Three early medieval Germanic languages—Old English, Old High German, and Old Norse—contain related words for a supernatural female being: mære in Old English, mara in Old Norse, and mahr in Old High German.¹ Their shared root is the Indo-European *mer, to crush or oppress.² The term has a long life: a creature called a mara also appears in folk narratives collected in Scandinavia and Hungary in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Catharina Raudvere and Eva Pócs, in their respective studies of this later material, conclude that the folkloric mara is a nocturnal female being who crushes men in their beds and livestock in their stables by mounting them, and whose attacks have an implicit erotic element.³ The natures of the much older Old English mære and Old Norse mara, however, have never been the subject of systematic examination.

Indeed, much scholarship makes assumptions about the identities and behavior of these beings without such an investigation. Most dictionaries translate mære and mara as "nightmare" without elaboration, or define [End Page 352] her simply as a creature who torments victims in their sleep; Johan Fritzner translates mara as "incubus" without further clarification.⁴ Several compounds in Old Norse that seem to be related to the mara—kveldriða, "evening-rider," myrkriða, "dark-rider," túnriða, "?fence-rider," and trollriða, "troll-rider"—are usually defined as "witches who ride out in the dark" similarly without elaboration.⁵ Previous scholarship has often ignored or denied the potentially sexual nature of the medieval mære and mara, suggesting instead that she uses her victims for transportation, merely suffocates them or obscures their vision, or is not defined as an individual supernatural being.⁶ Some scholars of Old Norse have suggested that the mara's predations may be erotic—Dag Strömbäck notes that "something libidinous was connected to these witch-activities," while Ármann Jakobsson refers to the mara as a "succuba"—but do not seek to integrate this understanding of the mara into Old Norse frameworks of sexual thought (e.g., ergi, discussed below).⁷ Other scholars have suggested that the mara is a sexual assailant, but in so doing conflate the Old English and Old Norse traditions, offer an incomplete list of examples, or elide the mara and her sexual activities with other supernatural beings.⁸ Alaric Hall offers a detailed examination of the Old English glosses containing the word mære, which provides groundwork for elements of the present study, but as Hall himself notes, questions about the nature of the mære merit further exploration.⁹ Raudvere has argued that there is continuity between the [End Page 353] folkloric and Old Norse mara, but much of the medieval evidence remains to be discussed.¹⁰

In this article, I examine all mentions of the mære in the Old English corpus, and of the mara and related terms in the Old Norse corpus, and demonstrate that these terms are broadly synonymous with one another and refer to a category of female, supernatural, sexual predators who commit erotic and eroticized violence against (mostly male) victims. The mara-type is not only a sexual assailant in both corpuses, but also a cause of illness. Though there are significant parallels between the corpuses that reveal similar sets of ideas about disease, sex, and gender, extant Old English texts dealing with the mære (glosses, medical texts) are weighted towards understandings of the mære as a disease agent, while the extant Old Norse texts (narrative prose and poetry) are most interested in the elision of sex and violence and its consequences for male victims.

The medical, legal, and literary texts that deal with mara-types operate on a set of assumptions about gender and sexuality that have been identified by numerous medieval scholars. These texts largely assume that physical sex and socially-constructed gender are binary and conflated—that is, an assessment of a person's physical sex based on genitalia and perceptible secondary-sex characteristics determines that individual's expected...