Bäckahäst

A horse stands alone in the wet grass where the brook runs out of the alders. It has no halter and no brand, and nobody in the village owns it. Its coat is dry, though mist is coming off the water behind it. A child walks up and it lowers its head to be stroked. A second child comes, and a third, and when the first one scrambles up onto its back the horse stands as quiet as a bench.

There is room for the second child too. There is room for the third. However many arrive, there is room, because the back of the horse is growing. It lengthens under them a hand’s breadth at a time until a whole row of children sits astride it from mane to tail. Then it turns and walks to the water.

This is the Bäckahäst, the brook horse of southern Sweden. The schoolmaster and collector Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius set it down in 1863 in his study of Värend, the old forest district of Småland. When the Neck shows himself in the shape of an animal, he wrote, it is most often as a horse or a foal, and in Värend that horse is called Vattenhästen, the water horse, or Bäckahästen, the brook horse. Countless stories about it went round the country. Further south and west, in parts of Halland, Blekinge and Skåne, it was the water being people spoke of most. The Danes knew it as the bækhest, the pond horse, the long horse.

It is a plain animal to look at. The tellings call it large and handsome and leave it there, and the white coat it usually wears today belongs to the later versions. Hyltén-Cavallius adds one detail of colour from the stable. Farmers said of a horse with white flecks that it was Neck-marked, sired from the water, and they rated such a horse above the others. A drowning spirit was a pedigree worth having.

No story explains where the brook horse came from. It is the Neck in another skin, and the Neck was always there. Hyltén-Cavallius did some guessing of his own. He thought the horse had once been an animal sacred to the water spirit, as the horse was to Odin, and that the word Bäckahäst might be a worn-down form of a name meaning Neck-horse. He also noticed that some of the sightings sounded like something else. One “water horse” lay like a foal on the stones of a stream, arched its back when it saw the hunter, and snorted like a pig as it swam away. He called that one a beaver or an otter. He did not think this settled the matter.

The Bäckahäst differs from the Neck in one large way. The Neck is a musician, the fiddler in the rapids who teaches his art for a price. The horse has no music in it at all. It is a drowning story told to children.

The other stories are about work. A captured brook horse, the Danish and Swedish accounts agree, makes a draught animal that never eats and never tires. The best known telling is set at Bohus in the west. A Neck had turned himself into a horse and come up on the bank to graze. A cunning man who suspected what he was looking at threw a halter over the animal, one so artfully made that the Neck could not get free. All that spring the man worked him without mercy and had every field he owned ploughed. Then one day the halter slipped. The horse went into the water like lightning, and the harrow went in behind him, bouncing over the stones. The man had his fields done. He was short one harrow.

In Värend the endings were rougher. The horse was caught in many places, the stories said, and it was put to the plough or shot dead with a silver bullet.

Its powers are those of the water it comes from. It changes shape. It stretches to carry any number. It draws children to it by being beautiful and standing still, and it holds whoever is on its back until the lake closes over them. Harnessed, it has the strength of a river behind a plough.

Its limits are just as clear, and they are the ordinary defences of the Swedish countryside. Steel breaks it. A knife or any scrap of steel thrown between the horse and the water stops it dead, and bathers in Småland bound the Neck in the same way, by driving steel into the ground before they went in. A halter holds it only while the halter is on. A silver bullet kills it. And it cannot bear a holy name. In a version still told on the shore of Lake Åsnen, twelve children are on the long back and the horse is making for the lake when one boy calls on God. The horse stops, the children fall off, and it goes into the water alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Bäckahäst in Swedish folklore?

The Bäckahäst, or brook horse, is a supernatural horse that lives in streams and lakes in the folklore of southern Sweden. It is the form the water spirit called the Neck takes when he appears as an animal. It drowns the people, mostly children, who climb onto its back.

How does the Bäckahäst catch children?

The Bäckahäst stands quietly near water and lets children mount it. Its back grows longer each time another child climbs on, so there is always room for one more. When they are all seated it walks into the water and drowns them.

How can a Bäckahäst be stopped?

Steel stops the Bäckahäst. A piece of steel thrown between the horse and the water breaks its power and keeps it from going in. In one version told at Lake Åsnen, a boy calls on God and the horse halts and vanishes into the lake without its riders. Stories from Värend also say it can be killed with a silver bullet.

Can a Bäckahäst be tamed?

A Bäckahäst can be put to work if someone gets a halter on it. It then ploughs without needing food or rest. In the story from Bohus, a man ploughed all his fields with a captured Neck in horse shape, but when the halter slipped off the horse leapt back into the water and dragged the harrow in with it.

Is the Bäckahäst the same as Näcken?

The Bäckahäst is the horse shape of Näcken, the Neck. Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius recorded in 1863 that in Värend the Neck in horse or foal form was called the water horse or the brook horse. The two are told differently, though. The Neck is a fiddler, and the brook horse has no connection with music.

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