Langsuir

The langsuir is the vampire of peninsular Malay folklore, and its earliest attestation is not Skeat's but William Maxwell's, published in 1881 in the journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. The condition is precise: if a woman dies in childbirth, either before delivery or after the birth of the child, and dies before the forty days of uncleanness that follow a birth have expired, popular belief holds that she becomes a langsuyar, a flying demon whom Maxwell likens to the European white lady and the Irish banshee. No curse or bargain is involved: dying within that span is enough. Wilkinson, who gives her a headword in his dictionary of 1901, specifies that she is the ghost of a woman who died pregnant with the child still unborn, and adds that what becomes the langsuir is that woman's shadow. To him we also owe the only etymology of the name with lexicographic backing: *lang*, the kite, plus *suwir*. Alongside that almost legal definition of who becomes a langsuir runs an aetiological tale that Skeat collected in Selangor, which tells of the first case of all: the original langsuir was a woman of dazzling beauty who did not die in childbirth but of the shock of learning that her child had been stillborn.

What best measures how far this belief organised the mourning of dead mothers is not what was said about the langsuir but what was done to the corpse. Maxwell describes a whole funerary protocol in 1881, and Skeat reproduces it in 1900 without altering a single piece: the mouth is filled with glass beads, a hen's egg is placed under each armpit, and a needle is driven into the palm of each hand. Every object has a stated mechanical function. The beads stop her opening her mouth to let out her shriek, the *ngilai*. The eggs stop her beating her arms as wings. The needles stop her opening and closing her hands to assist her flight. This is neither exorcism nor incantation: it is the physical immobilisation of a body that is literally expected to fly. The same treatment was given to the dead child, an egg under each armpit and a needle in each palm, so that it too would not rise. Nor is the rite a dead letter: when Cheryl Nicholas did fieldwork in Malaysia in the early twenty-first century, her informants described it to her intact, piece by piece, though they no longer credited it to the langsuir but to the pontianak.

Skeat lists four birth-spirits in Malay folklore, and of the langsuir he says, before anything else, that she takes the form of an owl with long claws which sits and hoots upon the roof-tree. That is her true body, and it is the detail almost every modern retelling has lost. The woman's form, the one that is remembered, is known by three marks that Skeat gives together: the green robe, the extraordinarily long tapering nails, which he is careful to call a mark of Malay beauty and not a weapon, and the jet-black tresses she lets fall to her ankles. The hair is not ornament: it covers the hole in the back of her neck through which she sucks the blood of children. She also has well-localised botanical haunts. Annandale and Robinson place her in 1903, in Upper Perak and the Patani states, inside one particular fig, the *pauh jerei*, from which she comes down into the village at night to possess women; and Gimlette records in 1915 a bird's-nest fern known in Selangor simply as *paku langsuir*, the langsuir's fern, because she is believed to make her home in it. There is even a domestic touch that undoes the terrifying picture: wild langsuirs are fond of fish, and are described sitting in crowds on the fishing stakes at the river mouth, waiting for a chance to steal it.

Her vampire-like proclivities can be combated, Skeat says, if the right means are adopted: if you can catch her, cut short her nails and her luxuriant tresses and stuff both into the hole in her neck, she becomes tame and indistinguishable from an ordinary woman, and stays so for years. Cases have been known, he adds, in which she became a wife and a mother. The spell breaks in the most domestic way imaginable: the tamed langsuir of the Selangor tale was allowed to dance at a village merry-making, and at that instant she reverted to her ghostly form and flew off into the dark forest she had come from. The motif is not one informant's fancy: Annandale and Robinson record it three years later, in another region and in the same words. It is worth saying, finally, why this entry exists apart from the pontianak's. Skeat held in 1900 that the pontianak was the stillborn child of the langsuir, and that hierarchy was copied for a century. It is his, and it is fragile: his own source, Maxwell, does not mention the pontianak once; Wilkinson denied it in 1901; and it rests on reading *mati beranak* as "stillborn" when the prefix *ber-* turns *anak* into a verb and the phrase means "died in childbearing". Malay today settles the matter by defining each name with the other. The langsuir here is therefore the classical peninsular figure documented between 1881 and 1915, not a separate species.