Sjörå

The light shows first, low over the water and off to one side, where there is nothing but a bare shelf of granite standing out of the lake. It is night and there is weather coming. On the rock sits a young woman, turning and twisting, bright enough to be seen clearly across black water. Anyone who rowed towards her found her gone, and then there again, further out. Fishermen in the Gothenburg archipelago said she was doing this on somebody else’s errand.

She is a sjörå, and the first thing to understand is that the word is a job rather than a name. Swedish sjö covers the inland lake and the open sea alike, and a rå, or rådare, is a being that rules and holds power over one specific place, someone a person was obliged to stay on good terms with. The forest has its skogsrå, the mountain its bergsrå, the mine its gruvrå, and those are women. The farmyard, the mill and the ship have theirs as well, and those are men, small grey figures much like the tomte. Every water of any consequence had somebody in charge of it, and that somebody was the sjörå.

So there is no single sjörå any more than there is a single mayor. There is the one in your lake, and there is the next one over.

The descriptions agree on the parts that matter. She looks like a beautiful young woman and she is hollow at the back, which is precisely why she never turns round. In an account taken from Leonard Larsson, born in Gothenburg in 1859, the sjörå sat out on the skerries between the rocks and moved constantly, twisting so that her back stayed away from anyone watching. She appeared only at night and only before a storm, and she gave off her own light, so that where she showed herself she could be seen plainly. It is the same fault the forest rå carries. Lovely from the front, rotten stump behind, and the entire encounter turns on whether she can keep herself facing you.

Most of what survives about her is practical rather than dramatic. The Swedish national encyclopedia defines her as the counterpart, in the archipelago and on the open sea, of the näck of the inland waters, and notes that she belonged above all to the working life of fishermen. Keeping on good terms with the sjörå was a safety measure. She could be relied on for a full net, and she gave warning before bad weather, which out on a skerry in October is worth considerably more than fish.

She was paid for it. A coin dropped into the water was the ordinary rate. On Vänern, the largest lake in Sweden, the rå is called Kajsa, and sailors becalmed out there would toss a copper or a silver piece over the side and call out for wind as it went. The Swedish Academy’s dictionary records that cry, blås, Kajsa, as seafarers’ usage, and defines Kajsa as a supernatural female being thought to rule the winds, with printed examples running from around 1830 through to the early twentieth century. The name turns up in a chronicle of old Stockholm in 1882 with no explanation attached, because none was needed.

The story that fixed the arrangement in people’s minds is small and domestic. A fisherman gives a sjörå a mitten, or a stocking, and for that one gift she gives him luck with the fish and warns him whenever a storm is coming. It is told along the coasts throughout the Nordic countries, and it is old enough that Olaus Magnus set it down in the middle of the sixteenth century. A mitten. She owns the water and she takes wool.

In the Vänern country they say Kajsa keeps cattle. Down in the lake the herd looks like fish, fat perch and heavy pike, but when the animals come ashore to graze they look like ordinary cows, apart from the stripes. One local story has her walk into Karlstad in the shape of an unremarkable woman, buy a shipload of grain, order the whole cargo tipped over the side in the middle of the lake, and then go in after it herself. The grain was feed.

The other half of the record is much less companionable. Larsson’s sjörå were luring people out to drown, and they were doing it under orders. They were sent, he said, by Hornper, so that he could have souls. A man who saw one had to say nothing to anybody until the morning after he had slept on it, and even then he had to bite down on a knife or a pair of scissors before he spoke, or he would fall ill. That last detail is not the kind of thing invented for effect. It reads like something people actually did.

Hornper is Horn-Per, the Devil, and his arrival in the story is late rather than original. Mikael Häll’s Lund study of erotic nature beings in seventeenth and eighteenth century Sweden works from court records, theological writing, ballads and legend, and describes exactly this squeeze, with the nature spirits caught between God and the Devil and between the natural and the unnatural. The pressure was not theoretical. In the sixteen hundreds a man could be sentenced to death if he was believed to have had love meetings with the forest rå.

Her powers are an owner’s powers. The fish are hers to hand over or keep. The weather is hers to know first. She can put light where there is no light, stand on one skerry and then on the next without crossing the space between, and on Vänern at least she can walk about among people looking like somebody’s neighbour with a shopping errand.

Her limits are an owner’s limits too. Her authority stops at her own shoreline, and the next lake belongs to a different warden entirely. She is bound by the very bargain she offers, which means she can be managed by anyone willing to pay attention: a coin, a mitten, a clean shore, silence held until the right hour. She takes offence easily, and the advice around Vänern is still to leave nothing behind and throw nothing in. And she cannot afford to be seen from behind, which is a strange weakness for something that rules a lake, and the one every story about her quietly depends on.

There is no account of where she came from. Nobody recorded a birth or a parentage or a first appearance, because the sjörå was never a character in that sense. She was the answer to a question about who a body of water belongs to. The sources do not draw a firm line between her and the havsrå of the salt water either, and along the coast the two names slide into one another. What held steady was the arrangement itself. Somebody owns this water, she is watching, and politeness is cheap.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a sjörå?

A sjörå is the female guardian spirit of a lake or stretch of water in Swedish folk belief. The name joins sjö, meaning lake or sea, to rå, a being that rules one specific place. There is no single sjörå, since every water of any size was thought to have its own.

What does the sjörå do to people?

The sjörå dealt mainly with fishermen, and the dealing ran both ways. Kept on good terms with a coin or a gift, she granted good catches and gave warning before bad weather arrived. Slighted or ignored, she could lure a careless person out onto the water and drown them.

How did people keep the sjörå happy?

They paid her. Coins thrown into the water were the usual offering, and on Lake Vänern becalmed sailors threw a copper or silver piece overboard while calling on Kajsa for wind. The best known legend has a fisherman give a sjörå a mitten and receive fishing luck and storm warnings in return for it.

What does the sjörå look like?

She appears as a beautiful young woman giving off her own light, usually seen at night on a rock out in the water with a storm on the way. She is hollow at the back, so she keeps turning to stop anyone seeing it. Approach her and she vanishes, then shows herself again further off.

Is the sjörå the same as näcken?

No. Näcken is the male water being of inland streams, mills and rapids, while the sjörå is female and belongs to lakes, archipelagos and the open sea. Swedish reference works treat the two as counterparts rather than as one being, although their stories overlap and the names blur along the coast.

Related Entries

Havsrå, Rå, Rådande, Skogsrå, Bergsrå, Ysätters-Kajsa, Askafroa, Tomte, Hulder, Nix, Marmennill, Näkki, Fossegrim, Vellamo, Rusalka