You know what a nightmare is (my dog has diarrhoea at the moment, so I’m literally living in one, as in my carpet) – a scary dream or, more broadly, a crappy real-life situation (not necessarily poop related). But what does a horse have to do with waking up in a cold sweat after dreaming you’re naked while about to play piano at the Albert Hall (just me?)?
Well, absolutely nothing, because the ‘mare’ of ‘nightmare’ isn’t anything to do with lady ponies. A mare is actually a malicious entity in Germanic and Slavic folklore. It sits on your chest when you’re sleeping, bringing on bad dreams. Most scholars trace the word ‘mare’ back to the Proto-Indo-European root mer-, which is associated with crushing, pressing and oppressing. That’s also where we get ‘mortar’ from (as in ‘pestle and’) as well as morsel, because you crush food with your teeth. This isn’t the only theory as where it came from though – there are a few others including that it stems from the Greek term ‘moros’, meaning ‘doom’.
The shape-shifting mare is often depicted as female (isn’t it always?) and has magical abilities to haunt her victim, as well as being able to shapeshift. She didn’t just target humans either – according to Nordic and German folklore, she often took horses out for midnight joyrides, leaving the poor beasts exhausted, terrified and covered in sweat by sunrise. She even targeted trees, particularly twisted, stunted pines growing on coastal rocks in Sweden, which are still known as ‘martallar’ or ‘mare-pines’.
Johann Heinrich Füssli’s 1781 painting The Nightmare
So, how can you keep this scary hag from putting her bum on you in the middle of the night? Well, medieval Europeans had some truly chaotic solutions. Depending on where you lived, you could ward her off by:
leaving your slippers upside down next to your bed (seems far too easy)
reciting a holy prayer/poem to trick her into counting all the stars in the sky before she could get close to you (more complicated)
hanging a mirror over your horse’s manger to scare her with her own reflection (this happens to me a lot, with both mirrors and my phone’s front-facing camera).
If you managed to spot a mare wandering around the morning after an attack, German lore suggests the ultimate passive-aggressive move: politely invite her over for a nice breakfast. Not because she’ll want to avoid the awkward morning-after kitchen chat, but because almost every ancient culture has rules about hospitality. Once you share a meal with someone – even a demon – they can no longer harm you without bringing a massive curse down on themselves.
Well, at least the mare got a free brekkie out of it.