Fossegrim

The meat had to be stolen. Not spared from the family’s own storehouse, not bought, but lifted after dark from a neighbour’s stabbur and carried down through the trees while it was still warm inside the coat. A good joint, best of all a sheep’s leg. Then the walk to the falls on a Thursday evening, the noise thickening with every step until it crowded out thinking, and the throw, and the long sit on cold wet rock with a fiddle across the knee and the spray settling on the strings.

Nothing came of the first night. Nothing was supposed to.

The fossegrim keeps to waterfalls and mill-races, and Norwegian folk tradition holds that he can appear in any shape he likes. He is musical, and on dark still evenings he plays to draw people towards him. That is the whole of what the record fixes about him, and the tellings are far more interested in what he does than in what he looks like. In Sigdal, in Buskerud, the collector Andreas Mørch took down an account that separates two beings people around there called by the same name. One was the well-nykk, who sat in the springs where the household drew water and was said to have an appetite for small children, which was reason enough to keep them away from the well. The other was the real one. He lived in the falls, and he taught men to play.

The method was exact and it took three weeks. On the first Thursday evening you brought your stolen bone to the water, threw it in, sat down on the bank with your fiddle and drew the bow. You learned nothing. On the second Thursday you brought another stolen joint and did the same, and learned nothing again. On the third evening, after the third bone had gone into the water, he came up out of the falls and tuned your fiddle for you. After that the tunes arrived by themselves. You sat there stroking and stroking and they got into you, and you stood up a fiddler.

He is paid in meat, and he counts it. The fatter the offering, the better the player; a lean one bought nothing but the ability to tune. One man in Sigdal stole himself a cured ham for the purpose, then thought on the walk down that it was a waste of good food and ate most of it, pitching the bare bone into the water. On the third Thursday the spirit came up to him with the fiddle and told him, in two flat lines, that he would learn to tune and not to bow, because he had given a ham with nothing on it. He never became a fiddler.

The price was not only meat. Going to the falls on those evenings was understood as selling yourself to the Evil One, and not everyone who wanted the gift was willing to pay for it that way. A farm servant at Foss took a leg of meat down to the river one Thursday and felt nothing at all, though a woman up at the house heard playing coming from the falls that night and nearly went down on the spot. The second evening the river came up so high and so fast that it almost carried him off the stones. That was him, showing himself. The boy ran, and never went back for the third night, which the tellers agree was the sensible choice, since otherwise he would have been sold.

You could recognise the men who had gone through with it. They could tune higher than anyone else alive. Ola Eilivsen Taleshaugen, reckoned the finest player in the district fifty years before Mørch wrote it down, had stood beside Kittilsfossen with his fiddle on three Thursday evenings running, and afterwards he had tunes in him that nobody else could play. He emigrated to America and took them with him. Trond Kringstad learned his from the strømgubben, the current-man, sitting in a cleft of rock below where the new Prestfoss bridge runs. When Trond tuned up at a gathering, other fiddlers trying to follow him snapped their strings, and Ola Nubberud, who had boasted at a wedding at Rolvstad that keeping up with Trond was no trouble, had to put his instrument down in front of everyone. Trond’s own strings held.

What the fossegrim gives is technique, not luck, and it does not fade or need renewing. What limits him is that he is scrupulous. He cannot be flattered, hurried past the third Thursday, or paid in anything but what was agreed, and he answers a cheat with exactly the fraction of the gift that the offering covered. He is also fixed to his own water. He does not follow a pupil home, and he has no reach beyond the noise of his own falls.

Theodor Kittelsen drew him in 1887, and the picture has done a good deal to give a shapeless thing a face. The Telemark fiddler Torgeir Augundsson, called Myllarguten, who died in Rauland in 1872 after taking the Hardanger fiddle into a Christiania concert hall for the first time in 1849, left among his tunes a slått named *Fossegrimen*. In 1905 Sigurd Eldegard’s play of that name reached the stage with music by Johan Halvorsen, who conducted it and played the Hardanger fiddle in several numbers himself.

Mørch’s informant had tried it as a young man and had not been able to get hold of a cured ham, so he went down to the falls without one, carrying an old scratchy fiddle to scrape at. He sat there two Thursday evenings. On the third he settled himself right under the water and waited to see something. What came was a black cat, up onto the rock beside him, and he got frightened and went home. It was probably just a cat from one of the farms, he said. But it looked so strange.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Fossegrim?

The Fossegrim is a water spirit of Norwegian folk tradition who lives in waterfalls and mill-races and is famous as a fiddler. He plays on dark, quiet evenings to draw people towards him, and he can teach his skill to a living person in exchange for a food offering. The tradition does not fix a body for him and says he can appear in any shape.

How do you get the Fossegrim to teach you the fiddle?

You bring a food offering to a waterfall that runs north on a Thursday evening, throw it in, and sit on the bank playing. In the Sigdal accounts the meat had to be stolen from another farm rather than taken from your own store, and the whole thing was repeated over three consecutive Thursdays. On the third evening the Fossegrim comes up out of the falls, tunes the fiddle, and the tunes begin to arrive by themselves.

What happens if the offering is too small?

The Fossegrim gives back exactly what the offering is worth. A fat offering makes an outstanding fiddler; a lean one buys only the ability to tune the instrument, not to play it. One Sigdal man ate most of his stolen ham on the way to the falls and threw in the bare bone, and was told he would learn tuning and nothing more.

Is the Fossegrim the same as the Nøkk?

They are closely related, and in local speech the names run together. In the Sigdal material collected by Andreas Mørch the fiddle-teaching spirit of the waterfall is simply called the nykk, and elsewhere in the same account he is the strømgubben, the current-man. The distinction people did draw there was between the being in the drinking wells and the being in the falls, rather than between two separate names.

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