The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year (12 page)

Christmas, the first of these Yule Lads descends from the

mountains, a new one appearing each day to hang about

the farmstead or even the streets of Reykjavik until there are thirteen of them making merry on Christmas Day.

If you look out the window after dark and see a troll-

ish lad making faces back at you, that would be Win-

dow Peeper. Have the smoked mutton and
skyr
that you put aside for Christmas dinner disappeared? Blame Meat

Hooker and Skyr Gobbler. Someone clattering among the

dirty dishes in the sink? The culprits would be Pot Scraper, Spoon Licker and Bowl Licker. You don’t have to guess

what kind of mischief Skirt Blower likes to get up to, but some of the lads have more enigmatic names such as Door

Sniffer, Candle Beggar and Gully Gawk. While folklorist Jon Arnason standardized their number in 1864—before that

there could be as many as twenty and as few as nine—their

names still vary.

In the Icelandic folktale, “See My Grey Foot Dangle,”

three children are left home alone while their parents attend church on Christmas Eve. They’ve each been given a candle

and a pair of bright red socks which they sit around admiring when a voice is heard out in the yard. The youngest and therefore most innocent child remarks that it must be Jesus
Creatures of Forest and Mountain 89

who is calling to them through the window. The boy’s use

of the holy name banishes the creature, who was not Jesus

at all but a hairy gray Icelandic troll who would surely have spirited one or more of the children away. Was this troll one of the Yule Lads? He might have been, for in the old days, the Yule Lads often had children on their grocery list.

You can’t really blame the lads for their bad habits. Their parents were the trolls Gryla and Leppaludi, though Gryla

may actually have born them all out of wedlock. We don’t

know much about Leppaludi, but Gryla was a great eater

of children. The Christmas Lads have been around since at

least the 1600’s and the years have been kind to them. They used to be ogres as terrible as their parents but are now

merely oafish. These days, they like to dress like Santa Claus and are inclined to bring presents instead of carrying children off and dropping them in their mother’s pot. In the

1920’s, Icelandic children started placing their shoes in the window anytime after December 12 in the expectation that

the Yule Lads would fill them.

Goblins at the Window

Although it was not written down until a month after the

fact, the following incident occurred on or around Novem-

ber 21, 1933, according to Father Nicholas Christmas who

included it in a letter to the children of J. R. R. Tolkien in December of that year. (The letter can now be read by all in
The Letters of Father Christmas
, edited by Baillie Tolkien.) On the night in question, Father Christmas was woken by

a disturbing “squeak and spluttering” in his bedroom, fol-

lowed by the appearance of a “wicked little face” at the win-90 Creatures of Forest and Mountain

dow which was some distance above the ground. There was

no doubt about it: the old man’s Cliff House was under

attack from bat-riding goblins.

In the Scandinavian literature of which Tolkien was

so fond, the goblins are always hungry for treasure. In the Norwegian tale, “The Christmas Visitors at Kvame,” the

goblin chieftain, Old Trond, brings his own silver goblets to the party at a Norwegian farmhouse and is only parted

from his treasures when he is shot dead in the High Seat.20

Old Trond would have been subordinate to the Goblin

King who lived in Sweden and presided over a consider-

ably larger hoard of golden chalices, coins and plates. The nastier the goblin, the greater the hoard, and the Norwegian
jutul
was the nastiest of all. On Christmas Eve, if you were brave enough to venture into the mountains, you

could see glow of the jutul’s treasure-heap blazing out from the cracks in the rock face with the brilliance of a thousand candles.

The goblins of the North Pole, however, are mad for

toys—especially the toys Father Christmas stores in the cellars of his Cliff House. In fact, they will do anything to get their clumsy black paws on the train sets and are apparently untroubled by the steel components, unlike their more

traditional cousins who cannot tolerate iron in any of its forms. As Father Christmas reports to the children, the use 20. In the Scandinavian home, the ornately carved High Seat was reserved for the master of the household. By breaking in and seating himself there, Old Trond was displaying typical goblin cheek.

Creatures of Forest and Mountain 91

of green smoke had failed to eradicate the goblins the year before and now they’ve grown especially bold.

In none of the Scandinavian tales do the goblins have

wings, nor do those besieging the Cliff House. When Father Christmas glimpses them in the darkness outside his window he comes to the immediate conclusion that they are

riding on bats. Why bats? Why not some more plausible

species such as the snowy owl or a high-stepping Arctic

hare? Although rare—F. C.’s staff had not seen a goblin on a bat since 1453—the bat-riding Christmas spirit is not without precedent.

When Father Christmas, with the help of his compatri-

ots, Polar Bear and the Red Gnomes, finally got the upper

hand and drop-kicked the goblins’ noxious little corpses

out the door, he sat down to paint a picture of the bat-

tle, which is how we know that the North Pole goblins are

soot-black, the usual color of troublesome Christmas spir-

its as well as a few of the beneficent ones. John Grossman’s album of antique postcards,
Christmas Curiosities: Odd,
Dark, and Forgotten Christmas
, includes the antitheses of these polar goblins: a handful of rosy-cheeked angelic little boys riding their own bridled bats—noctules and pip-

istrelles by the looks of them. Each chubby boy is wearing a jockey’s outfit and holding what appears to be a peacock feather. They are coming to wish us all a “bright New Year,”

but the tiny white wings sprouting from their backs are the only even faintly seasonal symbol in sight. (The wings naturally raise the question of why these boys need to be riding bats at all!)

92 Creatures of Forest and Mountain

The bat would not appear seasonal to us, but this color

lithograph was printed in 1895, about the same time that a three-year-old J. R. R. Tolkien first arrived in England from his birthplace in South Africa, a time when the idea that

Christmas and New Year’s belonged, in part, to the squeaky creatures of the night could still sell a few postcards. (Grossman’s album also features a tribe of fur-clad fairies roasting a rat over an open fire and a coven of witches scattering

Christmas wishes while flying backwards on their broom-

sticks.)

Even at Halloween, bats have never been as popular as

black cats, so it’s unlikely they’ll ever become the official mascots of Christmas. They seem to have fallen out of favor with the goblins too, for no further incidents of aerial bat-manship have been reported since that infamous night in

1933. Still, you never know, so keep an eye on your stash of Christmas presents and be alert for any flapping or squeak-ing at the attic window.

If you are not already in possession of a household sprite, you should think very carefully before taking one on. The

English version of the household sprite is the boggart, and the most famous boggart was probably the one belonging to the Yorkshire Gilbertsons. Fed up with their bog-

gart’s mischievous pranks, the Gilbertsons decided to move house. The cart was all packed up and ready to go when

they heard the boggart speak up from inside the butter

churn. “We’re flittin’,” he explained to an inquisitive neighbor. It had never even occurred to the boggart that the family might try to leave without him.

Rather than stay behind in an empty house or, worse

yet, get used to a new family, the household sprite will stick with those he knows. Conditioned by centuries of primogeniture, the
nisse
,
tomten
or
tonttu
will usually cast his lot with the eldest son, that is, the one most likely to inherit the old homestead. There was a time when no farm in Denmark, Sweden, Norway or Finland was without its tiny,

93

94 The Scandinavian Household Sprite

bright-eyed old man to help with the chores at night. Over the last few hundred years, many of these creatures have

moved to the cities, especially in Denmark which has the

highest concentration of household sprites. In the Faeroe

Islands, the chores were sometimes taken over by the red-

capped
niðagrisur
(see “Yule Boar” in Chapter 8), while in Iceland there are only the huldrefolk who have no special attachment to the farmstead. Since it was not only second sons traveling to Iceland at the time of settlement21, this indicates that the household sprite is either reluctant to travel far from his homeland or, like the Celtic fairy, is unable to cross large bodies of water.

Still, accidents and exceptions do happen, so if you are

of Scandinavian descent, there is a remote chance that you might already have one of the old fellows living in your

home. The information in the following pages should help

you to identify him and make him more comfortable. If

your family does not hail from that part of the world, or

if you come from a side branch of the family, it’s not too late to acquire your own domestic goblin. The best place to 21. There is an episode early in the Icelandic
Laxdaela Saga
in which the matriarch Unn the Deep-Minded discovers the High Seat pil ars which she had brought from Norway and lost when her ship was wrecked in Iceland. She decides to build her house right there where the carved pil ars have washed ashore. Had her household sprite been carried along with them, she might have expected to find a fire already burning, the turves for the house wal s cut, and the horses fed and combed, but this was not the case. Earlier, Unn had left her granddaughter Olof behind in the Faeroe Islands. Olof was to become the progenitor-ess of the mighty Gotuskeggi Clan, so it is possible that the family nisse stayed with her and was later conflated with the Faroese niðagrisur.

The Scandinavian Household Sprite 95

do so is at a Scandinavian Christmas market. While there

is nothing intrinsically Christmassy about the boggart, the nisse, tomten and tonttu are the epitome of Yule. Yes, you could order one online, but picking them up in your hands

and patting their knitted caps will help you to choose the one that’s right for you. Failing this, you can follow the instructions at the end of this chapter and make your own.

A homemade house-sprite is not just a consolation prize

but a long-standing practice. Medieval Germans were carv-

ing little kobolds out of boxwood back in the thirteenth

century, ostensibly just for fun but originally as objects of veneration. In Scandinavia, the carving of these creatures is now a specialized craft. (No doubt our ancestors would

be surprised how popular the wooden trolls have become!)

Jacob Grimm assures us that household sprites can

indeed be bought and sold, but if you are the third pair of hands to receive it, you must hold on to it forever. Grimm identified all of these tutelary spirits, along with the kobold, with the ancestral ghosts who dwelt in the hearth and liked to use it as a front door. There is no denying that the household sprite has come down in the world. Assuming that

he is indeed of the same lineage as those age-old spirits of the fireplace, he resides there no longer. At some point, he was moved to the periphery of the home, to attic, stable or barn, and the daily repast that was set out for him became a once-a-year treat. Household sprites are not all cut from the same homespun; there are subtle differences in their dress, characters and preferences. We’ll begin our study with the nisse, whose kind covers the largest area: both Norway and Denmark.

96 The Scandinavian Household Sprite

Nisse

“Nisse” may be derived from “Nicholas” and thus a generic

nickname, but the nisse has never really had anything to do with St. Nicholas Day; Christmas Eve is his special night.

The farm nisse used to be particular about Thursdays: there was to be no spinning or chopping of firewood on a Thursday night, a reflection of his heathen leanings.22

The Norwegian farm nisse was once restricted to the

southeastern part of the country. The northern and western districts were the territory of the
gardvord
and the somewhat more crotchety
tunkal
. The earliest gardvord was a giant who could hold his own against any troll. Because he was too big to fold himself up in the hayloft, he was given the use of an empty room or outbuilding. He allowed himself to be seen more often than the nisse, while the tunk-

all appeared to and conversed only with the elderly. Most

likely the tunkall or the gardvord was the ghost of some old grandfather, perhaps the one who had established the farm

and vowed never to leave it.

A descendant of the gardvord and tunkall, the nisse is

now drastically shrunken. The German kobold was sup-

posed to be the size of a four-year-old child, but the nisse is only as tall as a one-year-old. When he chooses to doff his red cap, thereby making himself visible, you can see

that he has a long gray beard. The city nisse might wear a 22. Not every nisse is a heathen. Each church used to have its own
kirkegrim
or church nisse. Though identical to the farm nisse and often believed to be a specialized breed of the same, the kirkegrim is more likely to be the lingering ghost of a foundation sacrifice.