Wódny Muž

Also Known As: Upper and Lower Sorbian “water man”; also nyks, nykus and nikus, borrowed from German Nixe; German Wassermann; his wife the wodna žona or water woman
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Wendish Mythology, Slavic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: He commands the water he lives in, raising it into flood and pulling anything that enters it down, and he reads the coming year well enough to move grain and butter prices at market.
Role in Mythos: He is the owner of every mill pond, slow river bend and lake in Lusatia, collecting his yearly count of the drowned and rewarding anyone who treats him decently.
Relation to Humans: He walks among Sorbian villagers without being recognised, buys and sells beside them, and his daughters dance at their festivals. He also takes their children, and the stories about him were told to keep those children away from the water.

Near Zittau, on nights when the moon is a quarter full, the sound comes off the river where the current goes deep and quiet and stops making any noise at all. It is a flat clapping, hands on thighs, and under it a voice counting. He is counting the patches of his coat, every small scrap of brownish-yellow leather that has been stitched into it, and he does this aloud, and he does it every month. Anyone who creeps to the overhanging bank to see will find him sitting there, very pale, black hair down past his shoulders, entirely absorbed in his arithmetic.

The temptation is to join in. People have. The trick is to call out a wrong number or clap out of time and spoil the count, and it works, in the sense that he throws himself over into the murmuring water and nothing at all happens to the person who interrupted him. What happens instead is that the clapping and the counting start up outside their own front door, every night, for as long as it takes. The cure is to give in and count along with him. At that point there is laughter from the dark, loud and pleased, and the visits stop.

The Sorbs of Lusatia call him the wódny muž, the water man, and also the nyks or nykus, a word their neighbours’ German handed them. His country is a good one for him. Łužica, the Sorbian name the Germans turned into Lausitz, means something close to marsh or waterhole, and the land is threaded with mill races, ponds, sluggish Spreewald channels and, now, the flooded pits of the Lusatian lake district. He lives at the bottom of all of it. His wife, the wodna žona, lives there with him, and so do their children, who come up and play with the children of the villages.

He is not an obviously monstrous thing, which is the point of him. In company he cannot be told from a man. Two details give the family away: the hem of the garment is always wet, and he wears a small red cap while she wears red stockings. In Upper Lusatian market towns the shoppers learned to watch for a man in a linen jacket with a soaked bottom hem who paid over the going rate for grain, because grain would then get dearer, or who undersold everyone, because the price was about to fall. His wife worked the same trade in butter. She was also seen on the banks in her red stockings, spinning, or spreading laundry out to bleach, and that meant rain coming and the water rising.

The best of the old stories was collected at Lohsa. When there was music at the tavern there, the water man’s daughters came to it, beautifully turned out, and danced with the young men without the least shyness, and only the wet hem of a skirt marked them out from the village girls. One of them fell for a lad known as handsome Georg, and he fell for her, and for a long time he walked her back only as far as the pond called Ramusch, where the Spree ran through the manor’s water, and no further. Eventually he went in. She took a fresh switch, he said afterwards, and struck the surface with it, and the water opened and left a fine green turfed road running down, and at the end of it was a house, and in the house he was made extremely welcome.

Not everyone comes back to tell it. He is owed a certain number of lives every year, man or beast, and he collects. He sits under the bank with a club and waits for small people to come too close. The water lilies are bait, and a hand reaching for one is a hand he can take. Bodies in the slow Spreewald channels silt over within days and are often never recovered at all, which is explained by saying that he eats them and keeps their souls in clay pots down in the mud, arranged in rows like a garden. Blue marks on a drowned man’s skin are the sign that the nixes and not the water did it. After his winter sleep he wakes hungry, and that is the season the floods come.

He drowns people. Most of the tellings do not soften it.

The same figure lends seed grain to farmers who cannot afford it, drives fish into the nets of men who have been polite to him, and warns a village before the water comes over. One story has a midwife walking past a pond and being asked, courteously, to come down: his wife was in labour. She went in, delivered the child, was paid handsomely and came out dry. Abuse his good will and the account is settled in the usual currency.

His power stops at the waterline. On dry land he is weak, and a man who catches him there can keep him and put him to work as a servant, which is a strange and slightly comic ending for something that has been eating the parish for generations. The other limit is that he can be outwitted by anyone willing to look foolish, which is what the counting game at Zittau is really about.

Much of what is known was written down in the middle of the nineteenth century, by Ernst Willkomm in 1845 and by Karl Haupt in his Lusatian legend book of 1862, both of them drawing on the Sorbian scholar Jan Arnošt Smoler, and later gathered properly into Sorbian by Adolf Černý. He has not been retired. A house in Malschwitz is named for him, a nursery in Räckelwitz is called K wódnemu mužej, and in 2023 the district of Spree-Neiße had his legend drawn as a comic and translated into Lower Sorbian by the songwriter Bernd Pittkunings, then handed out to kindergarten children who are learning the language. The oldest use of the story is still the working one. Stay away from the edge.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Wódny Muž?

The Wódny Muž is the water man of Sorbian folklore in Lusatia, a spirit who owns the region’s ponds, rivers and mill races and drowns people who enter them. He is also called the nyks or nykus, and in German the Wassermann. He lives underwater with a wife and children and comes ashore looking exactly like an ordinary man.

How can you recognise the Wódny Muž?

The hem of his clothing is always wet, and he wears a small red cap; his wife wears red stockings and his daughters have a damp skirt hem. In the Zittau tellings he looks different, with a very pale face, long black hair and a suit of brownish-yellow leather made of small patches that he counts aloud by moonlight while slapping his legs.

What does the Wódny Muž do to people?

He is owed a set number of victims every year, human or animal, and lures bathers and curious children into the water to take them. Blue spots on a drowned body were read as his mark. He is said to devour the drowned and keep their souls in clay pots on the bed of the lake.

Is the Wódny Muž evil?

He is dangerous rather than simply evil. The same stories that have him drowning children also have him lending seed grain to poor farmers, driving fish into a fisherman’s net and paying a midwife generously for helping his wife give birth. Treat him decently and he repays it; cheat him and he collects in the usual way.

How do you escape the Wódny Muž?

On dry land he loses his power and can be captured and even forced into service, so the safest ground is away from the bank. In the Zittau story his counting can be disrupted by joining in with the wrong number, though he then follows the offender home and claps outside the door until they count along with him properly.