Witches

The Witches are figures in a village tale that turns social exclusion into supernatural danger: women driven from their homes supposedly gather in the Witches’ Village, practice magic, and entice children away. A girl’s abduction provides the story’s central warning, while her father’s protective boar’s tooth and the life-bearing plants in a witch’s pot make the threat concrete. The tale has an immediate effect on Ada, and her fear gives Joseph Knecht an occasion to comfort her and approach her father, Turu, the Rainmaker.

The village tale and its outcasts

In the story told by an old woman to the assembled listeners, a wicked woman who wishes harm on her village is sometimes expelled. The villagers go to her hut at night, restrain her husband, drive her into the woods and swamps, and leave her under a curse. If she survives, the tale says, she learns the language of animals and eventually finds the Witches’ Village, where other expelled women have gathered. There they live apart from the communities that rejected them and make magic.

The tale associates the witches’ supposed danger with their childlessness: because they have no children of their own, they are said to coax children away from proper villages. A child who disappears in the woods might not, the old woman suggests, have drowned or been taken by a wolf; a witch may have led the child to the village. The explanation works as a folk account of children lost beyond the settlement, but it also turns the cast-out women into a continuing threat to the communities that expelled them.

The lost girl and the protective tooth

To illustrate the danger, the old woman recalls a girl who went berry-picking with other children, fell asleep among the ferns, and was left behind when the others returned home. Her father had given her a boar’s tooth, bored through with a stone tool and strung on bast after being boiled in boar’s blood and prepared with protective spells. Her parents had warned her not to let a stranger see it. When a woman appears and offers to lead the lost girl home, the child secretly removes the tooth and hides it in her belt.

The woman takes her not to her own village but to the Witches’ Village, where the child is locked in a dark stable. The following morning, the witch asks about the missing tooth. She then shows the child a clay pot containing three plants: one represents the mother’s life, one the father’s, and one the child’s own. According to the witch, a plant’s condition corresponds to its person’s health, and pulling one out means that person will die. The story stops at the moment she starts to pull the father’s plant. The threat is left suspended rather than resolved within the tale.

Ada’s fear and Knecht’s intervention

Knecht is listening beside Ada, the Rainmaker’s daughter, when the old woman tells the story. Ada has been trying to master her terror, but at the threat to the father’s life she jumps up and runs away. Other listeners are frightened too, though they stay seated; Knecht, startled from his own absorption, immediately follows her.

He searches near the village pond and calls to Ada with coaxing, reassuring sounds. Before he sees or hears her, she takes his hand from where she has been waiting beside a hut. Knecht asks whether she was frightened, assures her that no one will hurt her, and leads her home. The tale’s imagined danger thus becomes the occasion for an actual gesture of care: Ada is no longer alone with the fear the story has created.

The Rainmaker, the charm, and apprenticeship

At Turu’s hut, Knecht explains why he has brought Ada home. Turu tells his daughter that sensible girls need not fear witches. When Ada answers that witches know wicked tricks and mentions the missing boar’s tooth in the story, her father offers a different protection: a special root that he will give her and that, he says, protects sensible girls from magic and makes them prettier. Ada is reassured. Knecht asks whether he might help find the root if Turu describes the plant, but Turu replies with mild mockery that there will be time for that, perhaps in autumn.

The exchange anticipates Knecht’s growing attachment to the Rainmaker’s knowledge. He repeatedly follows Turu into the woods, watches him gather plants and seeds, and sometimes receives tasks, explanations, or tests. Eventually Turu takes him into his hut and acknowledges him as an apprentice and possible successor. His teaching relies chiefly on the senses and on accumulated practical experience rather than formal concepts or written methods. In that relationship, the protective root belongs to the same world of particular plants, inherited know-how, and closely guarded practices that Knecht is gradually permitted to enter.

Narrative role and significance

The Witches’ tale is an inset story, delivered by an elder to a village audience and remembered as part of Knecht’s life. Its function is not only to frighten: it brings together the village’s explanations of danger, family protection, and magical knowledge in a story that directly changes what the children do. Ada flees; Knecht follows; and the episode gives him a reason to enter Turu’s hut with her and ask about a protective plant.

The witches themselves remain figures within the old woman’s account; the narrative does not establish that the Witches’ Village exists outside the tale. Their importance lies in how the story shapes the scene and its relationships. A child’s fear becomes a moment of trust between Ada and Knecht, while Knecht’s curiosity about the root points toward the apprenticeship that will make him Turu’s heir. The tale’s threatened child is protected in the immediate scene, and its imagined magic opens a path into the Rainmaker’s practical tradition.