My grandmother once told me how much she loved finding pieces of amber on the seashore back home in Samland.
"And do you know how amber came to people?" she asked me one day. Then she began her story...
..Many, many years ago our Earth was in the power of evil elements. These forces, hostile to people, harmed them as best they could — and envy, and fear, and hatred, and strife multiplied like weeds in the fields.
But people had protection too. They were watched over by two bright maidens, two guardian spirits. The domain of one was the land, the realm of the other the element of the sea. The enemies of the human race hated them, for wherever the protecting maidens were, they could no longer do people any harm. Trees, too, served as a protection for people. Oaks and spruces were sacred, and where they grew there was no room for evil spirits.
One day the sea maiden came out onto the shore to meet her earthly sister. The two of them settled beneath the shelter of a huge ancient oak and began to talk with each other. Soon, tired of talking, they dozed off, and the oak covered them with its large leaves.
And then a man possessed by evil noticed the two sleeping maidens and decided to climb the oak and kill them by bringing down a hail of acorns on them from above. Now it must be said that in those days the leaves of the sacred oaks were huge and the acorns very heavy, and excellent oil was pressed from them.
It so happened that at the same time some women from the nearest village were walking through the forest in search of wild honey and nuts. And when they suddenly saw two beautiful maidens under the huge oak, they were greatly astonished, for they had never seen anything like it before. Sitting down beside them, they began to study the strangers.
The dress of one of the sleepers was long and white. It was woven of a fine fabric, cool and soft, almost like the long fair hair of the one who wore it. The dress of the other was blue like the waves of the sea, and on her neck and arms were wondrous ornaments: transparent like honey, red like blood and yellow like the sand of the sea.
Suddenly the village women saw a man hiding up in the spreading crown of the tree. He was just reaching for the big acorns, but they suddenly shrank in his hand and became as small as hazelnuts. Then the man began to shake the branches of the oak, and the acorns came pouring down. The honey gatherers quickly jumped up and covered the two sleepers with their cloaks of fur and wool, for in those days people did not yet know flax.
Both maidens woke at the noise and looked around. Their clear eyes, blue as a sea wave in one and golden as honey in the other, calmly looked at the people. The village women were frightened and wanted to hide. But the fair-haired stranger called out to them kindly: "Wait, don't run away. You have done a good deed and must be rewarded. What would you like for yourselves?"
Then one woman hesitantly touched the white dress of the one who was speaking: "A dress just like this ...", and the second pointed to her sister's ornaments: "Such a beautiful ornament ..."
The bright earth maiden put her hand into the pocket of her dress, took out a handful of seeds and scattered them around her. And suddenly tall stalks began to grow out of the ground, and on them bloomed flowers as blue as her eyes: "Look: this is flax. From it you will make yourselves dresses as beautiful as mine. And since oil can no longer be got from acorns, gather the little brown seeds of the flax, from which you will press wonderful linseed oil."
The other maiden went to the edge of the surf and dipped her hands into the foaming waves. And lo, there were many shining stones in her hands, white as sand, yellow as honey and red as blood. The sea nymph threw the pebbles onto the sandy shore, saying: "Gather them! From now on you will always come upon them. Make ornaments of them. And if you wear these ornaments, they will protect you from evil illnesses..."
"And that, child, is how amber and flax came to people!" my grandmother said, finishing her story.
NOTE
"The Tale of Amber and Flax" (German: Das Märchen vom Bernstein und vom Flachs) was published on 15 November 1952 in the newspaper Das Ostpreussenblatt without the author's name or any reference to a source.
● Editor's note: Read on VisitPrussia.com an interview with the translator of German, and in particular Prussian, fairy tales, our regular contributor Tatyana Kolivay, who runs her own blog, where countless other parables, legends and fairy tales in her translation have been published.
Translated from Russian with the help of AI (Claude, Anthropic), October 2026.
