Huldra — the girl in the forest with a secret
A young woman, beautiful from the front and hollow as a rotted tree-trunk from behind, who waits in the summer pastures and the logging camps. Marry her and she loses her beauty but keeps a troll's strength — enough to straighten a glowing horseshoe in her bare hands.
From the front she is a young woman in skirts — handsome, calm, often willing. From behind she carries a cow’s tail, and in the northern tellings a back that is hollow and bark-stripped like a rotted tree-trunk. That is the whole danger of the huldra: she keeps her back to a wall or a spruce and does not turn, and the man talking to her in the clearing does not see what he is talking to until she walks away.
She belongs to the lonely working places — the high summer pasture, the charcoal-burner’s kiln in the slow dusk, the edge of the winter logging camps where men spent weeks without women. She drives a small herd of dun cows and calls them with the lokk, the high herding-song that carries across a valley, and a man who followed the song could walk into the forest after her and never come out. The crueller stories were about the ones who did come out — slow, listless, hard for their own families to recognise in their own bodies.
The Old Norse word huld meant both hidden and gracious, the same root under both senses, and it named her whole people: the huldrefolk, who hold dances inside the hollow hills. A man who joined one came home to find the years had run on without him — a night underground had cost him a decade above it.
Marry her, and her tail dropped off at the altar the moment she was churched into a Christian congregation — but she lost her beauty with it and kept a troll’s strength. A husband who treated her badly learned this the way the stories tell it: she takes up a horseshoe glowing from the forge and straightens it in her bare hands, without changing her face.
Theodor Kittelsen painted her vanishing into the fog in 1893, in Huldra forsvant. But the country people did not keep her in a painting; they kept her in the church at Seljord in Telemark, where seven cow-tails are said to hang from the rafters — one for each huldra who married a local man and was baptized out of the woods.