Lady Midday

The rye stands still at noon. Nothing moves in it, not the heads of grain, not the air above them, and the reapers who have been swinging since first light feel the heat settle across the backs of their necks and stay there. Somewhere past the cut swathes the horizon begins to shiver. That is her hour, and the people who worked those fields agreed on very little about her face and almost everything about what she did once she arrived.

Her name is simply the time of day. Polednice in Bohemia, Południca in Poland, Poludnitsa across Russia and the Balkans, Připołdnica among the Sorbs of Lusatia, Poloznicha away north among the Komi, all of it built on the old word for half-day. She is one of the few beings in Slavic belief whose identity is a clock reading.

In Bohemian telling she comes as an airy white lady, or as an old woman who drifts along the field paths at noon and then wanders into houses. Sometimes she does not walk at all but floats high up in violent gusts of wind, and whoever she touches from that height dies suddenly, without a named illness to explain it. Sometimes she is slight and slim, a girl of about twelve, carrying a whip. Anyone she strikes with it is marked for an early death, though the tellings never say how long the mark takes to work.

Moravia gives her an uglier body: an old woman in a white gown, with slanting eyes, hair in disorder and horses’ hoofs under the hem. The Polish Południca is grander and worse. She stands tall in a white robe that reaches her feet and carries a sharpened sickle, and she spends the summer in the fields and at the wood’s edge chasing down whoever is working there. Peasants blamed her for the shimmer on the far side of a hot field, and said that when she finally left the grain she went accompanied by seven large black dogs. Women and children were the ones she came back for.

The Sorbs of Lusatia recorded the strangest rule. Anyone she meets in the field at noon has to talk with her for a full hour, and about one thing only. Change the subject, run dry, lose the thread, and the penalty is your head or a sickness she chooses. Often she asks the questions herself, and they are agricultural rather than riddling: how flax is grown, how hemp is grown, the ordinary knowledge of the work being done in front of her. A woman bends to gather a sheaf and finds a tall figure in a white gown already standing in the stubble, sickle in hand, waiting for an answer about retting flax. The hour runs to one o’clock. She is holding a conversation, and it is a capital examination.

Russian belief strips away the talk. There she appears as a tall, beautiful girl in a white gown who lures small children in among the standing stalks, and who walks the field at harvest and takes hold of the heads of anyone still bent over the crop, twisting their necks until the pain drops them. Siberian Russians pictured her differently again, as an old woman with thick curly hair and hardly any clothing, living down among the reeds and the deep nettle beds, stealing badly behaved children. Elsewhere in Russia she is simply the guardian of the field, which is the same being seen from the farmer’s side rather than the labourer’s.

Nobody wrote down where she came from. There is no birth for her, no parents, no first appearance, nothing that turns her into a story with a beginning. She is attached to an hour rather than to an event, and the collectors who went looking in the nineteenth century found her already fixed there, as much a feature of the summer field as the heat haze.

The one full narrative she has is a literary one, and it is savage. Karel Jaromír Erben wrote the ballad Polednice in 1834 and set it in his collection Kytice, where a mother, worn past patience by a screaming child, threatens to call the noon witch to take him. He does not stop. On the stroke of twelve the thing she named is standing in the room, and it wants the boy. The mother snatches him up and runs, the witch comes after them through the house, and the mother goes down in a faint with her arms locked around her son. The father comes home at the end of the day to find his wife unconscious on the floor and the child dead in her grip. She smothered him herself while saving him.

Antonín Dvořák set the ballad as a symphonic poem in January 1896, fresh back in Bohemia after three years in America, and gave the witch to the bass clarinet and the child to the oboe, with twelve strokes of a bell to bring noon into the room. Belief in her was not a museum piece by then. Władysław Reymont, writing of Polish village life in the 1880s, has the południce named among the topics that come up when the villagers gather to tell stories through a winter evening, sitting there in the list alongside the drowned women and the revenants.

Around Prudnik in Upper Silesia they knew a near twin of hers called the Chabernica, the Cornflower Wraith, a slim young woman dressed in blue with cornflowers in her hair who also walked the field boundaries at midday. She took particular offence at trampled grain and at sharp tools. Those she judged were first put to sleep by her whisper, and then woke to headaches, paralysis or a ruined lower back, and the unluckiest of them woke with broken arms, legs or necks. The way to stay clear of her was to stop work for the midday Angelus.

Her powers all run out of the same source, which is the hour itself. She can appear where she likes inside it, indoors or out, on the wind or on the ground. She can compel speech and hold a person in one place for as long as she wants them. She can twist a neck, break a limb, hand out an illness with no visible cause, and take a child out of the grain so completely that the grain closes over the fact. Nothing in the record suggests a weapon works on her.

Her limits are equally plain, and they are why she was useful to tell children about. She holds the field at noon and only at noon, and the hour ends. Answer her flax questions correctly, or keep the conversation running the full sixty minutes, and she goes. Rest indoors while the bell rings and she has nobody to meet. Keep the children out of the standing crop and there is nothing for her to lure. Every rule for surviving her is a rule for not being in the hot field at the hottest hour of the day, which is the other reason the stories lasted as long as they did.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Lady Midday?

Lady Midday is a Slavic noon demon who appears in the fields at the height of summer, usually at harvest time. Her name comes from the word for half-day and is the same across the Slavic languages: Polednice in Czech, Południca in Polish, Poludnitsa in Russian. She is best known in Bohemia, Poland, Russia and Sorbian Lusatia.

What does Lady Midday do to people working in the fields?

She attacks people still working at noon. In Russian belief she grabs the heads of reapers and twists their necks until the pain forces them down. In Bohemia her touch brings sudden death, and in Poland and Lusatia she sends grievous illnesses on those who displease her. She also steals unattended children out of the standing grain.

What questions does Lady Midday ask?

Among the Sorbs of Lusatia she demands that anyone she meets in the field talk with her for a full hour about a single subject, and she often sets the topic herself with questions about growing flax and hemp. Anyone who cannot answer, or who lets the conversation wander, forfeits their head or is struck with sickness.

What does Lady Midday look like?

Most accounts give her a long white gown, but the figure inside it changes by region. Bohemian tellings make her an airy white lady, an old woman, or a slim girl of about twelve carrying a whip. Moravia gives her horses’ hoofs, slanting eyes and wild hair. Polish and Sorbian accounts describe a tall woman carrying a sharp sickle.

Is Lady Midday the witch in Dvořák’s The Noon Witch?

Yes. Dvořák’s symphonic poem Polednice, Op. 108, composed in 1896, sets a ballad Karel Jaromír Erben wrote in 1834 about this exact being. In it a mother threatens to summon the noon witch to take her misbehaving son, the witch arrives on the stroke of twelve, and the mother smothers the child by accident while trying to shield him.

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