Dryads

Tree Spirits

Greek Mythology

I've been thinking about dryads recently. They popped up on my radar a few months ago when a character from my Gateway series informed me that she was a tree spirit. This was news to me, and though I didn't know much about the creatures, I vaguely remembered the dryads from Greek mythology. I dutifully jotted down as much of my tree spirit's story as I could, and vowed to do some research. But, as is often the case, there were several other projects I was working on, and I put it on the back burner.

Tree spirits resurfaced in my consciousness a month or so ago when I was brainstorming for a short-short story for the AOER website -- you can see the end result at Authors of Erotic Romance, in Under the Influence #5 -- and I realized it was past time I did some reading.

Dryads are wood nymphs (nature spirits from Greek mythology.) Their name comes from the Greek drys, which means oak. It is thought that they were associated with the oak tree specifically, though the word is often used to include wood nymphs in general.

Dryads are long-lived guardian spirits who will sometimes leave the trees they inhabite to dance in the forest. They are usually described as shy, and it is said to be unlucky to interact with them -- or even to see them at all. Dryads are associated with Artemis, the moon goddess, and Dionysus, the god of wine.

There are several other varieties of wood nymphs in Greek Mythology. For example, Meliai were the nymphs of ash trees, and Oreiades were the nymphs of mountain conifers. Hamadryads, unlike dryads, were said to be bound to their trees. If the tree died, they died too.

You can find more information about wood nymphs on the Theoi Project and Mythography.

In the process of researching dryads, I discovered a number of non-Greek tree spirits which I'll blog about another time. I have to say, I'm not sure my Gateway tree spirit is a dryad or not. I'm going to have to do some more reading...

Dryad Art: top left by AselClub;bottom right by Ulrike Kleinert