Fossegrimen — the waterfall fiddler who teaches you to play
The spirit who lives behind the white roar of a waterfall and sells you the fiddle — for a stolen white goat thrown into the falls on a Thursday night. Bring too little and he teaches you only to tune; bring enough and he plays so well the river slows to listen.
The Hardanger fiddlers of nineteenth-century Telemark played so far past their neighbours that people kept an explanation ready: the man had been to the waterfall. Torgeir Augundsson of Sauherad — Myllarguten, the Miller’s Boy — was the most famous of them, and the rumour shadowed him his whole life that he had bought his playing from the fossegrim. He denied it flatly. He died of tuberculosis in Rauland in 1872, a pauper, and the rumour outlived him.
The fossegrim lives where the water is loudest: behind waterfalls, in the rapids, under the mill-race. He is not the nøkken, who drowns you in still black lakes. The fossegrim teaches — which is a slower kind of danger. What he teaches is the hardingfele, the Hardanger fiddle whose sympathetic strings ring under the bowed note, and he teaches it for a price set in advance.
The price was meat, and the meat had to be stolen. A white he-goat kid — never bought, never your own — carried in secret to a north-running falls on a Thursday evening and thrown into the water with your face turned away. What came back depended on what you brought. A scrawny, stingy goat bought the right to tune the instrument and nothing more. A good one bought the lesson. A whole fat kid bought mastery. The fossegrim never cheated anyone; he gave exactly what was paid for, and the skill was always bought with a small theft, which was the point of it.
The lesson drew blood. The spirit took the pupil’s right hand and dragged the fingers across the strings until they bled raw, and again the next night, until the playing came. At the top of it the music was past bearing — the trees were said to lean toward the river, and the falls themselves to slow to hear it.
One tune no fiddler was ever taught. The fossegrim’s lay ran to eleven variations, and a pupil learned ten; the eleventh, played anywhere, set tables and benches and grey-beards and grandmothers and the babe in its cradle dancing, and would not let them stop. So the spirit kept it back, and the wise pupil knew not to ask.
Bergen cast the bargain in bronze. At the foot of Stephan Sinding’s statue of the violinist Ole Bull — unveiled on the national day, 17 May 1901 — a small fossegrim sits half-sunk in the water with a harp, playing up at the master he is supposed to have taught.