Jurgen

Jurgen

Jurgen is a respectable tradesman of Bellegarde, forty-something, married to the formidable Dame Lisa, and privately convinced he was meant for finer things than pawning other people's treasures. When Lisa vanishes into a cave, he follows her less from devotion than from a sudden, self-congratulatory notion of doing the manly thing — and promptly finds himself among witches, goddesses, and worse. His charm, his shameless self-justification, and his habit of narrating his own virtue make him both an irresistible guide and an unreliable one through the book's early wonders.

Queen Anaïtis

Anaïtis rules a land where the law is simply to do what seems good to you, and she takes Jurgen as Prince Consort when he blunders through the Breaking of the Veil. Her passion unnerves him — he keeps thinking of the female spider — and her jealousy is equally outsized, though she has some cause where the yogini Stella is concerned. She embodies the book's central temptation: pleasure without consequence, offered by a goddess who cannot quite believe her luck in having him.

Koshchei

Koshchei is the cosmic force behind the novel's shifting realities, the one who decides that what he wills has not only happened but always already happened. He meets Jurgen near the end of the journey and offers him not justice but something more acceptable — a life unburdened by the memory of wonders. His wry, unreadable smile and his refusal to be pinned down make him the book's slyest joke and its quietest terror.

Dame Lisa

Dame Lisa is a decent Christian woman with strong opinions about long words, low company, and her husband's shirts, and she disposes of cosmic beings with the same brisk contempt she applies to Jurgen's reading in bed. She has vanished into a cave when the story opens, and Jurgen's pursuit of her is tangled up with memories of the fine, merry girl she was before she married him. Her scolding voice haunts the whole book as the counterweight to every goddess and nymph he meets.

Mother Sereda

Mother Sereda lives in a chill stone house with a yardstick, a pair of scales, and caged birds, and she bleaches the cloths that Clotho spun and Lachesis wove until nothing remains but dishclouts. She recognizes Jurgen's glittering shirt, and she tells him plainly that in time she will bleach that too. She is the Léshy power that nibbles and devastates, and her meeting with Jurgen sets the rueful, elegiac undertone beneath all his later adventures.

Chloris

Chloris is a hamadryad in the island of Leukê, where Jugatinus marries everyone and nobody ever leaves, so the question of Jurgen's prior wives simply cannot arise. She is tender, literal-minded, and utterly untroubled by the complications that follow Jurgen everywhere else, and their wedding is one of the book's gentlest, funniest scenes. She represents the sweet, impossible simplicity of a love that has no history and no consequences — exactly what Jurgen keeps half-wanting and cannot keep.