Nakinneito

The nakinneito of Finnish folklore is the female of the nakki, the dangerous water spirit of the country's lakes and rivers, and she is described very much like the mermaid of British tradition: a beautiful blond maiden, gleaming white from head to waist and fish-tailed from the waist down. Her most particular recorded trait is an endowment the tellers evidently enjoyed — breasts so voluptuous she can throw them over her shoulder — and she is most often seen out on the water, combing her long curly hair.

Her family places her. The nakki whose female she is drags the unwary under, and the neighboring peoples keep her counterparts — the Estonian water maiden among them — so the nakinneito sits in the wide Baltic ring of water-wives whose beauty on the surface advertises a danger underneath. The combing, the gleam, and the display on open water are the standard equipment of the type: the sight of her is the warning, for those who know to read it.

The record in the works consulted is brief — a description and a kinship, with no named encounter or local legend preserved — and the over-the-shoulder detail, comic as it reads, is doing real folkloric work: it marks her body as extravagantly other — a fertility figure as much as a peril, kin to the abundant water-wives of the whole Baltic ring — while the combing and the gleam are the standard advertisement of her kind. The prose above states what the works consulted attest and declines to invent the drowning tale they do not tell.

The paragraphs below are extrapolated; no source supports them.

The nakinneito reads as display without appetite — unlike her male counterpart she is recorded doing nothing but being seen, and a being whose whole documented life is grooming on open water suggests vanity of a serene, self-contained kind. If danger attends her, it is the danger of the audience's own approach. Placid, decorative, indifferent — the shop-window of the drowning trade. Inferred from her one recorded scene, and marked as such.