Rusalka

The tale of the Rusalka

In the villages of the old Slavic lands, people knew that a girl who drowned did not simply die. If she drowned unmarried, or took her own life for love, or died before her time, her soul did not rest. She became a rusalka, a pale water maiden who lives at the bottom of the river or lake where she died.

Rusalki are beautiful in a cold, wrong way. Their skin is white as the moon, their eyes are green or empty, and their long loose hair is always wet, tangled with river weed. If a rusalka's hair ever dries, she dies at last. So she keeps a comb with her, and combs her hair on the bank to draw water through it. Some tales say that if a rusalka loses her comb, she loses her power.

Rusalka Week

For most of the year the rusalki stay under the water. But in early summer, in the week after Pentecost (called Rusalka Week or Rusal'naya Nedelya), they come out. They climb into the birches and willows along the riverbanks, swing in their branches and run through the rye fields. On moonlit nights they dance in rings in the meadows, and where they have danced the grass grows thicker and greener.

They also sing, and that is the danger. A young man who hears a rusalka's song and follows it to the water is tickled until he laughs himself to death, or pulled down into the river, never to come up. Villagers kept away from the water that week. Women hung embroidered cloths and ribbons in the birches as gifts, to keep the rusalki kind, and people carried wormwood, which the rusalki hate.

Two faces

In the south, in Ukraine and among the Southern Slavs, the rusalki were once gentler: spirits of water and fertility who brought rain to the fields. The darker picture of the drowned bride, the one who lures men to their deaths, grew stronger in the 19th century, when poets and composers took up her story. Both are true in their way. The river that feeds the fields is the same river that drowns.

Rusalka in Battle of Myths

Rusalka is a cost 2 Slavic mage and assassin. Her ability, Drowning Song, drags her target under, dealing magic damage every second for three seconds and chilling it. With the Slavic heroes she shares the Cycle of Morana: the first time she falls, she rises again as a spectral spirit. For someone who has already died once, it comes naturally.

Did you know?

• Antonín Dvořák's opera Rusalka (1901) contains the famous Song to the Moon, one of the most loved arias ever written.
• Alexander Pushkin's unfinished play Rusalka tells of a miller's daughter who drowns herself for love and becomes queen of the river.