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What this episode is about
This episode starts my four-part series on the real myths behind the monsters of The Witcher. Geralt calls her the Noonwraith, in Poland she is Południca, and in Lusatia people feared her as the Mittagsfrau, Lady Midday, with her sickle. I ask where the deadliest ghost of Slavic legend comes from: a being that does not appear at night but in the harsh light of the noon hour.
From a Witcher contract to Lusatia
The starting point is the Witcher contract “The White Lady.” From there I go to the Sorbian legends of Lusatia, collected in the 19th century by Karl Haupt in 1862, Johann Georg Theodor Grässe and Edmund Veckenstedt. Lady Midday asks people in the fields questions, and anyone who can’t keep answering until the noon hour is over dies. Friedrich Sieber recorded this legend as “Die Mittagsfrau fragt zu Tode” (“Lady Midday questions you to death”), and Elias Canetti took up the motif in Crowds and Power.
The noonday demon
An older trail leads to the Bible: in the Vulgate, Psalm 90 names the daemonium meridianum, the demon of noon.
Erben and Dvořák
In his 1853 ballad collection Kytice, Karel Jaromír Erben made the Polednice into the figure who takes a child after its mother threatened it with her. Antonín Dvořák set the ballad to music in 1896.
What CD Projekt Red changed
At the end I ask what the game changed about the old myth, and why.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Lady Midday (the Noonwraith)?
A field spirit of Sorbian and Slavic tradition who appears in the midday heat and kills people in the fields with questions or with her sickle.
More in the lexicon: Lady Midday.
About this episode
Geralt calls her a “Noonwraith.” The Poles call her Południca. And in Lusatia she was feared as the Noon Woman — sickle in hand. In Part 1 of our new four-part series on the real myths behind the monsters of “The Witcher,” we dig up where the deadliest ghost in Slavic legend truly comes from: a demon who doesn’t appear in the night, but in the merciless light of the noon hour.
We follow her from the Witcher contract “The White Lady” through the Sorbian legends of Lusatia and the biblical “noonday demon” to Dvořák’s chilling tone poem — and ask, at the end, what CD Projekt Red changed about the old myth. And why.
📖 Further reading & sources:
- Karl Haupt: Sagenbuch der Lausitz, Vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1862) – “Die Mittagsfrau. Připolniza”
- Johann Georg Theodor Grässe: Der Sagenschatz des Königreichs Sachsen, Vol. 2 (Dresden, 1855/1874) – “Das Mittagsgespenst”
- Edmund Veckenstedt: Wendische Sagen, Märchen und abergläubische Gebräuche (Graz, 1880)
- Friedrich Sieber: Wendische Sagen (1925) – “Die Mittagsfrau fragt zu Tode”
- Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht, 1960), chapter “Question and Answer”
- Kazimierz Moszyński: Kultura ludowa Słowian (Folk Culture of the Slavs)
- Karel Jaromír Erben: Kytice (1853), ballad “Polednice”
- Antonín Dvořák: The Noon Witch (Polednice), Op. 108 (1896)
- Research of the Sorbian Institute / Serbski institut on the Noon Woman
- Psalm 91:6 (Vulgate 90:6): “daemonium meridianum”
#LadyMidday #Poludnica #Noonwraith #TheWitcher #SlavicMythology #Folklore #Lusatia #Sorbs #Mythology #GreyTales