Fjøsnisse — the one who eats porridge in the barn
The barn-specific variant of the nisse — the one who lives among the cattle, watches over the livestock, and demands his bowl of porridge with butter on top before he'll keep doing it.
The fjøs is the cowshed, and the fjøsnisse is the nisse who lives in it — not under the farmhouse floor with the family, but out among the animals, in the hay, where the warmth of the cattle keeps the winter out. Of all the places a nisse might settle on a farm, the barn is the one he defends most jealously, because the animals are his.
He tends them at night. A fjøsnisse’s barn is found in the morning with the stalls mucked, the hay down, the cows calm and fat, the best horse groomed until it shines. Farms with a well-kept nisse were known for it; neighbors could tell, from the sheen on the herd, who had one and who didn’t. He asks two things in return. The animals are to be treated well. And on Christmas Eve there is to be porridge — fløtegrøt, the good kind, made with cream, with the butter on top — carried out to the barn and left where he can reach it.
Both halves of the bargain were enforced. A stable-hand who beat a horse or kicked a cat in the fjøsnisse’s barn found things beginning to go wrong for him — his tools missing, his footing bad on the ladder, the hay falling from the loft when he stood under it and not when he didn’t. The animals were watched over; the people were watched. In the harder tellings a cruel hand didn’t work on that farm much longer, one way or the other.
And the porridge was not optional. The fjøsnisse who was forgotten on Christmas Eve — or slighted, given the thin porridge, the butter left off — stopped working, and then started working against. Milk soured. Cows sickened where they stood. The luck of the barn, which had been his gift, turned out to be removable.
The one thing you could not do was get rid of him. A family on a nisse-plagued farm — one telling of it is set in Hallingdal, others all over the country — finally gives up, packs the cart, and moves. On the road the farmer glances back at his load, and the nisse’s red cap pops up out of the milk churn: “Fine day to be moving, isn’t it?” The nisse belonged to the ground, not to the deed. Wherever the household went, the household spirit was part of what they carried.
The fjøsnisse faded with the barns themselves. When the animals left the small farms in the twentieth century, the spirit who lived on their warmth had nowhere to sit. What survived of him moved into the house, onto the Christmas cards, and into the softer julenisse who knocks on the door in December — a spirit who once killed cows over butter, remembered now mostly as the reason Norwegian families still put out a bowl of porridge on the twenty-fourth.