Xana

Before sunrise on the twenty-fourth of June, the water in an Asturian spring runs cold enough to ache in the teeth. That is the hour people went to look. The stories agree on the details with unusual precision: she sits on the wet stone at the mouth of the fountain, a small woman with hair down past her waist, drawing a comb through it slowly while the light comes up behind the hills. The comb is gold, or sometimes silver. The water keeps talking underneath her. If she notices the watcher, what happens next depends entirely on what kind of person the watcher is.

She is the xana, and for most of the last two centuries she has been the most familiar figure in the folklore of the wet green north of Spain, where limestone means caves and caves mean springs. Her territory runs east into León and west into the edges of Galicia. She is always female and always attached to fresh water, and she is fixed to the landscape rather than floating free of it. The map of Asturias is still dotted with fountains and pools and caves that carry her name, which is a durable kind of evidence, because a village does not name its own well after a creature nobody talks about.

Constantino Cabal, who spent years assembling *La mitología asturiana* in the 1920s, made a point that later collectors have mostly accepted. The enchanted women of Asturian story go by a dozen labels: *encantadas*, princesses, *moras*, *dueñas*, *señoritas*. Underneath the local vocabulary there is one being, and it is the xana. His contemporary Aurelio de Llano Roza de Ampudia had already spent three years walking the province with a notebook for *Del folklore asturiano* (1922), and the xana turns up in his pages the way weather does, in every parish, doing broadly the same things with local variations in the ending.

Physically she is neither monster nor goddess. She is a woman, complete and unremarkable in outline, except that she is unusually small, unusually beautiful, and her hair, most often fair, is long enough to be a nuisance. No tail, no wing, no hoof hidden in the grass. The only prop that never varies is the comb. She uses it at first light and on the shortest nights of the year, and everything the stories mean by her, the vanity, the patience, the fact that she has nothing to do but wait, is carried in that one gesture.

Her voice does the rest. On spring and summer nights the singing comes up out of the ground along with the sound of the water, and the effect depends entirely on the listener. Someone with a clear conscience hears it and is filled with a peace they will remember for the rest of their life. Someone without one feels the air close over their mouth, and a few of them do not come back right. She offers travellers water to drink and rewards of gold or silver to those she judges deserving, and in no version of the story is anyone ever told what the standard is.

Nobody explains where she came from, either. She is not created in these tales, she is discovered, already in place and already under a spell, and that is the crucial thing about her. To be *encantada* in the older Spanish sense is to be held, and the engine of her entire folklore is that somebody put her there and only a mortal can get her out. Her name is argued over too. The most repeated guess derives *xana*, and the Cantabrian *anjana* beside it, from Latin *Diana*. That is a guess about a word. It is not evidence that a Roman hunting goddess survived in a Spanish valley for fifteen centuries, and the honest position is that the origin of the word is unknown.

The disenchantment sits at the heart of it, and it usually takes the form of a test that looks trivial and is not. In the version collected across Asturias as *el bollu de cuatro picos*, she gives a man a four-cornered loaf and tells him to keep it whole for a year. Keep it whole and she goes free and the hoard is his. He is a farmer with a hungry house and a hard winter in front of him, and the loaf sits in the cupboard going stale, and the stories are not sentimental about how these things end.

That hoard is the *ayalga*, the treasure sealed in the rock, and in Asturias it is rarely left unattended. Coiled in the dark beside it is the cuélebre, the winged serpent that keeps both the gold and the woman, so that freeing one means dealing with the other, and the night of San Juan is the hinge on which both turn.

Then there is the business with the children. A xana bears young, called *xaninos*, and she cannot feed them, because she has no milk. So she goes to a farmhouse cradle and makes a swap. The mother works it out when her baby grows a year in a month. The test for it is domestic and faintly comic: set the pots on the hearth and scatter eggshells among the embers, and the thing in the crib will forget itself and blurt out that in a hundred years of life it has never seen so many eggshells by the fire.

Not all of them are kind. The darker xanas come in through keyholes, take a person and enchant them, turn themselves into animals, steal food out of the pantry, hand over belts that should not be worn. Her powers follow from what she is: she owns the water and the gold beneath it, her song bends whoever hears it, she can change shape, and on midsummer night she drives out herds of impossible cattle that pour back into the eye of the spring at first light.

Her limits are the same list read backwards. She cannot leave her fountain. She cannot nurse her own child. She cannot break her own enchantment, which is precisely why she needs a farmer with a stale loaf and rather more self-control than most farmers turn out to have. And she can be seen only at the two thin edges of the day, so almost everyone who ever went looking for her walked home at full sunrise with nothing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Xana?

A xana is a water fairy of Asturian folklore in northern Spain, always female, always beautiful, and always bound to a particular spring, river or cave. She guards hidden treasure, sings on spring and summer nights, and is usually under an enchantment that only a mortal can break. She appears at dawn combing her very long hair with a comb of gold or silver.

Where do Xanas live?

Xanas live in fountains, springs, rivers, waterfalls and caves throughout Asturias, extending east into León and west into the edges of Galicia. Each xana is tied to her own body of water and cannot leave it. Many Asturian place names still mark the specific fountains and caves where xanas were said to appear.

How do you disenchant a Xana?

A xana is freed by a mortal who passes a test she sets, and the reward is the treasure she guards. The best-known Asturian version is *el bollu de cuatro picos*, in which she gives a man a four-cornered loaf and tells him to keep it intact for a full year. Most tellings turn on the fact that keeping the loaf whole is far harder than it sounds.

What is a xanín?

A xanín is the child of a xana. Because a xana produces no milk, she takes a human baby from its cradle and leaves her own infant in its place, which is why Asturian mothers watched for a baby that seemed to age a year in a matter of months. The traditional way to unmask a xanín is to put pots on the fire and scatter eggshells beside them, at which the changeling exclaims that in a hundred years it has never seen so many eggshells by the hearth.

Is the Xana the same as the Roman goddess Diana?

No. The most commonly repeated etymology derives the Asturian word *xana*, and the Cantabrian *anjana*, from Latin *Diana*, but that is a proposal about the history of a word rather than proof of an unbroken cult. The xana of the collected tales is an enchanted woman of the springs with her own body of story, not a huntress goddess, and the true origin of her name remains unsettled.

Related Entries

Cuelebre, Anjana, Ojáncanu, Trenti, Enchanted Moura, Lamiak, Mari, Basajaun, Changeling, Naiad, Nymph, Nix, Rusalka, Undine