Hulder

The call comes down the valley at dusk, across the water, in a woman’s voice so clean that the dairy girl at the summer farm sets down her pail to listen. It is a herding call. Every girl on the mountain knows one, sung high and long to bring the cattle in off the slope. But her cattle are already in. The byre door is barred, the fire is banked, and whatever is being called, it is not cows.

Her name means the hidden one. It comes from the Old Norse word for covering something over, and it is the whole thesis of her people in a single syllable. The huldrefolk are the ones underneath: under the hill, under the floor, under the pasture, going about a life that mirrors the human one so closely that the mirror becomes the horror. They keep farms. They fish. They marry, and they have children, and they hold services in their own churches with their own priests. They simply do it out of sight, on the other side of a thin wall nobody has ever found the door in.

Their cattle are the giveaway. Huldre cows are black or white or dappled, and they are always fatter, glossier and better kept than the beasts a Norwegian farmer could raise in a hard year on thin grass. That detail says more about the people who told these stories than any amount of theorizing would. The hidden folk had what the tellers did not: full byres, deep chests, no hunger.

The huldra herself appears alone, and she appears beautiful. Tall, fair, unhurried, with a voice like the one that came down the valley. Then she turns, or the wind lifts the back of her skirt, and there is a cow’s tail. In Sweden it may be a fox’s. In a great many tellings there is worse than a tail: her back is hollow, scooped out like a lightning-split trunk, so that the woman who was standing before you a moment ago is nothing but a face and a front. The tail is what gives her away. Everything else about her is perfect, which is exactly the problem.

Where she came from depends on who is telling it, and the commonest answer is a piece of borrowed scripture that has been chewed on for centuries in Norwegian kitchens. God comes walking through Eden and asks Eve to show him her children. Some of them are filthy and she has not had time to wash them, so she pushes those ones out of sight and shows him the clean ones. God, who is not fooled, tells her that what she has hidden from him shall stay hidden. The unwashed children go into the earth and become the huldrefolk. Other versions swap Eve for Adam’s first wife or for an ordinary farm woman with too much to do and not enough water. Elsewhere the hidden folk are the angels who fell but did not fall far enough to land in hell, and were caught halfway, under the ground.

There are older bones in the story than Genesis. The sagas describe landvættir, land spirits thick in the rocks and mounds of Iceland, some great and some small, and the oldest Norwegian church law of around 1200 was already bothered enough to forbid believing in them. Where the huldrefolk actually began is not known. What is clear is that by the time anyone was writing them down, they were not a theology. They were the working conditions.

Because the practical business of the mountain was to keep her happy. When the summer farms opened and the herds went up to the high pasture, people asked the hidden folk for permission to be there. The dairy maid tipped a little milk onto the byre floor at milking so that those below got their share. A stall was left empty for a huldre cow. Get this right and your butter came thick and your cheese came good. Get it wrong, ignore them, spit in the wrong place, build where you should not have, and nothing you did that season worked. The wild country was hers. The animals in it, the fish in the lake, the luck of the man walking home through it at night, all hers.

And a man walking home through it at night was the one in real danger. She could offer him food when he was hungry, or a bed, or marriage, and if he took it he was bergtatt, taken into the mountain, gone. Some came back and were never right afterwards. They lost their reason, or they sickened, or they sat by the fire for the rest of their lives with a look on their face nobody in the house wanted to discuss. The vulnerable moments were the in-between ones: a woman who had given birth but whose child was not yet baptized, a couple in the weeks before their wedding, a boy alone in the outfields at the wrong hour. Against all of it there were three defences, and they were the same three every time. The name of Jesus. The Lord’s Prayer. The sound of a church bell, which could reach into the rock and fetch a man back out.

She could not be baptized herself, and that is her one true weakness. The stories are oddly generous about it. A huldra who manages to get a man to marry her in a church is freed: the tail drops off, and she becomes human, and in the same breath she loses her beauty and turns plain and hard-featured like anybody else who has to live in a house and get old. Nobody in the tradition seems to think she made a bad trade.

The rest of her power is music. A huldrelokk is the melody she sings to draw someone in, and half the finest fiddlers and jaw-harp players in the Norwegian mountains were said to have learned their best tunes from her, or from the waterfall spirit, or from the nix in the millpond. It is a lovely way of admitting that some music is too good to be explained. In the nineteenth century the poets and painters took her up, put her in the birch woods as the very face of Norwegian nature, and she has been drifting between the folk record and the national imagination ever since. She is on a municipal coat of arms. She is in the films. As late as the 1990s a Norwegian journalist could still go from farm to farm and find people who would tell her, quite calmly, that they had seen the huldra, and where, and what she was wearing, and that they had not gone any closer.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a hulder?

A hulder, or huldra, is a beautiful supernatural woman from Norwegian folk belief who lives in the forests and mountains and has a cow’s tail hidden under her skirt. She belongs to the huldrefolk, the hidden people, who are believed to live underground in a world that mirrors the human farm. Her name comes from an Old Norse word meaning to hide or cover.

Why does the hulder have a tail?

The tail marks her as one of the hidden folk rather than a human woman, and it is the flaw that betrays her when a man gets close enough to look. In Norway it is a cow’s tail; in Sweden the corresponding being may have the tail of a cow or a fox. Many accounts add a second deformity, a back that is hollow like a rotten tree trunk.

Is the hulder dangerous?

She can be. The hulder could lure a person into the forest or into the hill and keep them there, a fate called bergtaking, and those who escaped often came back ill or out of their minds. But she was equally capable of rewarding people who treated her country and her cattle with respect, so Norwegian herders and dairy maids dealt with her as a powerful neighbour rather than a monster.

How do you protect yourself from a hulder?

Speaking the name of Jesus or reciting the Lord’s Prayer was the standard defence in Norwegian folk belief. The ringing of church bells was believed to be strong enough to free someone who had already been taken into the mountain.

Can a hulder become human?

Yes. In many legends a hulder who succeeds in marrying a man in a church loses her tail and becomes fully human. The bargain has a sting in it: along with the tail, she loses her supernatural beauty and becomes ordinary in appearance.

Related Entries

Skogsrå, Rå, Rådande, Sjörå, Havsrå, Bergsrå, Huldufólk, Nøkken, Fossegrim, Nisse, Tomte, Troll, Landvættir, Changeling, Glaistig