Nordic Folktale Water Creatures

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Have you ever looked out over a lake at night, wondering if that splash you heard was something to worry about?  Or heard the shriek and moan of the wind during a storm on the coast? Nordic folk have long had explanations for unexplainable things through folktales of strange and sometimes creepy supernatural creatures. In this podcast we look at the folktales that describe the mosekone and lygtemænd (bog woman and lantern men) of Danish marshes, the fearsome draug and sjøorm (sea spirit and sea serpent) of the northern coast of Norway, the musical fossegrim (water sprite) that inhabits Swedish waterfalls, and the treacherous horse-like nykur (nixie or nøkk) in the lakes of the Faroe Islands and Iceland.  We include a tale by Hans Christian Andersen along the way.

Please navigate to nordicontap.com to read the complete show notes, see pictures of these creatures, find links to more stories; nd while you’re there, take our listener survey to help us make podcasts that you want to hear.  So….pull up a chair for 40 minutes of stories we tell around the hearth late at night!

Links

Download a transcript of the Nordic Folktale Water Creatures podcast here.

Troll Magic: Hidden Folk from the Mountains and Forests of Norway, is a fantastic book of drawings and stories by Theodor Kittelsen with depictions of all the creatures in this podcast and many more. Of all the folktale illustrators of the late 1800s and early 1900s, Kittelsen, more than any other, showed us what Nordic supernatural creatures looked like. Most illustrators then contributed pictures to collections of Asbjørnson and Moe folktales, as did this artist, but in Troll Magic, Kittelsen writes his own stories to go with his illustrations. I wrote a review of the book for the Norwegian American.

Folktale sources for this podcast include Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend (Reimund Kvideland and Henning Sehmsdorf, ed.), Icelandic Folktales and Legends (Jacqueline Simpson), Swedish Legends and Folktales (John Lindow, contrib.), Folktales of Norway (Reidar Christiansen ed, Pat Shaw Iversen trans.), Danish Folk Tales (Svend Grundtvig, et. al., ed.; J Christian Bay, trans.), and The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf (Hans Christian Andersen, trans. Jean Hersholt). My other go-to folktale collection is Scandinavian Folk and Fairy Tales (Clair Booss, ed.), the source for stories in many of my other podcasts.

Rachel Nesvig, the accomplished hardanger fiddler and violinist, has a website at rachelnesvig.com. The brief snippets of her work played in this podcast (in the section about the fossegrim) came from this recording of a home concert on May 17, 2021 in honor of Norwegian Constitution Day. A special opportunity to hear her describe and play the hardanger fiddle is in our in our podcast, The Hardanger Fiddle: Lynn Berg and Rachel Nesvig. In our opinion, Rachel could give the fossegrim a few pointers on how to play the fiddle.

Images

Kittelsen’s Draugen (The sea spirit/ghost/dragon) sinking a ship at sea, 1891, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum Open source at https://digitaltmuseum.no/021047996133_draugen.png

This version of Sjöormen i Aalesund (The Sea Serpent in Ålesund) was included in Troldskab (Troll Magic) and shows fishers preparing for the huge wave caused by the sea serpent, 1877. Kittelsen drew at least one other version of this picture. https://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/samlingen/objekt/NG.K_H.B.06922

At left, above, is Næken (The stream man or fossegrim) by Johan Tiren [Wikipedia Commons], hanging in a Stockholm art museum.Can you imagine what the young fiddler is listening to? You can barely see it, just to the right of the small bush. Curiously, Johan Tiren also painted at least one other version of this scene. That one is called Jämtlands Sagen (Folktale from the Jämtland Region) and features a much older fiddler and an even less visible næk/fossegrim. Which version fits your mental image of the fossegrim best?

To the right above is Theodor Kittelsen’s Fossegrimen (The Water Sprite)pen and ink sketch , 1887, Wikimedia Commons. The fossegrim was often depicted as a naked man playing under a waterfall.

The fossegrim (sometimes considered a nøkk) is sometimes depicted as a harpist, as in Johan Zacharias Blackstadius’s painting of Två bondflickor som lyssnar till strömkarlens spel (Two farm girls who listen to the water sprites enchantment) at the left (Wikipedia), and in the sculpture of Stefan Sinding’s sculpture of the grim from 1901, in the waterfall/fountain under the statue of Ole Bull (taken by an anonymous photographer on Flickr) . It’s from the fossegrim that Bull allegedly learned how to become one of the world’s most famous and accomplished violinists.

An engraving of a lygtemann or lantern man glowing inside the bog rushes, by Josiah Wood Whymper, 1849, from his book Phenomenon of Nature at the Science Museum Group. Called ignis fatuss in Latin, for “foolish fire”, the lyktemaenn (plural) are phosphorescent lights hovering over the water in marshes. Unlike the draug, sjøorm, and fossegrim, these lights seem to be a real phenomenon in nature. They are, unfortunately, rarely observed anymore, due to the draining of marshes and swamps around the world.

The nykur of Iceland and the Faroes, called a nøkk or bäkehäst elsewhere. These twp illustrations by Theodor Kittelsen (Nøkken som hvit hest or The water horse/nixie as a white horse), shows an innocent-looking white horse that is more than happy to let you ride on him. If you do, you go to your doom. See also Countess Sica’s nykur illustration in A Book of Creatures and note the backwards hooves!

This isn’t specifically of the mosekone or bog woman, but shows such a witch “brewing” the fog (steam), as in the expression, “mosekone brygger”. From an 1891 drawing, artist unknown, at Open Clip Art.