Undine Names: Water Spirit Names for Fantasy Stories and Games

Short answer

• An undine is an elemental water spirit. Paracelsus named undines as the beings of water in his system of four elementals, alongside gnomes of earth, sylphs of air and salamanders of fire. The word comes from the Latin unda, meaning wave.
• The famous undine is a literary one. Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's 1811 novella Undine tells of a water spirit who marries the knight Huldbrand and gains a soul through the marriage, the soul theme Paracelsus had described.
• Undines are not mermaids. Mermaids are sea folk with fish tails. Undines are elemental spirits of water in all its forms, rivers, lakes, springs, rain and sea, usually shown in human form.
• Good undine names flow. Build them from a water word or root (river, tide, mist, Latin unda or aqua, Greek hydor) plus a soft ending such as elle, ara, ina or ette, or a flowing second element such as whisper, mere or light.
• Match the name to the water. Still water takes quiet names, moving water takes traveling names, and deep or storm water takes heavier names with harder consonants.
• For games, undines are also a playable people. In the Pathfinder roleplaying game, undines are mortals descended from beings of the Plane of Water such as marids, so the same patterns serve player characters as well as spirits.

Introduction

An undine name has a job to do before the character ever speaks. It has to sound like the water the spirit comes from: a river name should travel, a sea name should carry weight and distance, and a rain name should land softly. Get that match right and the reader understands the character’s nature from the first mention. Get it wrong, naming a still, secretive lake spirit something that crashes and storms, and the name fights the character on every page.

This article works as an undine name generator in list form, and it goes further than a list. It explains who the undines actually are in the tradition that invented them, from the sixteenth century writings of Paracelsus to the 1811 novella that made one undine famous, and it sets them beside their older neighbors, the naiads, nereids, rusalkas and selkies, so you can name the right kind of water spirit rather than a generic one. It then gives original names grouped by river, sea, rain and lake, deep water, storm and ice, and by temperament, and finishes with the root and ending patterns that let you build unlimited names of your own, plus practical guidance on using them in stories and in games.

Every name in the lists is an original suggestion created for this article, in the spirit of the source package, not copied from any published game setting or novel. A few are built from real language roots, as fantasy names usually are, and the building section shows those roots openly so you can judge and reuse them. Nothing here requires a purchase, a download or a sign up: the lists and the patterns are the whole tool.

Who the Undines Are: Paracelsus and the Four Elementals

Undines are not ancient in the way Greek nymphs are ancient. They were named, deliberately and systematically, in the Renaissance. Paracelsus, the Swiss physician and alchemist (1493 or 1494 to 1541), set out a scheme in which each of the four classical elements was inhabited by its own kind of being. His treatise on the subject, usually known in English as A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits, was published after his death, in 1566. In it, the beings of earth are gnomes or pygmies, of air sylphs, of fire salamanders, and of water nymphs, water people, or undines.

Two details from that scheme still shape how fantasy writers use undines today. First, Paracelsus did not treat these beings as devils or as pure spirits. He described them as part of creation, beings between creatures and spirits, with bodies, reason and skills, who eat, sleep and dress much as humans do, but who lack an immortal soul. Second, he held that an undine could gain a soul through marriage to a human. That single idea became the engine of almost every famous undine story that followed.

The name itself is a clue for name builders. Undine, also spelled ondine, derives from the Latin unda, a wave, with a small feminine ending; dictionaries record the same derivation, from New Latin undina, from Latin unda. So the word undine is already a built name: a water root plus a soft ending. The patterns later in this article simply repeat, with many more roots, the trick Paracelsus used once. Later tradition made them almost invariably female, similar to humans in form, and placed them in forest pools and waterfalls.

From Paracelsus to Fouqué: How Literature Shaped the Undine

The undine had an older cousin in medieval romance. Melusine, whose story Jean d’Arras wrote down in his Roman de Mélusine in 1393, is a fairy of fresh water, half serpent on Saturdays by her mother’s curse, who marries the nobleman Raymondin on the condition that he never watch her on that day. He spies on her anyway; she forgives that, but when he later denounces her publicly she leaves him, returning only to warn her descendants of deaths to come. Fouqué’s novella, whose author drew on Paracelsus, is generally read as descended from the Melusine pattern: a water woman, a mortal husband, a condition, a betrayal, a loss.

The book that fixed the undine in modern memory is Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine, published in 1811 and translated into English in 1818. Its heroine is a wild, mischievous foundling raised by an old fisherman and his wife beside a forest lake. The knight Huldbrand shelters at their cottage, falls in love, and marries her, and on the morning after the wedding Undine explains what she is: a water spirit, one of an elemental kind without immortal souls, who has gained a soul through her marriage. Her uncle Kühleborn, a powerful water spirit, warns that betrayal will doom him. Huldbrand’s love cools, he turns back toward the mortal Bertalda, and when he speaks harshly to Undine on the water she is taken back by her element. After he marries Bertalda, Undine returns once, as the laws of her kind compel her, and her embrace kills him. A spring rises around his grave.

For a writer naming characters, the novella is a small masterclass. Undine’s own name is the generic word for her kind turned into a personal name, which tells the reader her whole nature at once. Kühleborn joins German kühl, cool, with Born, an old poetic word for a spring, so the name sounds like cold spring water rising. Bertalda, the mortal rival, carries an ordinary human name of the period, and the contrast underlines that she belongs to the land, not the water. Three names, three natures, no confusion.

The story kept traveling after 1811. Britannica records librettos based on Fouqué’s romance by E. T. A. Hoffmann in 1816 and Albert Lortzing in 1845, and Jean Giraudoux returned to the figure in his 1939 play Ondine. Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” of 1837, in which a sea maiden longs for an immortal soul, carries the same Paracelsian theme into a new story, and Andersen’s letters confirm he wrote it in conscious response to Fouqué’s version.

Undines and Their Neighbors: Naming the Right Water Spirit

Writers often use undine as a catch-all word for any female water being, blurring traditions that folklore readers can tell apart. Pick the being first and the name second.

Greek tradition, far older than Paracelsus, divided its water nymphs by habitat. Naiads presided over fresh water, fountains, wells, springs, streams and brooks, with subgroups such as the Limnades of lakes and the Crinaeae of fountains. Nereids were sea nymphs, the fifty daughters of the sea god Nereus, generally friendly to sailors. Britannica describes the undine figure itself as derived from the Nereids, the attendants of Poseidon. If your spirit belongs to one named spring and dies if it dries, she is closer to a naiad than to an undine, and a Greek style name will fit her better. Our guide to mythical creatures in Greek myths maps the wider family these nymphs belong to.

Slavic folklore gives the rusalka, a female water spirit or ghost dwelling in a waterway, in many tellings the restless spirit of a woman who died in or near the water; rusalka names in fiction lean on Slavic sounds and carry a sadder charge. Celtic coasts give the selkie, a seal folk who sheds its skin to take human form, whose stories turn on the stolen sealskin and the longing for the sea. Mermaids, finally, are a body type as much as a spirit kind: a human upper body and a fish tail. An undine walking out of a lake in human form is doing something a mermaid, in most traditions, cannot do at all.

None of this forbids mixing; Paracelsus himself was blending Greek nymphs into a new system. The point is to mix on purpose. Decide whether your character is an elemental with a soul at stake, a guardian bound to one spring, a drowned ghost, or a seal in human shape, then choose sounds from the matching tradition.

What Makes a Name Sound Like an Undine

Undine names across modern fantasy share a small set of sound habits. The core of it fits in one line: soft sounds, water words, and a rhythm like a current rather than a march. Unpacked, that means four things.

First, vowels do the flowing: open vowels in long, unhurried syllables read as calm and liquid, as in Ondalune, Lakelight and Mariselle. Second, the consonants are mostly continuants, sounds you can hold without stopping the breath: l, m, n, r, s, w and soft v. Rillana and Wavemere are almost all continuant, which is why they glide. Third, stress falls evenly or late rather than in a hard early thump, so the name ripples instead of marching: compare Streamara with a blunt name like Brakk. Fourth, the meaning points at water even when the reader only half notices: mere is an old word for a lake or pool and rill is a small stream, and a reader who has met those words in poetry feels the water in Wavemere and Rillana without analyzing it.

Breaking the pattern is a tool, not a mistake. A storm or deep sea undine who frightens people should carry a few stops and hard edges, the k, t, d and g sounds in names like Tempestine or Kühleborn’s cold consonants, so the name itself warns the reader.

Length matters too. Two or three syllables suit a character readers meet often. Four or more read as formal, ancient or royal, suiting queens, oracles and rarely seen spirits, and shorter names survive better in games, where names are typed and spoken aloud.

River Undine Names

River undines are travelers. Their water is always going somewhere, so their names suit messengers, guides, wandering healers and any spirit tied to a current that passes through other people’s lands. Each list in this article leads with its most versatile names, followed by further original suggestions in the same pattern.

• Riverelle: the river root with the softest ending; a gentle, general purpose name.
• Currentia: formal, almost Roman; a spirit of the main flow.
• Brookwhisper: small water; a quiet, secret-keeping spirit.
• Flowen: short and traveling; a restless, friendly character.
• Rillana: from rill, a small stream; light and quick.
• Streamara: a longer, more ceremonial river name.
• Eddyline: named for the eddy, where the current turns back on itself; a changeable temperament.
• Bankswell: tied to the riverbank and the rise of water.
• Meandrine: from meander, a river’s winding; a patient, indirect character.
• Cascadelle: a waterfall name, brighter and noisier than the others.
• Swiftmere: fast water meeting still water; two moods in one name.
• Fordana: from the ford, the shallow crossing; a guardian of crossings.

Sea and Ocean Undine Names

Sea undines carry distance. Their names can afford to be longer and grander than river names, because the sea is the largest water there is and its spirits are often old, proud and slow to forgive.

• Mariselle: built on mar, the Latin sea root inside marine and maritime.
• Tidewarden: the tide’s keeper, half title, half name.
• Saltspray: brisk and weather beaten; cliffs and open decks.
• Oceanna: the most direct sea name here, broad and formal.
• Pearldeep: deep, still water over pearl beds.
• Wavemere: wave and lake together; a coastal lagoon spirit.
• Coraline: from coral; warm water and patience. This is also an ordinary given name, which can help or hinder depending on your setting.
• Abysselle: the abyss softened by the ending; beautiful, but the deep is in it.
• Surfelle: the lightest sea name here; a playful spirit of the shore break.
• Kelpana: from the kelp forests; green, shadowed, sheltering.
• Tidemark: the line the sea leaves behind; a spirit bound to a shore and its memories.
• Deepcall: the hardest name in this section; a voice from far below, best kept for rare appearances.

If a sea undine commands a vessel in your story, the naming work doubles, because fantasy ships carry names as loaded as any character’s. Our companion guide to fantasy ship names works through that pattern, and pairing a captain’s name with her ship’s name is an easy way to make a sea power feel fully realized.

Rain, Lake and Mist Undine Names

Rain and lake spirits are the undines humans actually live beside. Their water falls on roofs and fills wells, so their names are usually the softest in this article, suited to healers, neighbors and household spirits rather than distant powers.

• Rainelle: the most straightforward rain name, soft and young sounding.
• Droplette: small and delicate; a minor spirit, a child, or a nickname form.
• Mistraline: built on mist, with a warning: mistral is also a real cold wind, which suits a spirit who arrives with weather.
• Lakelight: still water and brightness; serene and trustworthy.
• Puddlewick: the smallest name in the article, comic and humble; a spirit of one yard puddle, proud of it.
• Stormpetal: storm weather with a gentle second half; changeable, not safe to underestimate.
• Dewdancer: a dawn spirit, gone by morning.
• Stillwater: the calmest name available; also reads naturally as a surname or place name.
• Mistmere: mist over a lake; secretive and hard to approach.
• Cloudara: a high, formal rain name, for a spirit who seldom comes down.
• Dewmere: a small still pool at dawn; quieter even than Lakelight.
• Rainswift: fast weather; a messenger who arrives with the storm front.
• Lakeshadow: the melancholy counterpart to Lakelight.

Deep, Storm and Ice Undine Names

Not all water is kind, and the tradition knows it: Kühleborn is dangerous, and rusalkas drown the unwary. Names for frightening or wintry water beings use harder consonants and colder roots. Use them for antagonists, ancient powers and winter spirits.

• Tempestine: from tempest; a storm spirit with formal weight.
• Undertow: plain, blunt and ominous; best as a name others use about her, not the one she chose.
• Rimelight: rime is the old word for frost; beautiful and cold.
• Frostmere: a frozen lake, still on the surface and deep below.
• Hailana: hail given a soft ending; the contrast is the character.
• Stormara: Stormpetal’s sterner sister, without the petal.
• Wavekell: a harsh compound for a spirit of wrecking water; reserve it for a true villain.

Names by Temperament and Role

Lists grouped by water type only get you halfway. The other half is the character’s role, because a name that fits the water but not the job still sounds wrong.

The healer or well guardian wants the softest sounds and a home water word: Lakelight, Dewmere, Brookwhisper. The guide or messenger wants movement in the name: Flowen, Rainswift, Swiftmere. The queen, oracle or ancient power wants length and formality: Currentia, Oceanna, Tempestine, Cloudara. The trickster wants a name slightly too pretty, with a turn in it: Eddyline, whose water runs backwards, or Mistraline, who arrives as weather. The villain wants the pattern broken: Undertow, Wavekell, Deepcall. The beloved in the Fouqué pattern wants a name that could pass as a human girl’s name at the fisherman’s cottage yet turn out to name her whole kind: Undine is the model, and Coraline and Rainelle work the same way.

Building Your Own Undine Names by Language Root

The basic pattern is simple: take a water word, add a soft ending. The fuller method below uses real language roots, which gives you names with genuine water meanings underneath the sound, and enough combinations for any size of cast.

Start with a root. Latin gives unda (wave), aqua (water), mare and its stem mar (sea), fluvius and flumen (river), pluvia (rain) and lacus (lake). Greek gives hydor (water), plus the nymph vocabulary itself: naiad for fresh water, nereid for the sea. English water words work just as well: river, rill, brook, mere, tide, brine, foam, dew, mist, rain, frost and rime. The old-fashioned words, mere, rill and rime, often sound most like names, because readers meet them rarely and mostly in poetry.

Then choose an ending by weight. The soft endings of the tradition are elle, ara, ina, ette, ana and ia: unda plus ina gives Undina, the historical form itself. Shorter, more neutral endings suit modern and game settings: an, or, en and is, as in Rillan, Tidor and Flowen. Compound endings borrow a second water or light word instead: whisper, light, shadow, mark, warden, mere and deep. Compounds read as meaning first and name second, which suits spirits whose names are also descriptions.

Worked examples show the machine running. Mar (sea) plus iselle, a softened elle, gives Mariselle. Pluvia trimmed to Pluv plus ia simply rebuilds Pluvia itself, which is why checking a built name matters: some combinations land on real words and real given names, as Coraline and Marina do. That is not automatically a problem, but you should land on it by choice, not by accident. Say every built name aloud, check it against famous characters from published settings, and check that two names in one cast do not differ by a single letter, because readers and players will merge them.

One caution belongs in every naming system. Living cultures’ naming traditions deserve more respect than a root and an ending: if a character is actually Japanese, Slavic or Greek within your story’s world, use that tradition’s real names and customs. Undine names work best on invented water spirits in invented or loosely European flavored worlds.

Using Undine Names in Stories

In prose, an undine name earns its keep in three places: the first introduction, the moment her nature is revealed, and the mouths of other characters. At the introduction, pair the name with its water once, a single image, and the reader files the connection permanently: Lakelight beside the still lake at dawn needs no further explanation for three hundred pages. At the revelation, the name should deepen rather than change: Fouqué’s readers learn that Undine is not a girl named prettily but a being named exactly, and your name can do the same trick when a character realizes that Stillwater was never a surname. In other mouths, shortenings tell the truth about relationships: the spirit the court calls Currentia in ceremony is Ria to the one human who loves her, and the gap between the names is characterization you get for free.

Keep the cast’s water map consistent. If river spirits bear elle names and sea spirits bear mar names, do not give a sea spirit an elle name for prettiness without knowing you are implying mixed parentage, a renaming or a lie: readers will notice the accident. And let names age with the being: a young rain spirit called Droplette who grows into a storm power will be renamed Rainelle, then perhaps Stormara, by her own people.

The same worldbuilding pass will name the places your spirits haunt. A haunted spring needs an inn within walking distance in most stories, and our guide to tavern names covers the warm, lamplit end of that pairing. A whole drowned valley or cliff-top roost needs settlement names that follow their own people’s sound rules, the problem worked through in our companion piece on aarakocra village names. Different peoples, different phonetics, one consistent map.

Using Undine Names in Games

Games use undines two ways, as spirits to meet and as people to play. As non-player characters, undines are classic quest givers, guardians of crossings and wells, and powers to bargain with, and the temperament section above is built for that casting: the name should tell the players, before a word of dialogue, whether this water is safe to drink from. Announce the name with the water visible, the ford, the well, the black lake, and the table will do the rest of the work itself.

As player characters, undines are an established option in the Pathfinder roleplaying game, where they are mortals whose ancestry traces to beings of the Plane of Water such as marids, with coloring that mimics lakes and seas and an affinity for water magic. That ancestry changes the naming brief: a playable undine is not the spirit of one river but a person with a family and a name her parents chose, so give her a name a parent would choose, Rainelle, Flowen, Lakelight, and keep the heavy ceremonial forms, Currentia, Tempestine, for her grandmother, her people’s queen, or the true spirit she is named after. The same applies in any system with water-touched peoples, sea elves, tritons or merfolk characters: person names first, spirit names for the spirits.

Practical game naming has two extra rules. Keep names short enough to say across a table and distinct enough to survive a noisy room, which rules out running Rillana and Rillan in the same party. And write the pronunciation into your notes the first time, because a name pronounced three ways in one session loses its water entirely. If your group also needs a collective identity of its own, a company, order or crew name built with the same discipline, our guide to guild names applies the same method to groups.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an undine? An undine is an elemental water spirit. Paracelsus named undines as the beings of water in his system of four elementals, set out in a treatise published in 1566, and later writers developed the figure into a water nymph in her own right. The word comes from the Latin unda, meaning wave.

Where does the word undine come from? From Latin unda, a wave, with a diminutive feminine ending, through the New Latin form undina used by Paracelsus. Ondine is the French flavored spelling of the same word, and both spellings name the same kind of being.

Are undines the same as mermaids? No. A mermaid is a sea being with a human upper body and a fish tail. An undine is an elemental spirit of water in any form, river, lake, spring, rain or sea, usually depicted in fully human shape. Britannica traces the undine figure back in part to the Greek Nereids, but their folklore roots and their rules are different.

What is the difference between an undine and a naiad? Age and system. Naiads are the ancient Greek nymphs of fresh water, each presiding over fountains, springs, streams or lakes. Undines are a Renaissance category, all the people of the element of water at once, defined by Paracelsus and given souls and marriages by later literature. A naiad belongs to one place; an undine belongs to the element.

Who wrote the most famous undine story? Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, whose novella Undine appeared in 1811. His heroine marries the knight Huldbrand, gains a soul by the marriage, loses his love to the mortal Bertalda, and is taken back by the water. The story descends from the medieval Melusine legend and fed operas, plays and, in spirit, Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”.

Can undines be male? In the classic tradition undines are almost invariably depicted as female, which is part of why the famous stories are bride stories. Modern fantasy and games are not bound by that: playable undine peoples in games such as Pathfinder include all genders, and the shorter, neutral endings in the building section, an, or and en, produce names that sit comfortably on any character.

Are the names in this article free to use? Yes. They are original suggestions created for stories and games, and you may use them for your characters, campaigns and fiction. A few built names coincide with real words or existing given names, such as Coraline, so run the same quick check you would run on any name before publishing: say it aloud, and check it does not collide with a well-known character in a published setting.

How do I generate more undine names than the lists give? Use the building pattern: choose a water root, Latin unda, aqua or mar, Greek hydor, or an English water word such as rill, mere, tide or dew; add a soft ending such as elle, ara, ina or ette, or a compound word such as whisper, light or warden; then match the result’s hardness to the character’s temperament.

Sources & references

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Undine. Opened in full on 3 November 2026. Material read: undine as a mythological figure of European tradition, a water nymph who becomes human when she falls in love but is doomed if her lover is unfaithful; derived from the Greek Nereids, attendants of Poseidon; first mentioned in the writings of Paracelsus, who proposed spirits called undines inhabiting the element of water; adapted as the romance Undine by Baron Fouqué in 1811, with librettos by E. T. A. Hoffmann in 1816 and Albert Lortzing in 1845; Jean Giraudoux's Ondine (1939) also based on the myth; the word from the Latin unda, wave or water.
• Paracelsus, A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits. The treatise's summary and publication history were opened on 3 November 2026 in the reference article on the treatise. Material read: written by Paracelsus (1493/1494 to 1541) late in his life and published posthumously in 1566; those who live in water are called nymphs, water people or undines, those in air sylphs, those in earth gnomes or pygmies, those in fire salamanders; Paracelsus dismisses the view that elemental beings are devils, arguing instead that they are significant parts of God's creation; the English translation by Henry E. Sigerist appears in Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim Called Paracelsus (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941). The soul through marriage doctrine and the beings' humanlike form, reason and lack of an immortal soul are as summarized in reference accounts of the Sigerist translation, read in search excerpts on 3 November 2026.
• Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Undine (1811). The novella's plot, inspirations and influence were opened on 3 November 2026 in the reference article on the novella, which draws on the text itself and on Boria Sax, The Serpent and the Swan (University of Tennessee Press, 1998). Material read: Undine is the foster daughter of a fisherman and his wife; she marries the knight Huldbrand and explains the morning after the wedding that she is a water spirit who has gained a soul through the marriage; Kühleborn is her uncle, a shapeshifting water spirit; Bertalda is the mortal rival, revealed as the fisherman's own lost daughter; after Huldbrand speaks angrily to Undine on the river she disappears into it, warning him to remain true; after his wedding to Bertalda she rises from the unsealed fountain, kisses him and drowns him with her tears, then transforms into a stream encircling his grave; Paracelsus's Book on Nymphs states that undines can gain an immortal soul by marrying a human and mentions the Melusine legend; Hans Christian Andersen was influenced by the portrayal of souls in Undine while writing "The Little Mermaid", stating in a letter quoted in Jefferey Frank, The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen (Duke University Press, 2005), that he had not allowed his mermaid's soul to depend on the love of a human being as Fouqué had. The 1818 English translation by George Soane is attested in the Wiktionary entry for Undine, read in search excerpts on 3 November 2026.
• Edward Worth Library, Melusine, by Dr Elizabethanne Boran. Opened in full on 3 November 2026. Material read: Jean d'Arras, Roman de Mélusine (1393), written for Jean, Duke of Berry; Melusine, daughter of a human father and the fairy Presine, was cursed by her mother to turn into a serpent every Saturday; she marries Raymondin on condition he never sees her on that day; she forgives his spying, but after he publicly denounces her she is condemned to become wholly serpent, flies away from Lusignan, and returns only to foretell, with screams, the death of each count; Paracelsus treated Melusine as a type of water nymph in his treatise on nymphs.
• Collins English Dictionary, undine, dictionary entry. Material read in search excerpts on 3 November 2026: word origin, from New Latin undina, from Latin unda, a wave. The Latin roots used in the building section (unda, wave or flowing water; aqua, water; mare, sea; flumen, stream or river) were checked against the Dickinson College Commentaries Latin Core List, read in search excerpts on 3 November 2026; fluvius, pluvia and lacus and Greek hydor are the standard dictionary forms for river, rain, lake and water. The German word Born, an archaic and poetic word for a spring or well, from Old High German brunno and related to Brunnen, was checked in German dictionary references read in search excerpts on 3 November 2026; kühl is the ordinary German word for cool.
• Theoi Classical Texts Library, Nereids, and Greek nymph classification references. Material read in search excerpts on 3 November 2026 (a direct fetch of the Theoi page was rate limited in this pass, and the excerpts are recorded here as excerpts, not as an opened page): the Nereids were fifty sea nymph daughters of Nereus, goddesses of the sea's bounty and protectors of sailors and fishermen; naiads presided over fresh water, rivers, streams, brooks, springs, fountains, lakes, ponds, wells and marshes, divided into subclasses including Crinaeae (fountains) and Limnades or Limnatides (lakes), and a naiad's existence depended on her body of water, so that if a stream dried up its naiad expired.
• Reference summaries of Slavic and Celtic water spirits. Material read in search excerpts on 3 November 2026: the rusalka article, drawing on Vladimir Propp, Dmitry Zelenin and Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (M. E. Sharpe, 1989), records that in nineteenth century versions a rusalka is an unquiet, dangerous being, the soul of a young woman who died in or near a river or lake returning to haunt that waterway and lure men to drown; selkie summaries, drawing on David Thomson, The People of the Sea (1954), and Ernest W. Marwick, The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland (1975), record selkies as seal folk of Orkney, Shetland and the Irish coasts who shed their skins to walk on land in human form, in the best known story kept on land by a man who hides the skin until she finds it and returns to the sea. Individual folklore variants differ by region and telling.
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, undine entry in the Roll20 Compendium, reproducing the Advanced Race Guide text. Opened in full on 3 November 2026. Material read: undines are humans whose ancestry includes elemental beings of water, such as marids; the connection with the Plane of Water shows in coloring that mimics lakes or oceans, with blue eyes and skin and hair from pale blue white to the deep blue or green of the sea; undine sorcerers with the elemental water bloodline and clerics with the Water domain benefit from water affinity. Game mechanics are edition specific and are not reproduced here.