The vodník, or water sprite, is a popular character of Slavic folktales. It varies across different stories, but usually appears as a frog-man, or a green-haired man, with a long beard and wet clothes that causes mischief in towns and traps drowned souls in teapots in his underwater palace. Erben’s research notes suggest that he knew of a version of the water sprite story from his hometown, and of others told throughout Bohemia. It is also likely, considering his other work, that he was aware of the Slavic tradition behind the water sprite and its manifestations outside of Bohemia, as well as similar stories from other traditions (mostly Greco-Roman, to which he frequently drew parallels). These versions constituted the nebula of variations of the water sprite story that Erben had knowledge of—a crosscut of the huge corpus of water sprite stories ever in existence, that includes every version told but unrecorded around dinner tables or at bedsides—and was thus able to draw from to write his own iteration.

Erben’s place in history also informed his retelling. Writing during an intellectual age heavily influenced by Romanticism, which tended towards beautiful, poetic, and symbolic nature imagery, Erben’s language and syntax choices centered this aspect of the story. (For contrast, it is conceivable that, for example, a different author writing when rationalism was the prevailing literary ethic might have dwelt more on how the water sprite story depicts the institution of marriage.) Similarly, as a writer of the Czech National Revival who fervently believed in the Czech national cause, Erben chose to present the story in the style of a folk song, rather than prose or poem; in fact, some lines he borrowed expressly from the folk songs he had heard. The carefully Romantic yet simple language he chose represents an attempt to elevate Czech as a literary language and, therefore, elevate Czech national identity. Each of these choices, informed by the Romantic and nationalist context of Bohemia around the mid-century, shaped the form of Erben’s iteration.

By the example of “The Water Sprite,” I mean to demonstrate that, rather than being an independent product of individual work, or a static representative of the whole body of water sprite stories, it is instead an iteration influenced as much by context as by the tellings that preceded it. This iterative approach to folktale analysis grants more dynamism to the process of storytelling; there is not one definitive tradition to point to as representative of the whole, rather, each iteration draws from the body mythos and adds to it from its own context. In this way, I argue that viewing folk stories as a process rather than as static products allows us to more fully analyze the collection as multifaceted, and individual iterations as products of their time-place contexts. This, too, allows us to move away from the concept of “authenticity” or “originality,” viewing storytelling on a continuum with no one valid starting or end point, merely a similar story being retold again and again at different times.

This approach derives from theories that have gained popularity in recent decades in the field of posthumanism. Although these theories are far beyond my focus here, I would briefly mention Karen Barad’s framework of “agential realism” which, among other things, seeks to step away from representationalism (the idea that we can only know the world through our representations of it, and any attempts at direct knowledge are futile) towards giving agency to non-human forces of creation. Barad posits that, within this framework, institutions and epistemologies are dynamic arrangements of various interacting elements; that is, the matter that impacts our lives, like stories, are not static, pre-existing things, as it were, but instead ever-changing products of an ever-changing world. This form of realism also has many similarities to some Indigenous philosophies that assign agency to non-human elements that interact with us and each other in a dynamic process of creation. Eva Marie Garroutte and Kathleen Delores Westcott, for example, argue that “myth functions as a conscious vital entity possessing the power to create the world,” this framework referred to as “mythic thinking.” This idea that when we tell stories, stories tell something back lends itself to the iterative approach: storytellers engage with the existing body of stories while adding their own context in a continual process of co-creation. Because the body of the story is not static, we are then able to analyze it as a result of time-place specific arrangements of iterations, which themselves derive from time-place specific arrangements of institutions and belief systems.

Moving from analysis to possible applications, I will conclude by mentioning two of the most significant opportunities that viewing folk stories in this way grants us. In this, I hope to complicate the prevailing framework in folklore/myth studies that condemns the notion of the “original story” by asking, so what? I argue that the fact that there is no static, original story is what allows us to step in with analytical interventions to figure out why things have been told in certain ways, and with what effect.