Nøkken — the water-spirit who pulls you under
A shapeshifter in the still lakes and slow rivers — a fiddler, a pale horse, a floating log, or only two eyes among the lilies — who drowns the people who come close. The reason the old people feared the quiet water more than the loud.
The white water-lilies on a Norwegian lake are called nøkkerose — the nøkken’s rose — and where they grew thickest, the old people said, the nøkken was closest. He is the spirit of still freshwater: the lake, the mill pond, the black tarn up in the forest. What he does is drown you.
He has no fixed shape. He surfaces as a handsome young man with a fiddle across his knee, or a pale horse standing saddled and patient at the bank, or a log that floats and then moves against the current. His own body, when anyone sees it, is a drowned man’s — waterlogged, hair like algae, eyes holding a little light beneath the surface.
He rarely chases. He uses music. The tune carries over the water, and the safe distance shrinks a step at a time as the listener leans toward it; there is no struggle at the end, because the listener walks himself in. The horse works differently. Its back lengthens to fit however many children climb on, and once they are up they cannot get back down — it walks unhurried into the deep, the water closes over them, and the surface goes flat.
He gives warning of his own work. A cry comes off the water at one spot, sharp and carrying, like a loon; and at that spot, later, someone drowns. The defence against him was iron and a name. You threw a knife or a sewing-needle into the water and said the line children were taught — Nøkk, nøkk, nål i vatnet; jomfru Maria kasta stål i vatnet, needle in the water, the Virgin Mary cast steel in the water — and if you could shout his true name across the surface, he had to let go.
The still water was the dangerous water. The white roar of a waterfall belonged to a different spirit, the fossegrim, who taught the fiddle rather than drowning the fiddler. The nøkken kept the quiet lakes, and the quiet lakes were the ones that took children.
The parson Andreas Faye first set him in print in 1833 — a single line noting that he was found in most lakes and rivers in the country — though the belief was far older than the page. Theodor Kittelsen painted him in 1904 and painted almost nothing: a black pool choked with lilies, and two pale eyes at the surface, already close to the bank.