The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year (13 page)

The Scandinavian Household Sprite 97

red or blue suit, but the farm nisse wears smock and trou-

sers of natural-colored wool. Though they’re quite scuffed and ordinary-looking, his buckled shoes can carry him over mountains and bogs at terrific speeds. The Christmas market nisse tends to stoutness, even cuddliness, but the oldtime farm nisse is simply an old man in miniature.

Though child-sized, he prefers adult company, when

he wants company at all. He does not like his routine dis-

rupted. If he catches you spying on him while he’s doing

his chores, he will desert you no matter how much it pains him to do so. When making his nocturnal rounds, he carries a lantern with a blue flame in it. His work finished, he retires either to the hayloft, stable, cellar or oldest tree in the yard. The careless snapping of even one branch of this tree will also force him to leave the farm. Since he does his work under cover of darkness, he must sleep through the

long days of summer. He gets up again around Michael-

mas (September 29) when he switches his pointed cap for a

round one, just for the day.

The Norwegian nisse avoids the sun but loves the

moonlight, especially as reflected by the hard crust of the snow. Still spry, he enjoys all the usual winter sports—he may look like he’s on his last legs, but his strength and agil-ity will surprise you. Another of the nisse’s idiosyncrasies is his preference for black horses. On the farm, one horse, usually a black mare, will appear particularly well cared

for, her coat gleaming, her mane combed and even braided

when no one is looking. If such a horse is sold, the nisse will go with her.

98 The Scandinavian Household Sprite

On Christmas Eve, it is imperative that you serve your

nisse a bowl of porridge with a fat pat of butter in the middle. The Norwegian nisse also likes cake and beer. Unlike

the English brownie or Robin Goodfellow, he has no prob-

lem with clothes. For a Christmas present, you can’t go

wrong with a new red cap with a tassel at the point or a

jacket fringed with tiny bells, but don’t give him anything as fine as a pair of white leather breeches; he will think them too nice to work in and you’ll have to do all the chores

yourself.

At first glance, you might not be able to tell the Dan-

ish nisse from the Norwegian, for the only difference is the absence of the tassel on the Danish nisse’s cap. Denmark’s Jutland peninsula once had the most household sprites per

square mile. Consequently, it is the Jutish nisse who now

defines the breed. He is of a petulant bent and, like his Norwegian cousin, he is not fond of children. At Christmastime he might carry a birch switch tucked in his sash. He takes excellent care of the livestock, even stealing from the neighbors to give them extra grain. His best friend is the fam-

ily cat, but he also gets along with the pine martens and

other creatures that winter among the rafters. Dogs bark

at him, which is one of the reasons he likes to keep out of sight, though he is not above sitting on a window ledge and swinging his feet just out of reach of the dog’s snapping

teeth.

The Jutish nisse might inhabit any dark space on the

farm. In the city, he prefers the attic or a spot near the chimney, so perhaps he is not so far removed from the old

hearth spirits after all. He is devoted to the family but often
The Scandinavian Household Sprite 99

at odds with the maids and farmhands. If they tease him, he will take his revenge by yanking off the blankets while they are sleeping, throwing them in the well or blackening their faces with soot from the fireplace.

Thomas Keightley, writing in 1880, mentions the Jutish

nisse’s daily meal of groute, a sweet porridge of hulled oats or wheat grains, but I would not advise serving your nisse oatmeal on Christmas Eve. His tastes have become quite

refined over the years and he now prefers the Frenchified

ris a l’amande
, a sweet rice pudding made with almonds, whipped cream and sherry. Because he is a humble fellow

at heart, you should serve it to him in a wooden bowl with a wooden spoon. If you can only manage a basic rice porridge (recipe follows) be sure the butter pat is cold enough that he will have time to notice it before it melts and trickles to the bottom of the bowl. If he thinks there is no butter in his porridge, he will throw a tantrum.

Though easily peeved, the Jutish nisse is usually sorry

for it afterwards, and there are few things you could do that would make him desert the family. There is a story of a particularly prankish Jutish nisse who drove his master and

family to move house. The story ends just like that of the Gilbertsons’ boggart, but in this case the nisse, popping his head out of a washtub, is plainly visible.

Tomten

In the picture book version of Viktor Rydberg’s
The Christmas Tomten
, the titular hero looks in on a family absorbed in the Gospel of St. Luke and remarks to his orphan companion, “’I’m very fond of that baby he is reading about.

100 The Scandinavian Household Sprite

. . But mind you, old Thor was a fine fellow too.’” It’s not surprising, then, that when Thor’s goat, the
Julbok
, went into retirement in the mid-1800’s, the tomten took over his gift-giving duties in Sweden. Harald Wiberg’s pencil and

watercolor illustrations for
The Christmas Tomten
reveal a barrel-shaped, bandy-legged old man whose white beard

touches his toes and whose eyes glow like a cat’s in the

moonlight. Though the top of his head does not even reach

the doorknob, his nose and hands belong to a much larger

creature. His fingertips brush the crust of the snow when

he walks, as does the tassel on the point of his stocking cap.

The visual artists of the turn of the twentieth century

were in accord with Wiberg about the tomten’s white beard, though he often went without the tassel in the Christmas

postcards of the period. In place of the nisse’s magic buckled shoes, the tomten wears gray stockings and wooden

clogs, the better to make his way across the snowy yard. If he wants to get somewhere fast, he borrows the farmer’s

sleigh.

Many a tomten abides in the
botrae
, an ancient tree that grows before the farmhouse door. This is usually a linden, ash or elm, but the earliest botrae may have been a crabap-ple tree.23 In another, larger life which the tomten now only dimly remembers, he planted the tree himself.
Tomt
refers to the packed earth that lies underneath the buildings of the farmstead and extends into the square courtyard. Thus, the tomten or
tomte-gubbe
, “old man about the grounds,” is the 23. For more about the the botrae, or
apaldr
as it was known to the Norsemen, see my article, “The Golden Apples of Jotunheim,” in Llewel yn’s
2013 Herbal Almanac
.

The Scandinavian Household Sprite 101

least likely to emigrate. His bones are older even than the beams holding up the wal s, and he identifies himself with the very ground upon which his house is built.

Surround the tomten’s Christmas porridge with a moat

of honey in addition to the butter pat on top and he will

be especially pleased. The best place to leave his meal is in the stable, for he prefers the company of the livestock.

The gifts presented to him on Christmas morning should

include a length of gray homespun out of which he will presumably make his own clothes, a pinch of tobacco and as

much clay as a spade can hold. This last is either a token of his chthonic nature, the material for making a pipe, or an acknowledgment that it was he who laid the first shovelful of earth in the house wal s.

Tonttu

Like the tomten, the Finnish tonttu is a pipe smoker. He

doesn’t mind a glass of brandy alongside his rice porridge either. You can put his Christmas Eve meal in the sauna, the seat of both physical and spiritual cleanliness in the Finnish home. The Finns themselves like to dress up as
Joulutonttuja
, “Yule tonttu’s,” in red cotton caps with bells at their points, and they are most fond of dressing up little girls in the full kit: red cap, red suit, striped scarf and stockings.

That’s all right for the Joulutonttuja cavorting in the shopping districts—Finland needs a spark of color at this time of year—but I would guess that the ancient little man sip-ping his brandy in the sauna dresses more soberly.

If you have never seen a tonttu, it is because he does not spend very much time above ground. His real home is a

102 The Scandinavian Household Sprite

glittering world inside the earth. Some tonttu did not come with the farm but had to be fetched from the churchyard.

Once he had been brought home, he had to be given his

own room with his own bed and dinner table. That done,

he would make sure the family prospered.

There seems to be a genetic link between the tonttu and

the
kirkonwaki
or, “church folk,” a misshapen little people who dwell in the shadow of the altar cloth. The kirkonwaki’s misshapenness marks him as a
seite
, a suggestively formed stone or tree stump that served as an object of veneration among the pre-Christian Finnic peoples. The most unusual

thing about the kirkonwaki is the existence of females

among them. The reason there are not more kirkonwaki

in the world is because these females have difficulty giving birth. When his wife goes into labor, the kirkonwaki will

seek out a Christian woman to come and assist her with a

laying on of hands, suggesting that the kirkonwaki are not Christians themselves. As payment, the mortal woman is

rewarded with gifts of silver and gold.

Jacob Grimm relates the same story as told in Sweden.

Here, the distressed husband is described only as “a little man with a black face.” For her trouble, the Christian mid-wife receives “old silver vessels.” If not for the story’s ped-igree—it’s an example of Migratory Legend 5070—one

would have to wonder if the whole thing had not been a

fabrication to explain away the presence of church treasures in a house where they did not belong.

The Scandinavian Household Sprite 103

The Resilient Sprite

It would be simplistic to say that the nisse, tomten and

tonttu are the diminished spirits of the dead and nothing

more. For one thing, a belief in these often comical little creatures co-existed for a time with the larger gardvord and tunkall. Their capers also overlapped with the more serious idea that both the recently and the long and nameless dead visited their old homes on Christmas Eve.

As part of a ritual once prevalent throughout Europe,

the table was laid for the ghostly visitors, candles were left burning for their enjoyment and, in some cases, the living vacated their beds to allow the ancestors a good night’s sleep before the bells began to toll on Christmas morning.

In Celtic lands, this ritual was enacted at Halloween, while in the Nordic, Finnic and Baltic realms, it was eventually absorbed into Yule. In Scandinavia, it may once have been

part of the late autumn Álfablót and Dísablót observances.

The folktales in which the Scandinavian household

sprite appears have much in common with the stories of

kobolds, boggarts and brownies elsewhere, but the sprite

himself is unique in the details of his clothing, his preferences and his close but often frustrated relationship with the rest of the household. He is, I think, a Christian soci-ety’s grudgingly affectionate remembrance of its heathen

dead as viewed through a prism of humor and imagination.

The gardvord, tunkall and hungry Christmas ghost have all

faded away, but the little old man about the grounds is as active as ever.

104 The Scandinavian Household Sprite

Craft: Christmas Tomten

No matter how many of these little fellows you make, you

will find that each has its own personality. The grain of the wood will suggest a face; there is no need to draw one. Why plaster a smile on a creature who, like you, may not feel

cheerful all the time?

Since each tomten’s pointy hat is a quarter of a circle,

you might as well make four of them at a clip. There is only room for one tomten in a household, so give the others

away.

Tools and materials (per tomten):

One 1 inch diameter plain wooden bead for the body

One ¾ inch diameter plain wooden bead for the head

White acrylic paint

Color acrylic paint: red, dark blue or soft gray

Paint brush

Glue

Paper for hat:

Use a paper with a bit of nap, nothing smooth or shiny.

Washi—high quality Japanese origami paper—in a

solid color works very well. This usually comes in

packs of square 57⁄8 inch sheets.

Scissors

Pipe cleaner

Cotton ball

Paint the larger bead with a base coat of white. When dry, paint with color. Glue the smaller bead on for the head and set aside. (Figure 1)