Undine’s Adoption by the Fisherman and His Wife begins with a child’s death and turns a bereaved household into a place of shelter for a stranger from the water. Recounted by the fisherman to Huldbrand about fifteen years after the events, the story explains how the couple came to raise Undine as their daughter, why they gave her the name she still bears, and how the adoption’s mixture of care, grief, and unresolved origins anticipates later revelations about family and belonging.

Loss and the Child at the Door

The fisherman’s account begins before Undine arrives. His wife stayed at home while he crossed the forest on a journey to the city, because God had given the couple a baby girl in their advanced years. The new child had made them consider leaving their beloved home for a more habitable place where she might be brought up better. The fisherman, however, was poor and could not simply choose the circumstances he wished for his family. He worried about exchanging the familiar peninsula for the noise and quarrels of the city, but remained grateful for the baby and recalled no supernatural encounter in the forest on that journey.

On his return, he found his wife in mourning. Their infant had drowned while she was playing with her mother beside the lake. The baby had leaned toward something in the water, smiled, and stretched out her hands; then she sprang from her mother’s arms and sank beneath the surface. The fisherman searched for her without finding a trace. The story gives the loss a particular intimacy: the child is not taken in a distant accident, but disappears within reach of the mother who had been holding her moments before.

That evening the couple sat together in silence, looking into the hearth and unable even to speak through their tears. A rustling came from outside; the door flew open, and a richly dressed girl of about three or four stood smiling on the threshold. Water dripped from her golden hair and garments. Seeing that she had been in the water and needed help, the fisherman urged his wife to do for this child what they would have wished someone to do for their own. They undressed her, put her to bed, and gave her something warm. The girl did not speak, but looked at them with smiling eyes reflecting the blue of the lake and sky. Their first response to this inexplicable arrival was practical care.

Adoption, Origins, and Naming

By the next morning the girl seemed unharmed by her immersion. Asked who her parents were and how she had come there, she offered a confused account. She spoke of being in a boat on a great lake with her mother, falling into the water, and recovering her senses beneath the trees, where she felt happy on the shore. The fisherman could not trace her parentage, then or during the fifteen years that followed. Her talk of golden castles and crystal domes seemed so unlike the experience of the couple that he could only describe her origins as a mystery.

The couple decided to keep the found child and bring her up in place of the daughter they had lost. Yet taking her into their household did not settle every question of belonging: they did not know whether she had been baptized, and the girl could not tell them. When asked, she said she had been created for God’s praise and glory and would accept whatever they thought served that purpose. Her answer offered no ordinary account of parentage or religious status, leaving her new guardians to make decisions on her behalf.

They considered naming her Dorothea, understanding the name to mean a gift of God and seeing the girl as a comfort sent to them in their misery. She refused that name, insisting that her parents had called her Undine and that she wished to keep it. The fisherman regarded Undine as a heathenish name absent from the calendar, so he sought a priest’s advice. The priest initially objected, but came with the fisherman through the forest to perform the baptism at the cottage. The girl’s charm and liveliness softened his resistance; she was baptized as Undine and behaved with unusual propriety during the sacred rite, despite her customary restlessness. Thus the adoption joined everyday parental care to a public religious act, while preserving the name the child claimed from a family the couple could not identify.

A Found Family and a Hidden Kinship

The adoption later becomes part of a wider story about children separated from their birth families and brought up under other identities. At a gathering, Undine sings about Bertalda’s origins. The song moves the duke, who recognizes that he and his wife have not been able to give their foster daughter the priceless joy described in it. Undine then asks that the song also tell of the parents’ sorrow. When Bertalda demands to know where her parents are, the fisherman and his wife come forward; a noble benefactress recognizes Bertalda as their recovered child. The old couple weep and praise God, while Bertalda rejects their embrace and accuses them and Undine of deception. Her foster parents’ public recognition of her birth does not immediately produce her acceptance of them.

The old fisherman’s wife supplies a concrete means of confirming the relationship: she says Bertalda has a violet-like mark between her shoulders and another on the instep of her left foot. The duchess examines Bertalda and declares the fisherman’s wife’s account true. The identity revelation makes the adoption’s central distinction visible: years of upbringing can establish a real parental bond, but they do not erase biological origin or guarantee that a child will welcome it. Later, when Bertalda is distressed, Undine asks her to come to Ringstetten and proposes that they share everything as sisters. She describes the two girls as exchanged in childhood and bound by a kindred destiny, transforming their mistaken family histories into a claim of chosen kinship.

Narrative Significance

The fisherman tells the story while he and Huldbrand wait for Undine, each repeatedly looking up at small movements outside and hoping she has returned. His account is therefore both a family history and an explanation of the anxieties surrounding her present absence. As he reaches the events of the adoption, a rushing flood interrupts him: the forest brook overflows, stones and branches are swept along, and the storm lashes the lake and the peninsula. The two men run out searching and calling for Undine. Huldbrand eventually crosses the flooded water and finds her on a small island, safely beneath the trees. The retold arrival from the lake thus gives way to another scene in which water separates and then brings the characters into a charged intimacy.

In retrospect, the girl’s fall into the water and unexplained appearance at the cottage point beyond the limits of the fishermen’s understanding. Undine later explains that water spirits inhabit lakes and streams and identifies herself as one of them. The adoption does not resolve that supernatural origin; instead, it shows how the couple responds without knowing it, treating a strange, silent child as someone who requires warmth, protection, a home, and a name. The event’s force lies in that contrast: a child lost to the water is mourned, while another arrives from it and is accepted, and the household’s act of care becomes the first human bond in Undine’s life.