Havsrå

Somewhere off the Hälsingland coast in the first years of the eighteenth century, two men in a boat were rowing home with a single small ringed seal. One was Olof Broman, a vicar with an antiquarian streak who had come along to watch how the old seal hunting with a pole was done. The other was Peder Olsson of Arnön in Rogsta parish, old, experienced, and surrounded by the kind of practice his passenger would later file under superstition. Broman wrote afterwards that something met them on the water: white about the body down to the waist, standing above the surface, with very long black hair, whistling out sounds or words that he heard clearly enough in his astonishment and did not understand at all.

The old seal-man understood them. He was used to the sight and to the voice. He explained that if she was given the seal in the boat she would return a much better one, and then he rolled the little carcass over the side and told her she could have it. When the two of them reached the skerry called Hästholmen there were three big seals lying on the stones, and they were alive, and they had to be caught. Broman took the trouble to say so.

That is the havsrå at her plainest. The word is built from hav, the sea, and rå, worn down from rådare, one who rules or advises, and Swedish gave a rå to every sphere of the wild: the forest to the skogsrå, the inland lakes to the sjörå, the ore and the mine galleries to the bergsrå. The saltwater share belonged to this one. Swedish grammar files the word as a neuter, ett havsrå, which sits oddly against a tradition that talks about her without hesitation as a woman, and the mismatch is a fair warning about how tidy the category is. The names blur too. Havsrå, havsfru and sjörå are used for the same being by the same witnesses, and any account that keeps them rigidly apart is imposing an order the record does not have.

Her authority is over the water and everything the water contains, the weather across it and the animals under it. Broman, writing to his correspondent Urban Hjärne in 1707, called her the seals’ rådarinna, their mistress and owner, and described how difficult the hunting was, how watchful the seals, and how a parish might hold only one or two men fit to be called masters of it. This is the logic that makes the exchange sensible rather than sentimental. She is not being thanked. She is being paid, out of stock that was hers to begin with.

Along the Bohuslän skerries the same being is considerably less businesslike. Leonard Larsson, born in Gothenburg in 1859, described sjörå to a collector as beautiful young women who sat out on the rocks between the islands turning and twisting themselves about, because they were hollow in the back and would never let anyone see behind them. They showed themselves only at night and only before a storm, and where they appeared they gave off their own light, so they were seen perfectly well. Approach one and she was gone, then visible again further off. What they were doing out there, in Larsson’s account, was trying to draw men out onto the water to drown, and they were doing it on commission: they were sent by Hornper, the horned one, so that he should get souls. A fisherman who saw one was not to speak of it to anyone until the morning after he had slept, and he was to bite across a knife or a pair of scissors first, or he would fall ill.

The church had reached the same conclusion two centuries earlier and acted on it. In 1640 the town court of Söderköping tried a man named Peder Jönsson, who admitted under long questioning by both clergy and magistrates that he had deliberately called up the rå and made a pact with her, on instructions from an older hunter who had got extraordinary luck that way. He and a companion had gone out by boat on three Thursday evenings running, struck the water three times with a stick that the clerks recorded as a rönnkäpp, a rowan stick, and each time called out that they summoned her in the name of a thousand devils and would serve her. On the third evening she came up. She was a beautiful woman in a fine black dress, and she had a horse’s tail and the hooves of an ox. The court records call her sjörå, havsfru and skogsrå in turn, apparently without noticing. He was sentenced to death, the sentence was confirmed on appeal, and it was carried out.

The oldest written traces are duller and more useful. Sigfrid Aronus Forsius listed sjörår in a Swedish natural philosophy of 1611 among the elemental spirits God had appointed as rådare over the elements, which is as close as anyone comes to giving her an origin. The word havsrå itself is on paper by 1631. A dictionary citation from 1758 records that waterspouts happen whenever the havsfru changes her dwelling and moves house, which is the sort of detail no one invents.

Set against all this, her limits are unglamorous and consistent. Her weather stops where her water stops. Rowan and worked steel hold her off, and so does simply not going out. Nothing she gives is a gift, so nothing she gives is secure. And the tradition never tells you where she came from, never kills her, never gives her parents or a name of her own beyond the job description, because she is not a character in a story. She is the terms of business on a dangerous coast.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Havsrå?

A havsrå is the guardian or owner-spirit of a stretch of salt water in Swedish folk belief. The name joins hav, the sea, to rå, a worn-down form of rådare meaning one who rules, and she is the saltwater member of a family that also includes the forest’s skogsrå, the lakes’ sjörå and the mines’ bergsrå. She is held to control the water’s weather and its animals.

What is the difference between a Havsrå, a Havsfru and a Sjörå?

In practice there is very little, and the sources use the three words for the same being. Havsrå and havsfru belong to the salt sea and sjörå strictly to inland lakes, but witnesses slide between them freely. In the Swedish court records of 1640 concerning Peder Jönsson, one being is called sjörå, havsfru and skogsrå within the same set of documents.

What did fishermen give the Havsrå?

They gave back part of the catch, or left small offerings, on the understanding that she owned the stock and would repay generously. The clearest recorded case is the seal-hunter Peder Olsson of Arnön, who returned a small seal to the water in front of the clergyman Olof Broman in the early eighteenth century and shortly afterwards found three large seals waiting on a skerry.

Is the Havsrå dangerous?

Yes. Fishermen on the Bohuslän coast described her kind as luring men out onto the water to drown them, and in one account collected from Leonard Larsson of Gothenburg they were said to be sent out by the devil to collect souls. A man who saw one was to say nothing until the next morning and to bite across a knife or scissors first, or he would fall sick.

What does the Havsrå look like?

Accounts agree she appears as a beautiful woman with very long hair and then disagree below the waist. A seventeenth-century Swedish source gives her a fish’s lower body, the 1640 court record describes a woman in a fine black gown with a horse’s tail and ox hooves, and coastal tradition from Bohuslän says her back is hollow, which is why she never turns it towards anyone.

Related Entries

Sjörå, Skogsrå, Bergsrå, Rå, Rådande, Hulder, Marmennill, Ran, Nix, Näkki, Vellamo, Ahto, Mermaid, Selkie