Daphne At this moment Apollo's attention becomes engaged, and he begins his own pursuit. Daphne, fleeing to escape Apollo's advances, prays to Zeus to help. Zeus turns her into laurel tree. Parthenius' modern editor remarks on the rather awkward transition, linking two narratives. "Why should she wish to escape? Because she is Artemis Daphnaia, the god's sister," observed the Freudian anthropologist Géza Róheim, and Joseph Fontenrose concurs; boldly stating such a one-to-one identity doubtless oversimplifies the picture: "the equation of Artemis and Daphne in the transformation myth itself clearly cannot work". The laurel became sacred to Apollo, and crowned the victors
The Wood Nymph have failed to prepare "The Wood Nymph" for publication is a question that has perplexed scholars. On the advice of Ferruccio Busoni, Sibelius in 1895 offered "The Wood Nymph" to the Russian music publisher Mitrofan Belyayev but it was not published. Murtomäki has suggested that Sibelius, despite having been fond of "The Wood Nymph", was "unsure about the true value" of his output from the 1890s, an ambivalence that is perhaps best illustrated by the piecemeal publication history of, and multiple revisions to, the four "Lemminkäinen" legends (appearing in the composer's 1911 diary under a list of works to be