Púki

Also Known As: also púka; Old Norse púki, “a wee devil, an imp”; cognate with English Puck, Danish pokker, Welsh pwca, Cornish bucca, and Irish púca
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Icelandic Mythology, Norse Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: A small, shape-shifting devil who works by mischief, temptation, and terror rather than open force, and who can rise as a revenant to torment the living.
Role in Mythos: In medieval Icelandic Christian lore the púki is the Devil in miniature, the tempter renounced at baptism, while in later folklore he dwindles into a household imp and the miser’s guarding ghost.
Relation to Humans: The púki preys on the careless and the greedy, whispering sin, haunting privies and treasure-hoards, and frightening those who wander alone at night. He is broken by church bells, baptismal vows, and the protection of the faithful, so a Christian household that kept its faith had little to fear from him.

The privy in King Olaf’s hall had twenty-two seats and no lamp, and the man who crept out to it before dawn was going against a direct order. Something came up through the innermost seat while he sat there in the dark. It was small. It spoke to him in a reasonable voice, and it wanted to talk about the dead.

The creature has a name older than that story and stranger. Púki is Old Norse for a devil, though never a grand one. The word carries a diminutive weight, a wee devil, an imp, the sort of evil that works in corners. It belongs to a scatter of near-identical names across the north: the Danish pokker, the Norwegian puke, the English Puck, the Welsh pwca, the Cornish bucca, the Irish púca. Which tongue lent the word to which, no one can say. The names ran back and forth across the North Sea for centuries and tangled past unpicking.

In the mouths of Iceland’s medieval churchmen the púki hardened into something colder. He became the Devil himself, or a working piece of him. To stand against the púki was to stand against evil, and the old Norwegian law had every child at baptism renounce him by name, forsaking the púki and all his works. Translators of scripture reached for the word when they needed a name for the enemy of God. In the legend of Theophilus, the clerk who signs his soul away, it is the púki who comes to collect. The imp of the corners had been promoted to the prince of them.

No one wrote down what he looked like, and this seems to have suited him. The sources agree only that he is small and demon-shaped, and past that he takes whatever form the moment needs: a sprite close to the mischievous Puck of the English stage, a hunched thing climbing out of a latrine, a shadow at the lip of a hoard. He has no true face, only the ones he borrows. What holds constant is the size and the malice, a small body carrying a large appetite for other people’s ruin.

The man in the privy was Thorstein, an Icelander in the retinue of Olaf Tryggvason, and the thing through the seat named itself Thorkell the Thin, a heathen warrior fallen long before in the wars of Harald Wartooth. Thorstein, who seems to have been short on fear, put questions to it. Who fares best in hell? Sigurd the dragon-slayer, said the demon, who tends the fires there as both the kindler and the kindling. Who fares worst? Starkad the Old, sunk to his ankles and pitched face down into the flame, and he wails louder than any soul in the place. Thorstein asked the púki to give the wail. It did, and he wound his cloak about his head. He asked again; louder; again, louder still, until the sound seemed to fill the whole hall and he fainted where he sat.

That was the trick, and it was Thorstein’s, not the demon’s. Each cry carried further than the last, and the third woke the king, who understood at once and had the church bell rung. At the first stroke of it the púki dropped back through the seat and was gone. Thorstein walked out alive and carried away a nickname, Skelkr, the Shiver, for the single shudder he would admit the night had cost him. The demon’s whole power had rested on darkness and solitude and a sleeping house. A bell undid it.

The púki did not stay grand. As the centuries wore the old dread smooth, he shrank again, back toward the imp and then further, into the ground. A man who loved his money too well, who hid it and died still counting it, became in Icelandic telling a maura-púki, a treasure-puck, a soul soldered to its coins beneath the turf. Dig at such a spot and you dig at him. The greed that made him is the whole of his afterlife, cold and small and endless, a devil the exact size of a buried purse.

Something of him even worked its way into the fields. Icelanders gave his name to a flowering herb, the púka-bit, the same devil’s-bit scabious that English country people said the Devil had bitten off short at the root out of pure spite. The plant keeps the old grudge alive in its name long after anyone feared the thing that bit it.

His gifts were never the giant’s or the dragon’s. The púki works by nearness and suggestion, by shifting his shape, by the whisper that steers a soul toward sin and the fright that empties a bladder in the dark. He can wear a dead man’s name and sit among the living long enough to unstring them. Against open force he is nothing. He has no real strength and no courage at all; he needs the odds stacked heavily his way, one careless person alone at night. The things that break him are the things the Church carried in: the ring of a consecrated bell, the vow made at the font, the name of Christ, the return of the light. A household that kept its faith and did not go wandering off alone into the dark had, in the end, very little to fear from him. Which is more or less the lesson the old story was built to teach.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a púki?

A púki is a small devil or imp from Old Norse and Icelandic folklore. The word originally meant a “wee devil,” and in medieval Icelandic Christian writing it came to mean the Devil himself, while later folklore reduced it to a mischievous household imp and the guarding ghost of a dead miser.

Is the púki the same as Puck, the púca, and the pwca?

They are closely related and share a single root, but the direction of borrowing between them is unknown. The Old Norse púki, English Puck, Danish pokker, Welsh pwca, Cornish bucca, and Irish púca all descend from the same north-west European word, and scholars cannot agree which language lent it to the others.

What does a púki do to people?

The púki works by mischief, temptation, and fear rather than by force. It whispers people toward sin, frightens those who are alone at night, and can appear as a revenant wearing a dead person’s name, as in the tale of Thorstein Shiver, where a púki rises through a privy seat to torment him.

How do you get rid of a púki?

A púki is driven off by Christian holy power. In the tale of Thorstein Shiver the demon flees the instant a consecrated church bell is rung, and the tradition holds that baptismal vows, the name of Christ, and daylight all break its hold, since the creature depends on darkness and solitude.

What is a maura-púki?

A maura-púki, or “treasure-puck,” is an Icelandic form of the púki: the ghost of a miser who hoarded money in life and stays bound to it after death. Such a spirit guards its buried coins underground, so to dig for the treasure is to disturb the miser-devil still soldered to it.