Undine
Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Freiherr de La Motte-Fouqué
1811
In a fisherman’s cottage by a moonlit lake, a beautiful young woman named Undine has been raised among humans, though she is no human herself. She is an undine, a water spirit, creature of the depths and the mist, longing for the soul she cannot possess. When the knight Huldbrand arrives seeking shelter, he finds himself captivated by her wild, luminous presence, and Undine discovers that a water spirit may earn a soul through true love and holy matrimony. Theirs is a love that crosses the boundary between element and flesh, between the world of water and the world of men. But the lake remembers its own, and the forces that gave Undine life will not easily surrender her. This 1811 German Romantic fairy tale is one of the most haunting explorations of identity, love, and what it means to possess a soul. It gave the undine her name in literature and influenced Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid. For readers who crave romantic tragedy with the weight of myth, this is a rare thing: a story that understands love as both salvation and destruction.
