Pesta — the old woman walking from farm to farm
Plague personified as an old woman walking the roads with a broom and a rake. The broom means everyone on the farm dies; the rake means a few survive. Norway lost more than half its people in the Black Death, and the figure carries the weight of it.
When plague came to Norway, it came as an old woman on foot. Every parish knew her: where a sickness arrived that killed whole households in a week, someone had passed an old woman in dark clothes on the road between the valleys — and what she carried decided which farms went into the ground.
She looked like somebody’s grandmother — bent-backed, ash-skinned, hooded, in a red skirt or sometimes a blue one. She did not announce herself; she arrived at the ordinary hour of an ordinary visitor, and the countryside, terrified, treated her with the courtesy due an old woman. She carried two things: a broom in one hand, a rake in the other. The broom meant the farm she entered was swept clean and no one was left. The rake meant a few fell between the teeth and lived. What decided which she carried on a given morning, no one knew.
She walked Norway hardest in 1349 and 1350. An English ship docked at Bergen in the late summer of 1349 carrying the sickness, and within a year more than half the country was dead — by some counts three in five. The dying did not stop at people. Norway had something like 36,500 farms before the plague and barely 16,000 a century and a half later; whole valleys stood empty for generations, the names of the dead farms — the ødegårder — surviving only as the names of fields. The kingdom lost all but one of its bishops (Hallvard of Hamar died in early September 1349), the men who ran the country were replaced by Danes and Germans, and within a lifetime Norway had folded into Denmark’s shadow.
The rake-and-broom Pesta was first written down by the folklorist Andreas Faye in 1843, gathering legends the valleys had carried for five centuries. In one, from the south of the country, a ferryman rowing Pesta across the water at Gjerstad recognised her and begged for his life; she answered in the line the parish has kept ever since — Ditt liv kan jeg ikke spare, men en lett død skal du få, I cannot spare your life, but an easy death you shall have — and the man went home, lay down, and was gone before morning.
Faye’s book was where Theodor Kittelsen found her. Living on the island of Skåtøy near Kragerø in the 1890s, Kittelsen wrote that he had passed an old woman on a coastal path — small, thin, crooked, yellow-green in the face with black spots, worse than the plague itself — and drew her from it: climbing a wooden staircase inside an ordinary house, the rake at her side, her face mostly in shadow. The drawings went into the book Svartedauen in 1900 and into the visual memory of every Norwegian who has heard her name since.
What the legend never settled is the part that mattered most to the people who told it: not that she came, but why she raked one house and swept the next.