Their name means ‘young marriageable women, brides’; and they are the beings comprising Nature in many of her aspects, including mountains, waters, woods (i.e., aggregations of trees) and trees individually (or particular species of tree); but also places, regions, cities, and states. They could inspire mortals with poetry and prophetic power, but might also be deadly, even—or especially—to those whom they loved, as in the stories of Hylas and Bormos. (For the story of Hylas, read about the Argosy. For the story of Bormos, read about Linos.) As discussed in the file about the goddess Artemis, some of the nymphs are offshoots of her; as daimones of woods and mountains, they gave success (or denied it) to hunters. The Nereids (daughters of Nereus) are also nymphs; and two or three nymphs rose to the rank of not unimportant goddesses (as for example the Nereid Thetis); but the majority, although popular figures of rustic cult, alone or with Pan or some such deity, rather appear incidentally in stories of greater deities, or of mortals, than possess any very personal mythology of their own.
Nature nymphs are of several kinds, according to the province of nature which they inhabit or animate. There are the nymphs of trees, called Dryads or Hamadryads (properly, drus is an oak, and these should accordingly be strictly oak-spirits, as the Meliai are the spirits of ash-trees; but, either because the oak is one of the most important trees, or because its name is sometimes used to mean simply ‘tree’ of any kind, the Dryads are tree-nymphs in general). Ovid (Metamorphoses 8:771) says that nymphs, in contrast to true gods, are mortal, and Homer tells of dead nymphs in the Odyssey, while Hesiod regards them as being of extreme longevity—so extreme, indeed, as to amount to practical immortality; but some of the nymphs, such as the Nereids, certainly were immortal.
Their life-spans thus constitute a kind of flexible middle term between the utter deathlessness of such great gods as the Olympians, for example, and on the other hand such utterly mortal and short-lived creatures as Man. The author of the ‘Homeric’ Hymn to Aphrodite says about the mountain-nymphs or Oreads that “they belong neither to mortals nor to immortals; long do they live and they eat immortal food...together with them either firs or oaks of lofty crown grow on the nurturing earth...but when the doom of death stands near them, first the fair trees wither upon the earth, and the bark perisheth about them, and the limbs fall, and the soul of the nymphs therewith leaves the light of the sun.” Aristotle is recorded to have held that neither Nymphs nor Satyrs were immortal. Satyrs and Silenoi were frequently described as companions of the nymphs.
A late theory was that a Hamadryad animated a tree and perished with it, while a Dryad was simply a nymph who lived among trees. It is much to be doubted whether any such fine distinction existed in popular belief.
The Naiads were the nymphs of water, constantly associated with springs, rivers and lakes of all kinds. Here again we find sundry distinctions; a few authors speak, for example, of Potamiads, nymphs of rivers, and additional names include Creneids and Hydriads. The fact is however that all these names are simply feminine adjectives, agreeing with the substantive nymphe, and there was no orthodox and exhaustive classification of these shadowy beings. One and all, they are represented as beautiful, young, fond of dancing and music, and usually amorous, for they appear again and again as the brides, willing or otherwise, not only of satyrs, but of the greater gods and of mortals. Besides having prophetic and poetic powers which they can inspire mortals to emulate, they may also (or simultaneously with their poetic or prophetic inspiration) behave madly (as did those who took part in the Dionysiac thiasos) and may cause similar derangement or divine madness in men who have seen them, who when so affected are called nympholeptos, ‘caught (i.e., raptured or frenzied) by nymph(s).’
Like the British ‘fairy’ or the German Nixe, whom indeed the ancient Greek nymphe greatly resembles, the nymphs are on occasion formidable antagonists, as in the legend of the Sicilian herdsman Daphnis. Daphis, a son of Hermes and a nymph, and thus a half-brother of Pan, who was also his friend and teacher, was beloved of one of the nymphs of his native country, but either because he was unfaithful to her, or because he rejected her, she blinded him. He spent the short remainder of his life making sorrowful ditties on his own unhappy fate, these being the legendary origin of shepherds’ songs. Hermes took him up to heaven and made a river flow in the place where he died. (Theokritos, however, in his first Idyll, tells quite a different tale, in which apparently Daphnis, like Narkissos, would not love, until at last Aphrodite punished him by smiting him with insatiable longing for someone unattainable, whereof he died.)
Oreiads or Orestiads are the nymphs of mountains; Leimakids or Leimoniades are meadow-nymphs. Examples of local nymphs are the Acheloids, named after the river (god) Acheloös, or the Nysiads, named after Mt. Nysa where Dionysos was born. Many local goddesses were assimilated by the Greeks to this general category of being, and said to have been married to the founders of cities. Nymphs brought flowers to gardens and meadows, watched with Apollo and Hermes over the flocks, and frequently, as patronesses of healthful springs, aided the sick. Such nymphs were often associated with Asklepios).