Enchanted Voices Trivia Quiz

Answer: Lorelei

The Lorelei is near Sankt Goarshausen, a town in the west German Rhineland. The German folk tale of Lorelei was, no pun intended, set in stone by the fairy-tale writer Clemens Brentano. In the poem, titled 'Lore Ley - Zu Bacharach am Rheine", Lorelei is about to be taken to the nunnery to cleanse her soul, but begs to stare out onto the Rhine one last time before she leaves. There she sees a man in a ship.

'"My heart perks up so
He must be my dearest,"
Then she leans down
And falls into the Rhine.'

The best-known version of the Lorelei story is by Heinrich Heine, whose "Die Lorelei" has been set to song by two dozen composers. Rather than retelling her fate, Heine's version is told by a sailor in Lorelei's thrall.

'She's combing her golden hair,
She holds a golden comb.
Singing along, as well,
An enthralling
And spellbinding melody.
[...] I think that the waves will devour
The boatman and boat in the end
And this by her song's sheer power
Fair Lorelei has done.'

The image is a 1904 postcard featuring Lorelei, one of many from that period. The translation of the Brentano poem I relied on was from lyricstranslate.com. The Heine translation was from Thoughtco.com.

Answer: Canens

Canens, the daughter of Janus, was supposed to marry Picus, but the jealous sorceress Circe conjured an incantation which turned him into a woodpecker. "Angered at his sudden transformation" (and wouldn't you be?) "... he pecked at the rough oak with his hard beak, and in fury wounded the long branches." Poor Picus - all he did was rebuff Circe's advances and stay faithful to his woman. "Picus" is Latin for "woodpecker," so in a way he was asking for it.

As for Canens, she could not stand the hardship of waiting for her love to be found. For a week, she wandered the valleys and hilltops in vain. Finally, in exhaustion, she lay down beside the Tiber and sang her song of "grief, tearfully, in faint tones, in harmony with sadness, just as the swan sings once, in dying, its own funeral song." This is the famous "swan song," a superstition the Romans shared with the Greeks (incidentally, swans don't really do this). All this I relate from Ovid's "Metamorphoses."

Answer: Bird

Most people think of sirens as mermaids, but in the oldest depictions (including from Homer, Ovid, and painted vases) they were half-woman, half-bird creatures. (It has been my experience that there are more singing birds than singing fish, so this seems appropriate.) The kinnara - sometimes spelled kinnaree, kinnari, kenar, or many other variations - are depicted all throughout the Hindu and Buddhist world, from China and Japan to Tibet to India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, even among the Buddhist peoples of Iran. The statue in the photo was taken at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Depictions vary hugely, with some cultures showing them as part horse or horse-bird-human, but the most common representation is as a half-bird half-human.

Quite unlike sirens, the kinnara were not malevolent - they delighted humans with their music and dances. The Indian kinnara were believed to live in the Himalayas - by foot, I assume, since they're usually shown as unable to fly. As with many musical myth-creatures, kinnara don't just sing. They're pipers, lyre-players, and dancers as well. In the compendium of Buddhist tales called the "Jakata", the kinnara's music is shown soothing or healing humans. In another of the "Jakata", they rescue a human baby and raise it as their own. Despite this, they tend to be hated or feared by humans as goblins.

Answer: Funeral mounds

A lot of the iconography surrounding banshees has to do with Irish burial traditions. The southern Irish countryside is dotted with large burial mounds, tumuli (sing. tumulus), supposedly a gathering-place for fairies. The ancestors of the modern Gaelics arrived on Ireland around the year 1,000 B.C., displacing the Tuatha Dé Danann people who built the tumuli. Folklore gave the "people of the mounds" a magical significance, and the women of the mounds, banshees, were thought to be wandering spirits from the underground.

Some depictions make banshees beautiful, some horrific; they may have glowing red eyes or appear as aged, frail women. Some are said to be very tall or as short as a foot. Another belief is that the banshees, being spirits of dead Irish, will only scream for the Irish. "It is only 'blood' that can have a banshee," writes Friar O'Sullivan in "Ancient History of the Kingdom of Kerry." Some families even believe they have their own personal banshees, who cry especially for them.

In Gaelic cultures, a death was traditionally mourned by "keening," a wailing, devastating funeral song sang by a group. It involves clasping hands together and rocking back and forth while singing. Rarely practiced today, recordings of keening exist. The song is enchanting, yet at times harsh or high-pitched - not the kind of thing you'd want to hear on an evening walk.

Answer: Tickling you

Don't laugh! Imagine how awful it'd be to be tickled TO DEATH. These demonic creatures have a playful side, and are sometimes depicted as young children. Most commonly, however, they're naked women emerging on the feast of Rosalia (fifty days after Easter) to play, swing from branches, sing, dance, and tempt the unwary. They return to their underwater castles at the first thunder-crack of summer. Celebrated from around the eleventh century to the eighteenth, Rosalia (or "rusalchyn Easter") traditions included dressing girls up as rusalki, dancing their dances, singing their songs, and leaving offerings to the dead.

The songs of the rusalki derive from pagan enchantments, and draw on two major themes. Many are about women who meet with terrible fates, but others are sung to bring forth a bountiful harvest. Their dances, likewise, are supposed to spur the growing of grain.

Antonín Dvorák has a opera entitled "Rusalka" as well, the tragic story of a water sprite's doomed love. The painting is "The Mermaids" by Ivan Kramskoi.

Answer: Mandrake

The mandrake is a very pretty purple nightshade with a large root that sometimes grows to resemble a human being. "Mandrake" is originally from the Greek "mandragora," which means "man-shaped." This likeness imbued it with power to medieval Europeans: they believed that carrying a mandrake that resembled a person you desired - a dream woman, a baby - would bring that person to you. The root was also brewed into potions, and it did have legitimate medical use as an anesthetic. Being a nightshade, however, it's very high in several toxins that can cause hallucinations and death.

According to medieval superstition, the mandrake could be retrieved by stuffing your ears with wax, then tying the top of the plant to a dog. You throw the dog a treat and run away. The dog lunges and extracts the plant. Obviously, the shriek kills the dog. Small price to pay for such a valuable plant. The story probably originates from the popularity of mandrake trade and trafficking. Mandrakes were so prized, people even produced fake mandrakes from the thick tubers of bryony plants.

This is the very same mandrake which appeared memorably in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets," although extracting it there just involved the blocked ears, not the dead dog.

Answer: Sexual prowess

Huehuecóyotl lit the fire of the world, analogous with Prometheus in Greek myth - "lighting a fire" was equated by the indigenous Mexicans with illicit sexual behavior (get out your Doors albums if this metaphor is new to you). Coyotes themselves are sex symbols in Aztec cultures; the Nahuatl verb "coyoquetza" is equivalent to "going at it like animals" in English. Surprisingly, the Otomi also consider old age to be a sign of ultimate sexual potency.

The Aztecs believed in nahuals, animal spirits which are linked to a person at birth. They are something like avatars, something like familiars, and something like guardian angels. Gods and beings of immense spiritual power can channel and transform into their nahuals. Given their ability to shapeshift, and the small problem that most Aztec writings were destroyed, it can be difficult to even identify a god, let alone how it relates to other gods. It seems that Huehuecóyotl may have been a transformation of the god of Tezcatlicopa, the "Smoking Mirror," god of fire and obsidian. Both were tricksters, fire-gods, and relished creating discord among humans, though this usually backfired on them. In one reference,* Huehuecóyotl was called the "blanket of the god of fire."

The feast-day of Huehuecóyotl, celebrated still by the Otomi, involves much singing and dancing. The modern Otomi still recognize him as a god of music. North of the border, many American Indian tribes feature the related folk character of the Coyote, a wise trickster with a beautiful singing voice.

*The image is from the Codex Borgia, one of the precious few documents we have from pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. Much of my information, including the quote, is from an article by Guilhem Olivier called "Huehuecóyotl, 'Coyote Viejo,' El Músico Transgresor, Dios De Los Otomíes o Avatar de Tezcatlicopa?" ("Huehuecóyotl, 'Old Coyote,' Transgressive Musician: God of the Otomi, or Avatar of Tezcatlicopa?")

Answer: Hades

Orpheus's story makes more sense when I tell you that when he met Hades, Eurydice was dead. In the version in Virgil's "Georgics", she'd been killed by a water snake in the prime of youth and the peak of newlywed passion. Orpheus entered Hades' realm using his lyre to soothe Cerberus, make still Ixion's torture-wheel, and delight Charon, finally reaching the throne of Hades (or Pluto, to the Romans). Orpheus's music is powerful enough to enchant even a god, and Hades agrees to let Eurydice return to the surface, on the condition that on their way out, neither of them may look back. Upon feeling the warmth of the Sun again, Orpheus looks back at Eurydice - and she is whisked back into the depths of the Underworld. In mourning, the twice-grieving Orpheus sat beside the Struma river, and "sung his misfortunes under the cold caves, appeasing tigers, and leading oaks with his song."

The painting is "The Lament of Orpheus" by Franz Caucig.

Answer: Taliesin

Taliesin, the Bard of the Britons, appeared in legend long after his death, cropping up in 11th century Arthurian tales and appearing in the "Mabinogion" tales of the 14th. According to the "Mabinogion," Ceridwen gave birth to him under bizarre circumstances. A servant of hers accidentally drank a potion, which had taken a year and a half to brew, that gave him powers of magic and poetry. Pursued by the angry witch, transforming (like the end of Disney's "Sword in the Stone") from hare and greyhound to fish and otter to crow and hawk, he decided to transform into a grain of wheat and allow himself to be eaten. Ceridwen turned into a hen and fell for the trick, and went on to rebirth the servant, who as it happened was preternaturally handsome and had fully-formed powers of speech and song. She was moved by his looks, and she loosed him like Moses into the sea, where he was later found by Elfin.

When Elfin boasted that - get this - "my wife was as virtuous as any lady in the kingdom, and also I have a bard who is more skillful than all the king's bards," he was taken in as a prisoner by the king, Maelgwyn Gwynned. Fortunately, Taliesin went to the king and proved that he WAS as good as Elfin had claimed. (At least that's one interpretation; another is that the king was simply afraid of the older-than-time sea-monster described, at length, by Taliesin. The man could spin a yarn!) When Orpheus was taken to Efin, his very song unlocked the shackles on his feet.

Taliesin served under several kings, Bran the Blessed among them, but is most famous in legend as an advisor to King Arthur. Contrasts between Merlin and Taliesin are interesting. Whereas Merlin was strictly a magician and had many abstruse, fantastical, even demoniacal methods, Taliesin was more like a sage - supernaturally knowledgeable, but not likely to perform outright wizardry.

The image is a Victorian wood engraving of a bard depicted by the Dalziel brothers. The quotations are from the Mabinogion.

Answer: Kalevala

The Kalevala was collected, published and revised through the 1800s by a multi-talented doctor-botanist-linguist named Elias Lönnrot. Patronized by the Finnish Literature Society, he traveled rural Finland on a quest to document its oral tradition, like a modern-day Snorri Sturluson. The result was the "Kalevala", the founding text of Finnish national identity; it emboldened the Finnish independence movement, enabling independence in 1917.

Väinämöinen is the hero of about half of the "Kalevala" stories. Many of these follow his quest to retrieve the Sampo from the villainous Mistress of the North. The Sampo is a treasure that can produce meal, salt, and gold - sustenance, self-sustainability, and prosperity all in one. Along with a cosmic blacksmith (think Hephaestus) named Ilmarinen and a dashing hero, Lemminkäinen, they journey throughout Finland. After defeating a giant fish, Väinämöinen uses its jaws to make the first kantele, a string instrument. In the end, the treasure is lost, but Väinämöinen and his gang cast off the Mistress.

In a weird kind of mirror to Taliesin's story, Väinämöinen is also defeated by a precocious baby. A virgin named Marjatta has eaten a magical berry and borne a child in two weeks. The wizard advises that such a baby should not be kept alive; at that point the baby pipes up to say that he does not agree. Humiliated by the child, Väinämöinen sails off into the sunset. Meanwhile, the virgin born of Mary - sorry, Marjatta - is declared King of Karelia (the bit of Russia west of Finland). The similarity to Christ is a purposeful allusion. The painting is "The Departure of Väinämöinen" by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, which depicts this scene.