Xana

Before sunrise on San Juan’s morning in 1921, a folklorist knelt at a spring at the foot of a high rock wall in Somiedo, between Aguinos and Perlunes, close to the border with León, and drank. The place was called the fountain of the Xanas. Aurelio de Llano Roza de Ampudia had spent years going from parish to parish taking down stories with the teller’s name, age and date beside each one, and that spring marked the western edge of what he found. West of a line running from the coast at Cudillero through Belmonte to Somiedo, he wrote, there were no caves or springs carrying her name and no old people who had ever heard of her.

East of the line she was everywhere. His book, *Del folklore asturiano* (1922), lists her addresses the way a surveyor lists wells: the Cogolla cave on Monte Naranco above Oviedo, caves in Colunga, Llanes, Cangas de Onís and Lena, springs in Aller, Quirós, Mieres and Grado, a river of the Xanas in Proaza, a meadow of the Xana in Laviana. In Llanes she was the *injana*, a short step from the anjana of neighbouring Cantabria. In Ponga she was the *xiana*, and in Muros de Pravia the *xania*.

She is small. Llano calls the xanas a kind of tiny nymph, extraordinarily beautiful, with very long hair, and adds two details that the picture-book version has since lost: they wear the ordinary dress of the country, and they are Christian. Illustrators later put her in a long white gown and made her hair fair, and one writer on the subject admitted that a white tunic simply suits magic better than the complicated Asturian costume. Llano’s informants were not thinking about what suits magic. In a cave at La Llera, they told him, live the most beautiful xanas in Asturias, and also the hairiest.

What surrounds her is gold, and most of it is domestic. At the mouths of their caves the xanas spin and hang out skeins of gold thread, bright enough in sunshine to be seen shining from a long way off. Their hens and chicks are gold, and so are their combs, their distaffs, and the pins they bowl with on the meadow on San Juan’s morning. Neighbours near one spring in Candamo heard their tambourines at night. On the shore at Gozón, people standing by the sea could hear the gold chicks cheeping inside the sea caves.

On Monte Naranco a linen thread used to come out of the eye of a little spring called the Fontica. Women from round about went there to wind it into balls for sheets and shirts, and it never ran out. One Sunday a woman named Juana Prin was winding away when her husband called her to mass, and she stopped, and the thread snapped. A voice came up from inside the spring: “Curse you! If you had not broken the thread, my enchantment would soon have been over.”

Most of the stories run on that same hinge, a gift that works until someone breaks a rule, and the rule is always small. A shepherd girl in Ponga was given a ball of thread and told only that her mother must never ask where the end was. The mother wove yards and yards of cloth, then one day wondered aloud where the end might be, and thread and cloth were gone. A seamstress who helped a xana through labour in the Cogolla cave was invited to take anything she liked from a table of gold, and chose a small pair of golden scissors. A woman at Cardo, in Gozón, saw a white rosary poking out of a spring and reached for it for her daughter, and a xana rose up and asked her how she was supposed to say her prayers without it. The woman left it and went home ashamed.

There is no male xana. Llano says flatly that nobody has any news of a *xan*, and yet the xanas have children. When no one is looking they lift a farm baby out of its cradle and leave a *xanín* in its place, and in every district where xanas lived he found the same story. The reason varies. At La Canga, in Colunga, the mother reasoned that the xana had no milk of her own, and refused the hairy stranger the breast until the xana came and swapped them back: “Take your little snot-nose and give me my hairy one.” At the cave of Santa Marina in Vidiago the reason was holier. When the mother demanded her child back, the *injana* answered that she had not handed the baby over to be reared. She had handed it over to be baptised.

A xanín can be caught out. On Monte Alea a xana with a son who was very old and had never said a word asked the first beggar woman on the road what to do. Set eggshells all around the fire, the woman said, and sit him behind them. The boy looked at the shells and spoke at last: “A hundred years since I was born, and never so many pots together at the fire have I seen.” Llano heard the reverse version in many districts, with a farm wife roasting apples around the hearth to test the child in her own cradle. The trick works because the child is not a child.

Getting a xana out of her enchantment is harder than getting her child out of a cradle. In a cave above the beach at Aguilar, in Muros de Pravia, lived a *xania* whose own parents had enchanted her for some grave fault. She could be freed only by a man who would carry her in his arms from the cave down to the beach without stopping and without letting her fall, and his reward would be the treasure she kept wrapped in a spotted ox-hide. A horseman finally tried. As he ran she came out of the spell, and as she came out of it she grew, and grew heavier. The sky went black over the sea, the waves rose, lightning and thunder broke over the sand, and with the beach almost under his feet he took fright and dropped her. She went back up to her cave weeping, and nobody in Muros has seen her bowling on the beach since.

A widower in Carrandena came home from the fields to find his two small children washed and combed and the house in order, and hid to see who was doing it. It was a xana. She agreed to stay, curing a sore on his leg with *anzuela* leaves, on one condition: he must never tell her what he heard when he passed the Moru cave. A voice there kept calling, “Sister Xana, come and see your mother, she is very ill.” In the end he told her. She threw her flax hackle at his legs and left, telling him that four more days of silence would have made him rich and freed her for good. A shepherd of Ponga who took a xana home lost her in exactly the same way.

The best-known test of all belongs to the enchanted women of San Juan, whom later writers often fold into the xanas. Llano himself kept the two apart. Recorded in Les Regueres in 2006 from Ángeles Sánchez Llana, aged 82, it goes like this. A young man is given four-cornered loaves by enchanted ladies and told to keep them. His wife finds them and breaks off a corner, and the bread bleeds. She patches it with a little stick. When he brings the loaves back, one turns into a lame horse, and the enchantment holds. The lady’s parting gift is a broad ribbon, which the man, not trusting her, ties around a chestnut tree. The tree splits from top to bottom. A version recorded in Allande in 1997 swaps the ribbon for a sash, and Allande lies west of Llano’s line.

Beside the treasure in the rock, in Asturias, there is often a guard. Llano describes the cuélebre as a winged serpent that keeps both treasures and enchanted people in caves and deep springs, and on San Juan’s morning, he says, it loses its power. More recent writing on the xana notes stories in which she herself takes the shape of that serpent.

Her name has a respectable argument behind it. Ramón Menéndez Pidal derived *xana* from *Jana*, an old Latin by-form of *Diana*, and pointed to a matching word in the Algarve for night-spinning fairies and to a thirteenth-century Arabic vocabulary from Catalonia that glossed its fairy-word as *jana*. He also connected the medieval charge of riding by night with Diana to an Asturian tale of trapping a xana by leaving a horse out for her to ride. As a boy, he recalled in his prologue to Llano’s book, he heard that the men who tried it spread pitch on the horse’s back, and a *xan*, a xana’s child, came away stuck to it. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, offered the Greek nymphs who carried off Hylas as her ancestors, declined to press the resemblance. Llano’s own view was that she belongs with the fairies of Sicily, Ireland, Brittany, France and Scotland. The word may come from Diana. The woman at the spring does not behave like her.

Her power is wealth, and a sharp tongue to protect it. She pays in gold for help, gives thread and cloth without end, and curses a theft in earnest: when a woman of Muros carried off the Aguilar *xania*’s golden scissors, the xania sang that she hoped to see the thief boiled and roasted, and the woman’s cattle died and trouble fell on her family. On the Nalón, a legend has the xanas coming out on moonlit nights to sing, and any young man who listened was bound to the singer unless he could manage not to pay attention, which almost none of them could.

Her weakness is that she cannot free herself. She needs a mortal to keep a silence, carry a weight, or leave a thread unbroken, and human nature fails her almost every time. At Salas, in Colunga, a xana chased a woman who had stolen one of her silver skeins as far as a line on the ground that she could not cross, and caught her there. In the struggle the xana stepped on the line with her big toe, which came off and turned to gold. Weeping, and lame, she forgave the thief and gave her the golden toe to buy a milk cow for her children. And all the treasures of San Juan’s morning, the combs, the gold chicks, the bowls on the meadow, vanish before the first rays of the rising sun can reach them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a xana in Asturian folklore?

A xana is a small, very beautiful fairy woman of Asturias in northern Spain who lives in caves and springs, often under an enchantment. She owns gold thread, combs and other treasures, pays mortals who help her, and curses those who steal from her. Aurelio de Llano recorded dozens of xana stories with named informants in his 1922 book *Del folklore asturiano*.

Where do xanas live?

Xanas live in caves, springs and rivers in central and eastern Asturias, including Monte Naranco above Oviedo, Colunga, Llanes, Cangas de Onís, Quirós and Proaza. Llano found no trace of them west of a line from Cudillero through Belmonte to Somiedo. Local names include injana in Llanes, xiana in Ponga and xania in Muros de Pravia and Cudillero.

Why does a xana swap her baby for a human one?

A xana takes a farm baby from its cradle and leaves her own child, the xanín, so that a village woman will nurse it, since in one account she has no milk of her own. In another telling, from the cave of Santa Marina in Vidiago, she says she left the child so that it would be baptised. She takes her own child back when she chooses and returns the human baby unharmed.

How can you tell if a baby is a xanín?

The traditional test is to startle the changeling into speaking. In one Asturian tale a xana was told to ring the fire with eggshells, and her silent son said that in a hundred years he had never seen so many pots at the fire. In the more common version a mother roasts apples around the hearth and the child in her cradle gives itself away with the same words.

Does the name xana come from the goddess Diana?

The philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal argued that xana comes from Jana, an old Latin form of Diana, citing a similar word for spinning fairies in the Algarve and a thirteenth-century Arabic vocabulary from Catalonia. That is an argument about the word. In the collected stories the xana is an enchanted woman of the springs who spins, bears children and hopes to be freed, not a hunting goddess.

Related Entries

Cuelebre, Anjana, Nuberu, Busgosu, Trasgo, Ojáncanu, Trenti, Enchanted Moura, Lamiak, Changeling, Diana, Melusine, Naiad, Nymph, Fairy