De underjordiske — the neighbors living under the hill
The hidden folk who live under the farm — under the mound, the rocks, the floor — running a whole parallel neighborhood beneath the visible one. Offend them by accident and a child sickens. Huldra is the famous one; the gardvord under the mound is the oldest.
Dig a new well, throw your dishwater the wrong way, or set a barn post a foot too far north, and you might be living on top of someone. The Norwegians called them de underjordiske — the ones below — and the danger they posed was mostly the danger of giving offence you never meant to give: a whole neighbourhood ran underneath your own, and you could trespass on it without knowing.
The oldest of them was the gardvord, the farm’s guardian — the first man who ever cleared that ground, dead in the mound at its edge and still watching over the buildings his clearing made possible. You did not plough the mound. You poured him the first beer from every new barrel. Others lived in the old burial cairns, or under the rocks, or in the smaller hidden communities the country called tusser and vetter. The huldra of the forest was one of their famous named kind; most of the underjordiske kept out of sight.
They lived a life parallel to the one above — cattle, weddings, quarrels, music. The music of an underground wedding could carry up through the floorboards at night, and a household that heard it did not say so. Tools left out were borrowed and came back blunt. A child or animal that sickened for no reason had probably crossed them. The commonest offence was scalding: dishwater or hot grease thrown onto the ground splashed invisibly onto the family below, and within days a child took ill — so you shouted a warning before you threw. The bluntest punishment in the lore is the farmer who built his new byre over the underjordiske’s sitting room: their ceiling ran with muck from his cattle until they made his life unlivable, and he pulled the building down and moved it.
Their origin sat in scripture. Eve was washing her children when God came to visit, and she hid the ones she had not finished washing. God said: then let what is hidden stay hidden — and they have been under the ground ever since, neither damned nor blessed, between angels and humans, kin to the family upstairs and not to be feared the way demons were.
At Mollestad in Birkenes, in southern Norway, an oak nine metres around still stands over a burial mound. Every old Norwegian farm once had a tree like it: people poured the first beer from a new barrel at its roots, set out bread and milk, and would not break a twig. It is called the Vetteika, the spirits’ oak — and the instinct outlived the belief that explained it, because into the twentieth century road crews still bent a new road around a particular boulder rather than blast a stone someone’s grandfather had called occupied.