Who is Lady Midday?
Most ghosts come at night. Lady Midday comes when the sun is at its highest. In Lusatia she is called Připołdnica in Sorbian, in Poland Południca, in the Czech lands Polednice. She appears in the fields as a tall woman in white, often with a sickle in her hand, and speaks to people who are still working at noon.
The deadly question
In many Sorbian legends she asks questions, for example about how to grow and process flax. Anyone who can keep answering until the noon hour is over is saved. Anyone who falters has their head cut off or drops dead. Friedrich Sieber recorded one of these legends under the title “Die Mittagsfrau fragt zu Tode” (Lady Midday questions you to death). Elias Canetti took up the motif in the chapter on question and answer in Masse und Macht.
Origins and sources
The most important German-language collections date from the 19th century: Karl Haupt’s Sagenbuch der Lausitz of 1862, Johann Georg Theodor Grässe’s Sagenschatz des Königreichs Sachsen, and Edmund Veckenstedt’s Wendische Sagen of 1880. An older trace leads to the Bible: in the Latin Vulgate, Psalm 90 speaks of the daemonium meridianum, the demon of noon.
There is also a very practical explanation. Anyone who stayed out in the fields in the midday heat during harvest risked heatstroke and sunstroke. The legend sent people into the shade.
In literature, music and games
In 1853, Karel Jaromír Erben made the Polednice a bogeyman figure in his ballad collection Kytice: a mother threatens her child with the noon witch, and the noon witch comes. Antonín Dvořák set the ballad to music as a symphonic poem in 1896. In The Witcher 3 she appears as the noonwraith.
Episode on this topic
Further reading
- Karl Haupt: Sagenbuch der Lausitz, vol. 1, Leipzig 1862.
- Johann Georg Theodor Grässe: Der Sagenschatz des Königreichs Sachsen, Dresden 1855.
- Edmund Veckenstedt: Wendische Sagen, Märchen und abergläubische Gebräuche, Graz 1880.
- Friedrich Sieber: Wendische Sagen, 1925.
- Karel Jaromír Erben: Kytice, 1853.
- Elias Canetti: Masse und Macht, 1960.