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Undines (; also ondines) are a category of elemental beings associated with water, stemming from the alchemy writings of Paracelsus. Later writers developed the undine into a water nymph in its own right, and it continues to live in modern literature and art through such adaptations as Danish Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 "The Little Mermaid" and the 1811 novella Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué.
What undines lack, compared to humans, is an immortal soul. Marriage with a human shortens their lives on Earth, but earns them an immortal human soul, a view which was professed by Paracelsus.
The offspring of a union between an undine and a man are humans with a soul, but also with some kind of aquatic characteristic, called a watermark. Moses Binswanger, the protagonist in Hansjörg Schneider's Das Wasserzeichen (1997), has a cleft in his throat, for instance, which must be periodically submerged in water to prevent it from becoming painful.
Paracelsus's view of elemental spirits may have grown out of the folklore that a very human-like race of spirits exists in a different "plane" from humans, according to Celticist Henry Jenner.:
Thus in the "astral plane" (or "Chaos", in Paracelsian jargon) for each of the four elements, earth, air/wind, fire, and water, there resided four types of spiritual beings, a view held by Paracelsus according to his Liber de Nymphis. These spirits are like unto human beings, but not endowed with . But Undines ("water women", "water people") in particular are able to consort with humans more than the spirits of other elements, and are most capable of entering into marriage with a human male, thus earning a kernel of the immortality. The children born to her will be imparted with human souls as well. For this reason, the Undines (also called Nymphs) yearn to marry a human husband. If a man has an Undine/Nymph for a wife, he must be careful not to offend her in the presence of water, or she will return to her element.:"When they have been provoked in any way by their husbands while they are on water, they simply drop into the water, and nobody can find them any more. To the husband it is as if she were drowned.. And yet.. he many not consider her dead."
This motif of the husband's calumny causing Undine's departure also occurs in Fouquet's novella (and Hoffmann's opera). Undine's husband Huldbrand had been forewarned not to do so,, quoting La Motte pp. 73–74. but he rekindles his unfaithful relationship with Bertalda, he commits the insult, and she splashes away beneath the Danube.
Paracelsus also emphasizes that even if the sylph/undine has returned to water, the marriage still remains valid, and she cannot be presumed to be dead, another theme exploited by Fouquet's novella: thus, as her husband's transgression necessitates her departure into the watery world, she makes the insistence on her husband that his vow of fidelity still remains in place, and breaking it would have deadly consequence.: "her union with him extends to her own watery element". And she continues to remind to her husband to remain faithful, in the form of a message in a dream between the swan song.
According to Paracelsus, the Undine will still receive her place on the Day of Judgment, i.e., she will still preserve the immortal soul she earned through marriage.
David Gallagher argues that, although they had Paracelsus as a source, 19th and 20th-century German authors found inspiration for their many versions of undine in classical literature, particularly Ovid's Metamorphoses, especially given the transformation of many of their undines into springs: Hyrie (book VII) and Egeria (book XV) are two such characters.
Ondine was the title of one of the poems in Aloysius Bertrand's collection Gaspard de la Nuit of 1842. This poem inspired the first movement of Maurice Ravel's 1908 piano suite Gaspard de la nuit.
The character of Mélisande from Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande has been seen as an Undine figure. Claude Debussy, Jean Sibelius, Fauré, and Schoenberg all wrote music adaptions of the play. The 1939 play Ondine by French dramatist Jean Giraudoux is also based upon Fouqué's novella, as is Ondine, a ballet by composer Hans Werner Henze and choreographer Frederick Ashton with Margot Fonteyn as Undine. Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann, a friend of Henze's who collaborated with him frequently, attended the premiere of the ballet in London, and published her short story "Undine geht" in the collection Das dreißigste Jahr (1961), in which Undine "is neither a human nor a water spirit, but an idea".
Fouqué's Undine also exerted an influence on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" (1837), and H.D. plays on this identification in her autobiographical novel HERmione (1927). Burton Pollin notes the popularity of the tale in the English-speaking world: translations in English appeared in 1818 and 1830, and a "superior version" was published by American churchman Thomas Tracy in 1839 and reprinted in 1824, 1840, 1844, and 1845; he estimates that by 1966 almost a hundred English versions had been printed, including adaptations for children. Edgar Allan Poe was profoundly influenced by Fouqué's tale, according to Pollin, which may have come about through Poe's broad reading of Walter Scott and Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Scott had derived the character of the White Lady of Avenel ( , 1820) from Undine, and a passage by Coleridge on Undine was reprinted in Tracy's 1839 edition.
French composer Claude Debussy included a piece called "Ondine" in his collection of piano preludes written in 1913 (Preludes, Book 2, No. 8).
A poem by Seamus Heaney titled "Undine" appears in his 1969 collection Door into the Dark. The poem is narrated from the first-person perspective of the water nymph itself.
Japanese pianist Yukie Nishimura composed a piece of piano music titled Undine in late 1980s.
The composer Carl Reinecke wrote the "Sonata Undine" for flute and piano, opus 167, first published in 1882.
Critics have pointed out that medical texts on the syndrome frequently misinterpret Ondine as a vengeful or malevolent character; in the play, Ondine is not responsible for the curse and tries to save Hans.
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