Lauma

At dusk on a Lithuanian riverbank the sound carries a long way: a wooden beetle cracking down on wet linen against a flat stone, over and over, at the hour when every woman in the village is indoors with her supper. Nobody walks down to look. The washing at that hour belongs to the laumės, and they have firm opinions about being watched.

The word is old and shared across the Baltic languages. Lithuanian has laumė, Latvian has lauma or laume, and Old Prussian is reconstructed with the same stem. What it originally meant, nobody has established; Jonas Balys, who spent a working life on Lithuanian folk narrative, concluded that the origin of the name is entirely unclear. That is unusual for a being this deeply embedded. Her root is scattered across ordinary Lithuanian speech and across the map: laumžirgis, the everyday word for a dragonfly, is literally the laumė’s horse; laumės juosta, the laumė’s sash, is a folk name for the rainbow; there are hills called Laumės kalnas and stones called Laumės akmuo. In Žemaitija the fossil belemnites turned up by the plough were called laumės papas, the laumė’s teat, one name among several the same stones collected from the devil, the kaukas and the thunder god.

She is always female, always roughly the size of a woman, and never small in the way that later English fairies became small. Beyond that the descriptions pull in two directions. Nijolė Laurinkienė, working through the Lithuanian legends, found the tellers describing laumės either as handsome young women, or as female beings of an unpleasant and unnatural cast: big teeth, long arms, iron nails, hairy, lame, walking on the legs of a hen or a cockerel or the hooves of a horse. Latvian collectors did far worse. Out of a whole national archive there is exactly one record, taken down in 1961, that describes what a lauma looks like, and it gives only long hair and animal legs.

Norbertas Vėlius sorted what she does into four things: women’s work, the fostering or the injuring and swapping of children, dealings with men, and harm done to livestock. A fifth belongs to the legends attached to particular places rather than to the household tales, and it is on a different scale altogether. In those, laumės heap up the hillforts, dig out the lakes, throw up castles and dam the rivers. The same beings who quarrel over a bundle of flax are also credited with the shape of the countryside.

A woman in the Rokiškis district knew that laumės used her bathhouse, so she began leaving hot water and fresh birch whisks for them before she went up to the house. They started leaving her things in return: a length of homespun, a pair of sleeves, a towel, all of it worked so well it was a pleasure to look at. That is the whole story. There is no bargain, no summoning, no price named on either side.

Where she comes from, no source says. There is no birth, no parentage and no first laumė, and the tellers do not seem to have felt the gap. The nearest thing to an origin sits on the Latvian side of the border, and it is an origin for her replacements rather than for her. Sandis Laime has traced how the Latvian word slid across to mean simply a witch, and how the older nature spirit it had named was left needing a new label. She got one: svētmeita, holy maiden. Those beings live in caves and rocks and hills, spin more than they do anything else, and are said to come from the souls of women who never married or who died a bad death. In Kurzeme that belief was still being collected in the middle of the twentieth century.

The most widely told laumė story turns on flax running out. A woman sits up late spinning and a laumė comes to help, or is invited, and spins at a speed no human hand could match. Then the woman realises how little fibre is left in the basket, and she is afraid, because when the flax gives out a laumė will go on spinning with whatever is nearest: hair, veins, entrails. So she runs outside and shouts back through the door that there is a fire somewhere and children are crying in it. The laumė bolts for her own children. The woman bars the door behind her. Balys noticed that this exact sequence turns up in Celtic countries and not in German folklore, which makes the borrowing, if it is one, a long and awkward journey.

The other famous plot is the swap. A laumė takes a healthy infant and leaves a laumiukas in the cradle, and the way to get your own child back is to carry the substitute out into the yard and beat it. The mother appears at once, furious, and the fury is the point of the tale: she has been raising the human child properly, she says, and look what has been done to hers. Then the exchange is reversed. In 1850 a Latvian newspaper ran a piece against the belief, built around a man who wanted his child baptised quickly, before the laumas could get to it.

Her powers are all extensions of competence. She spins, weaves and washes at a speed that reads as supernatural because it is simply the human skill without the human limit, and the cloth she gives away does not run out. She can move earth and water on a landscape scale. In Latvia, by the seventeenth century, her characteristic crime had narrowed to taking the milk out of other people’s cows, and there she is barely distinguishable from the raganas and spīganas doing the same. In Lithuania the word collapsed into ragana too, and by the eighteenth century a laumė was a witch who could fly, turn herself into a snake or a toad, and turn other people into birds, dogs and horses.

Her limits are the interesting part. She is not a household spirit; unlike the aitvaras or the kaukas she has no place at the hearth, and she goes back to the water and the woods. She has no separate country to retreat into, no court, no community with rules of its own, which is where she parts company with the fairies she is usually translated into. She can be lied to, and the lie that works is always about her own children. And she is bound tightly to reciprocity: she cannot simply be exploited, because greed is the one thing she reliably punishes. Today lauma is an ordinary Latvian girl’s name, and the word a Latvian translator reaches for when the English text says fairy.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Lauma?

A lauma, called laumė in Lithuanian, is a female nature spirit of Latvian and Lithuanian folklore who lives by rivers, lakes, forests and fields. She is the size of an ordinary woman and is famous for spinning, weaving and laundering with superhuman speed and skill. She is neither good nor evil by nature, and treats people roughly as they treat her.

Why do Laumas steal babies?

The legends do not give a motive; they simply record that a lauma takes a human infant and leaves one of her own, a laumiukas, in its place. In the tales the substitute is recovered by carrying it out into the yard and beating it, which brings the lauma running to complain that she had been raising the human child well. The swap is then reversed and each mother takes her own back.

What is the connection between Lauma and spinning?

Spinning, weaving and washing linen are her defining occupations, and she does them faster than any living woman. In the best known Lithuanian legend a lauma helps a woman spin through the night, and the danger is that when the flax runs out she will start spinning the woman’s hair, veins and entrails. Her name also attaches to the rainbow, which Lithuanians called laumės juosta, the lauma’s sash.

How do you protect yourself from a Lauma?

Courtesy and small offerings work: one Lithuanian woman left hot water and birch whisks in her bathhouse and was repaid with fine cloth. The taboos matter as well, since no mortal woman was to spin on a Thursday evening or launder after sunset, when the laumas were doing it themselves. In the spinning legend she is driven off by a lie, when the woman shouts that there is a fire and children are crying in it.

Is Lauma the same as a witch?

Not originally, but the two words merged. In Latvia by the seventeenth century lauma had come to mean a milk-stealing witch, and in Lithuania by the eighteenth century laumė was being used interchangeably with ragana, a witch who could fly and change shape. The older nature spirit survived in western Latvia under a new name, svētmeita, meaning holy maiden.

Related Entries

Laima, Ragana, Aitvaras, Kaukas, Velnias (Velns), Perkūnas, Giltinė, Žemyna, Saulė, Mara, Changeling, Rusalka, Vila, Fairy