Anjana

Water comes out of the ground in Cabuérniga cold enough to make your teeth ache, and according to the people who lived beside it, the water talks. Better still, something answers. A woman no bigger than a child sits on the bank with her feet in the current, black braids down her back finished off with coloured silk, holding a conversation with the spring as though the two of them had known each other a long while.

There is a name for her, and the name has been in that country a very long time. She is an anjana, and the work she does is unglamorous. An old shepherd’s cattle stop drifting and settle in the high pasture with nobody driving them. A widow’s washing is on the line before she has hauled the basket down to the water. A garden belonging to a woman with too many children has been weeded overnight, the rows clean, the pulled stalks stacked at the end of the bed. None of it is witnessed. It is simply done by morning, and everybody knows who did it.

She is described with unusual precision for a creature nobody claims to have photographed. Braids of jet or gold, ribboned in coloured silk. A crown of wild flowers. A long fine white tunic under a blue cloak. Skin that the tellings return to again and again as extremely white, and a gaze that people kept calling serene and loving, which is a strange thing to say about a spirit and tells you something about how she was regarded. In her hand she carries a rod of ash or of hawthorn, sometimes a gilded pike, and she strikes the ground or the water or an object with it when she wants the world to change. She does not have to stay in that shape either. She can be a neighbour, a tree, an animal, or a thing lying in a ditch that you would step over without a second look.

Her pedigree is older than her name. Around the year 572 the bishop Martin of Braga wrote a plain-spoken sermon for the country parishes of the northwest, listing the demons his flock were still feeding. In the sea they called him Neptune, in the rivers Lamiae, in the springs Nymphs, and in the woods Dianae. Those Dianae never quite left. The historian Joaquín González Echegaray, working on the dark centuries between the fourth and the ninth, pointed out that the Cantabrian countryside had simply kept them under new names: the dianas became anjanas, the lamias became lumias, and the Roman januaria at the turn of the year became the local bijanera. Diana went into the ground speaking Latin and came back up speaking Cantabrian.

Under the fells she is said to keep palaces, hidden in caves and in the deep sinkholes the locals call torcas, and in them a great deal of gold. The gold is not for her. It is bait and it is reward, offered to tempt the covetous into showing what they are and to quietly settle a debt owed to somebody humble enough not to ask. This is the point of her, and the reason she has a partner in the stories. The Ojáncanu is the one-eyed giant of the same valleys, malice with a body on it, and his wife the Ojáncana is worse because she takes children. The anjana walks behind them repairing the damage: the tree split by the storm, the animal with the broken leg, the traveller who lost the path in snow.

The one narrative that shows her full strength is not tender at all. A young woman and an old man rode into Los Tojos on white horses, and she was very pale with high colour in her cheeks and her braids were fine and bright. A jándalo, home from a working life in Andalusia, fell in beside them. He had ruined five girls without a night’s lost sleep over any of them, and intended to make it six. They rode. He walked, then trotted, then ran to keep up. On the climb at Tajahierro he was wheezing from pure exhaustion, and she kept turning in the saddle to tell him, there was one, there were two, there were three and there were five. She said it several times. By the top of the hill he was a very large, very thin dog, and the wolves ate him in Campoo that same night. The rider and the old man were both anjanas.

Everything she can do follows from what she is. A spirit that lives in running water can heal, because that is what springs were for; a spirit of the woods can change shape, because the woods do; a spirit that keeps a hoard underground can make a poor family rich overnight. Her limits follow just as directly. She works on desert, which means she is useless to anyone who deserves nothing, and the stories are careful to show her refusing as often as giving. Llano also recorded wicked anjanas, though he noted that their power was generally cancelled out by the good ones, which is the sort of tidy arrangement that ought to make a reader suspicious.

Almost all of it comes from one man. Manuel Llano was born at Sopeña in Cabuérniga in 1898, worked as a sarruján or shepherd’s boy, and led his blind father about before the family moved to Santander. In 1928 he won the Ateneo de Santander folklore prize with a piece called Tablanca, published the following year in the Boletín de la Biblioteca de Menéndez Pelayo as Mitos y leyendas populares recogidas de la tradición oral. It runs to only seventeen items, and the anjana is among them. Each carries a named informant with an age and a village, women in their fifties and sixties from Terán and Sopeña, which is real fieldwork and not invention. In 1931 he published Las Anjanas in the same journal and the story collection Brañaflor in the same year. He died of a heart attack on the first morning of 1938, three weeks short of forty.

He is also the problem. People who knew him said his own gentleness got into the material, that he stripped the malice out of the beings he was given and made fairy godmothers of working country witches. He admitted himself that in Campoo and elsewhere he was told about helpful good witches who had no name at all: the word anjana belongs properly to Cabuérniga, and it does not travel as far as she does. What we have is genuine oral tradition with one writer’s hand pressed into it, and after a century it is no longer possible to say exactly where the one stops and the other begins.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an anjana?

An anjana is a benevolent fairy of Cantabrian mythology in northern Spain, associated with springs, streams and woodland. She helps the poor, the lost and the sick, keeps treasure in caves and sinkholes, and can change her shape into a person, an animal, a tree or an object.

Are anjanas good or evil?

Anjanas are overwhelmingly good, which is what distinguishes them from most fairy classes. They protect honest people, lovers and travellers who lose their way, and they punish the cruel and the greedy. Manuel Llano did record wicked anjanas, but noted that the good ones usually neutralised them.

What is the relationship between the Anjana and the Ojáncanu?

The anjana is the direct opposite of the Ojáncanu, the one-eyed giant who personifies cruelty in Cantabrian folklore, and of his wife the Ojáncana. Where they break and kill, the anjana mends: the storm-split tree, the injured animal, the traveller lost in the woods.

Where does the name Anjana come from?

The name descends from the Latin Diana through a medieval form, jana, and belongs to the same family as the Asturian xana. In about 572 Martin of Braga condemned country people for worshipping Dianae in the woods, and the historian Joaquín González Echegaray identified those Dianae as the ancestors of the Cantabrian anjanas.

Who wrote down the anjana stories?

Almost all of them come from Manuel Llano (1898 to 1938), a writer from Sopeña in the Cabuérniga valley who collected oral material from named informants and published it in the Boletín de la Biblioteca de Menéndez Pelayo in 1929 and 1931. People close to him believed his own kindness led him to soften the figures he recorded, so the anjana as she is known today is partly his.

Related Entries

Ojáncanu, Trenti, Trasgo, Busgosu, Sirenuca, Xana, Enchanted Moura, Lamiak, Mari, Mairu, Duende, Diana, Nymph