Nisse — the short-tempered spirit of the farm
A grey-bearded household spirit, knee-high in a red cap, who has been on the farm longer than anyone alive on it. Treat him well and he keeps the place; cross him and he kills the best cow. His name comes from the gift-giving saint whose feast he later took over.
On every old Norwegian farm lived a nisse: a grey-bearded man, knee-high, in a knitted red cap, in the barn or under the floor of the farmhouse. He had been on the ground longer than anyone now alive on it, and he watched everything they did.
The name comes from Nils — a Danish shrinking of Nicholas, the gift-giving saint — and the spirit who wears it breaks your tools and kills your cow when you cross him.
He worked at night and picked one favourite horse in the stall, grooming it until its coat shone and its mane was plaited into tight knots called nisseflette. A horse found braided like that in the morning meant the nisse had taken to it. The same knots, on the same farms, were also blamed on the mare — the night-creature who rode horses to exhaustion — but hers were a wound and his were a blessing, and either way you did not undo them.
The other side of him was the danger. He was strong enough to throw a grown man across a barn, and he had a temper. The stable-hand who teased him got pitched off the hayloft; more than one nineteenth-century farm tale ends with the hand simply dead, and the horses in his stall found sweat-dark and trembling in the morning, ridden hard by something settling a score.
The famous bargain was the Christmas porridge — a bowl of rice porridge with a lump of butter on top, set on the barn floor on the night of the twenty-fourth. The butter mattered as much as the porridge. In one well-known telling, a farm girl skims the butter off and hides it under the rice, thinking the nisse will not notice. He eats down, finds the butter gone, walks into the barn and kills the best cow — then comes back, finishes the bowl, finds the butter at the bottom, repents, and crosses the field to fetch back an identical cow from the neighbour.
The figure later softened. From 1881 the Swedish illustrator Jenny Nyström drew a rounder, rosier tomte — first for Viktor Rydberg’s poem, then for a flood of Christmas cards — and through them the barn spirit crossed over into the julenisse, the Christmas gift-bringer, back to the saint whose name he had carried all along. The red cap survived. Most of the working-farm menace did not.