Apollo and Daphne earth to enclose me, or change my form, which has brought me into this danger! Let me be free of this man from this moment forward!" Peneus answered her plea and “a heavy numbness [seized] her limbs; her soft breasts [were] surrounded by a thin bark, her hair [changed] into the foliage, her forearms [changed] into branches; her foot, just now swift, now [clinged] because of sluggish roots.” She was turned into a laurel tree. Apollo vowed to honor her forever: “Always my hair will have you, my lyres will have you, my quivers will have you, laurel tree. You
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