and web-footed, and one writer describes them as always female and two to four feet tall. Their lives are said to run to several hundred years. A retelling by Rosalind Kerven gives the asrai a fishtail in place of legs. Moonlight shapes its whole existence, and sunshine is said to end it.

Where it comes from

The word itself is a puzzle: nothing certain is known about where 'asrai' comes from, and the spellings 'asrey' and 'ashray' also appear. Its oldest trace in print is a poem, The Asrai, by the Scottish poet Robert Williams Buchanan, printed in April 1872. A second poem, The Changeling, followed in 1875, commissioned by the English journalist Robert Francillon for a Christmas number of The Gentleman's Magazine. Francillon had hoped for a piece built on the legends of Llyn Tegid, or Bala Lake, in Wales, but he later judged that Buchanan had ignored his suggestions and invented a myth entirely his own. Whether the asrai ever lived in ordinary folk belief is unclear, so its real starting point may be a single Victorian poem.

What it is for

No one prays to the asrai or works spells with it; in the tales, it is the lake itself that acts. In Kerven's retelling, the asrai tries to draw a man into the deepest water with talk of gold and jewels, meaning either to drown him or to cheat him. Coarse or vulgar speech from a human, though, will drive her off. In Tongue's account, a captured asrai pleads for freedom in a language no one understands, and its cold, damp hands scald the fisherman's skin as fire would, marking him for life. Meeting one, the stories suggest, brings danger or loss, never gift.

Peoples and places

The asrai belongs to English story, with a Welsh edge: the legend behind the poem commission came from Bala Lake, and Ruth Tongue set her asrai tales in Cheshire, Shropshire and along the Welsh Border. She was a British storyteller and collector whose work brought the creature back into notice a century after Buchanan. Nancy Arrowsmith's portrait of the creature as always female and two to four feet tall has travelled through many collections. Because Tongue's sourcing is disputed, scholars treat these county attributions as part of the story's literary life rather than evidence of local custom.

What people believe

The stories give the asrai firm rules. It dwells beneath its lake, fears light, and belongs to a world older than humankind. In Buchanan's The Changeling, a male asrai enters a human body and lives as a changeling, wanting what humans have: an immortal soul. Moon and sun govern it in opposite ways: moonlight is when it surfaces, once every hundred years, and moonlight is the only thing that ages it. Sunlight destroys it. In Tongue's telling, a fisherman who catches one covers it with wet weeds for the journey, but it protests in a fading voice until, at the shore, only a puddle remains.

When it is done

The asrai keeps a calendar of centuries, not seasons. It is said to surface once every hundred years, to bathe while the moon shines, and moonlight is the only thing that ages it. The rest of its long life is spent below, out of the light. The only dated occasion attached to it is a human one: a Christmas number of a magazine, in which the second poem about the creature appeared.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Scholars read the asrai as a creature of books rather than of oral tradition. Sarah Allison argues that its earliest and clearest source is Buchanan's nineteenth-century verse, and Francillon's later account supports that: he said Buchanan ignored the Bala Lake material and built a myth of his own making. Ruth Tongue's collecting is doubted too. Researchers have pointed out that her tales often borrow from popular fiction, and that she could pass off stories she made up or stitched together as genuine tradition. Several details of her asrai, including its trouble with moonlight and its melting, closely echo Buchanan's images. On this reading, Tongue's versions are literary reworkings, not records of an older belief, and the asrai is a modern myth that took shape as Victorian verse and later retellings in folk-tale dress kept answering one another across the twentieth century.

Compare and confuse

The asrai is repeatedly set beside water beings of wider story: the mermaid and the nixie. Its failure in daylight recalls Scandinavian trolls, which share the same frailty. One tale told of the asrai, in which it lures a man toward the deepest water with offers of gold and jewels, was earlier attached to a mermaid of Shropshire, before the name asrai existed for it. The second Buchanan poem also ties it to changelings, through a male asrai living inside a human body.

Today

The asrai now lives mostly on the page. Numerous collections of folk tales have reprinted or retold Ruth Tongue's stories, and the creature is often presented as traditional English or Welsh folklore, although the evidence for older belief behind it is thin. Tongue's work renewed interest in the being, and her versions supply most of the details now attached to it, from the green hair to the melting. On the current evidence, the asrai found in modern fairy anthologies is a literary water spirit wearing folk-tale dress rather than a documented local legend.

Questions people ask about Asrai

Good reading and sources

• Asrai on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data