Mora

**Mora**, also known as **Mare** (Old English: *mære*, Old Dutch: *mare*, Proto-Slavic \**mara*; *mara* in Old High German, Old Norse, and Swedish) is a malicious entity in Germanic and Slavic folklore that walks on people's chests while they sleep, bringing on nightmares.

## Abilities and Powers

Mora can enter ones dreams and give them nightmares.

## Etymology

The word mare comes (through Middle English mare) from the Old English feminine noun mære (which had numerous variant forms, including mare, mere, and mær). These in turn come from Proto-Germanic \*marōn. \*Marōn is the source of Old Norse: mara, from which are derived Swedish: mara; Icelandic: mara; Faroese: marra; Danish: mare; Norwegian: mare/mara, Dutch: (nacht)merrie, and German: (Nacht)mahr. The -mar in French cauchemar ('nightmare') is borrowed from the Germanic through Old French mare.

Most scholars trace the word back to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root \*mer-, associated with crushing, pressing and oppressing. or according to other sources 'to rub away' or 'to harm'. However, other etymologies have been suggested. For example, Éva Pócs saw the term as being cognate with the Greek μόρος (Indo-European \*móros), meaning 'doom'. There is no definite answer among historians about the time of origin of the word. According to the philologist Yeleazar Meletinsky, the Proto-Slavonic root mara passed into the Germanic language no later than the 1st century BC.

In Norwegian and Danish, the words for 'nightmare' are mareritt and mareridt respectively, which can be directly translated as 'mare-ride'. The Icelandic word martröð has the same meaning (-tröð from the verb *troða*, 'trample', 'stamp on', related to *tread*), whereas the Swedish *mardröm* translates as 'mare-dream'.

## Trivia

The mare was believed to ride horses, which left them exhausted and covered in sweat by the morning. She could also entangle the hair of the sleeping man or beast, resulting in "marelocks", called marflätor ('mare-braids') or martovor ('mare-tangles') in Swedish or marefletter and marefloker in Norwegian. The belief probably originated as an explanation to the Polish plait phenomenon, a hair disease.

Even trees were thought to be ridden by the mare, resulting in branches being entangled. The undersized, twisted pine-trees growing on coastal rocks and on wet grounds are known in Sweden as martallar ('mare-pines') or in German as Alptraum-Kiefer ('nightmare pine').

According to Paul Devereux, mares included witches who took on the form of animals when their spirits went out and about while they were in trance (see the Icelandic example of Geirrid, below). These included animals such as frogs, cats, horses, hares, dogs, oxen, birds and often bees and wasps.

In Serbian, *mora* refers to a 'nightmare'. *Mora* or *Mara* is one of the spirits from ancient Slav mythology, a dark one who becomes a beautiful woman to visit men in their dreams, torturing them with desire before killing them. In Serbia, a mare is called *mora*, or *noćnik/noćnica* ('night creature', masculine and feminine respectively). In Romania they were known as *Moroi*.

Some believe that a *mora* enters the room through the keyhole, sits on the chest of the sleeper and tries to strangle them (hence *moriti*, 'to torture', 'to bother', 'to strangle', *umoriti*, 'to tire', 'to kill', *umor*, 'tiredness' and *umoran*, 'tired'). To repel *moras*, children are advised to look at the window or to turn the pillow and make the sign of the cross on it (*prekrstiti jastuk*); in the early 19th century, Vuk Karadžić mentions that people would repel *moras* by leaving a broom upside down behind their doors, or putting their belt on top of their sheets, or saying an elaborate prayer poem before they go to sleep.