“A radiant maiden combing golden hair beside a forest spring, offering travelers a drink that may be love or ruin.”
In the green folds of Asturias, where the Cantabrian mountains drop their streams through beech woods, the clear water belongs to the xana. She is small wonder and old danger at once: a woman of extraordinary beauty who sits at the mouth of a spring or cave, combing long golden hair with a comb of gold. Her voice carries on spring and summer nights, and what it does to the listener depends on the listener — souls at peace feel peace, while the impure are sung toward madness.
The xana keeps accounts the way water keeps a shoreline: patiently and without mercy. She rewards the worthy with silver and gold, guards enchanted treasure that ruins the greedy who reach for it, and, unable to nurse her own children, slips them into human cradles in exchange for mortal infants. Generations of Asturian mothers watched their babies grow too fast and remembered her. She remains the best-loved figure of Asturian mythology, a spirit the region still names its springs for.
The Legend
Tradition places the xana wherever the water runs pure — fountains, waterfalls, river pools and the forested springs above the villages. Always female and always beautiful, she spends her days combing her golden hair with a comb of gold or silver, an object so charged with her power that mortals scheme to steal it. Those who try are cursed or transformed into animals. Those who instead prove themselves worthy may be led to her treasure and given what they can carry.
The darkest thread of her legend is the cradle swap. A xana cannot produce milk for her offspring, the xaninos, so she trades them for human babies, cuckoo-fashion. A suspicious mother could force the truth by setting a pot and egg shells by the fire, at which the changeling, startled out of its disguise, would cry out that in a hundred years of life it had never seen so many egg shells — a betraying verse still recited in the Asturian collections.
The Record
Folklorists sorting the Asturian material divide the xana's stories into four recurring types: changeling narratives, tales of breaking the spell on an enchanted xana, accounts of the treasures she keeps, and encounters with her malicious side, in which she slides through keyholes, steals food and bewitches households with enchantments, animal transformations and magic belts. The classification points to a tradition old enough, and dense enough, to have grown branches.
Her very name is a scholarly battleground. One school derives xana from Diana, the Roman goddess of wild places and the hunt, which would make the spirit a survival of the pagan religion the legions carried into the peninsula. The parallel figures of neighbouring traditions — the anjanas of Cantabria and of eastern Galicia — suggest a whole family of water-nymphs strung along the Cantabrian coast, each combing her hair beside a different spring.
The Lore
The xana's calendar peaks on the night of June 23, la noche de San Juan, the old midsummer vigil, when the xanas are always said to be seen and a mortal has the best chance of aiding one and earning her favour. An enchanted xana might be held captive with her treasure by the cuélebre, the winged serpent of Asturian myth, and the one who frees her wins all the golden things she guards — a bargain that has launched a hundred village tales of courage and greed.
She has never left the landscape. Asturian springs, caves and hollows carry her name, and her image — the golden comb, the guarded pool — remains the emblem of the region's mythology, taught to children and stamped on festival posters. She surfaces in modern fiction as well, from Daína Chaviano's The Island of Eternal Love to Kelley Armstrong's Darkness Rising novels: a small spirit of the wet green north of Spain with a remarkably long reach.
Field Notes
- ✦ Often held captive, along with her treasure, by the winged serpent cuélebre.
- ✦ Her name may descend from Diana, Roman goddess of the wild.
- ✦ A recurring tale has her exchanging her infant xanino for a mortal baby.
- ✦ Most likely to be seen on the night of June 23 — la noche de San Juan.
- ✦ Egg shells set by the fire trick a changeling into confessing its hundred years.
Case File
- Classification
- Water nymph / fairy
- Category
- Little People/Fae
- Territory
- Asturias
- First Sighted
- Ancient Asturian folklore
- Habitat
- Fountains, rivers, waterfalls and pure-water springs
- Reported Size
- Slender and woman-sized
- Also Known As
- Xanas · Anjana