Undine

A knight lost in a haunted forest takes shelter in a fisherman's cottage and meets Undine, the old couple's foster daughter, lovely, laughing, and strangely wild, as if the storm outside answered her moods. It does. Undine is a water spirit, and by marrying the knight Huldbrand she gains the one thing her kind lacks: a human soul, with all the love and grief that come with it. But the waters do not give up their daughters easily, and the bargain has terms no one warned the knight about, least of all what happens if he is ever faithless to her near water.

Fouqué's 1811 tale is one of the jewels of German Romanticism, the direct ancestor of The Little Mermaid and every soulful water-spirit story since. It is short, strange, and genuinely moving: a fairy tale that begins as enchantment and deepens, almost without your noticing, into tragedy.

At roughly 35,400 words, Undine runs about 4 hours at 1x narration speed. That figure is an estimate based on a typical narration pace. The exact length depends on the voice and the playback speed you choose.

The edition linked here is available from Project Gutenberg under its US public-domain listing. Check the edition, translation, completeness and copyright rules where you live. LoudReader lets you browse and download Gutenberg books; they are not all stored on installation. To listen:

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2. Search for “Undine” in the built-in catalog and add it to your library.
3. Press play. A natural offline voice reads the book while each word highlights on screen, and your place is saved between sessions.

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