Tomte

The horses had to be fed at ten at night and again at four in the morning. A stable hand who kept those hours, spoke kindly to the animals and did not swear in the doorway had nothing to fear from the dark end of the byre. One who cursed, forgot the night feed and slept until daylight could expect a blow on the ear from a hard fist he never saw, heavy enough to put him on his nose in the straw. Swedish farm people had a saying for the difference between a sleek horse and a poor one. The groom lays the food in the crib, but it is the tomte who makes the horse fat.

The name is a piece of land law. A tomt is a house lot, the ground a building stands on, and the tomte belonged to that ground before he belonged to anyone living on it. Danes and Norwegians called him nisse, and older Norwegian speech had a whole row of names for him: tufte and tuftekall, gardvord, godbonde, rudkall, haugebonde, and tusse up in Nordland. Almost every one of them is about the yard, the farm, or the mound behind it. He was so attached to his place that he could not endure a removal. If the family moved away, he forsook them, and their good luck stayed behind with him.

Arvid August Afzelius, publishing Swedish folk tradition in the 1840s, gave him the height of a child of twelve months, with an ancient, shrewd face under a little red cap, a jacket of coarse gray wool, short breeches, and the kind of shoes peasant children wore. Danish tradition made him larger, about the size of a boy of ten or twelve, dressed in gray under a pointed red hat. Norwegian accounts run from something that would fit in a hand to a figure about ninety centimetres tall, with a gray or white beard and clothes of gray or blue wadmal. The cap is the one thing nobody leaves off. The strength is the other constant. A Norwegian farmer who met a nisse on a winter road and ordered it out of his way found himself pitched over the hedge into a field of snow before he knew what had happened.

Where he came from is less settled than what he wore. Norwegian scholarship traces him to the ancestor cult of the pre-Christian farm, where the man who first cleared the land received offerings for protection and good harvests, and the old name haugebonde, the mound farmer, points the same way. In Sweden he is bound up with the vård, the guardian spirit living in the great tree of the yard, the tomt tree. Norwegians said the tall old trees around a house were not to be felled, and told of people who cut one down and paid for it with a sickness nothing would cure. A Swedish explanation recorded by Afzelius was bleaker. The small gray workers were the souls of slaves who had kept the fields and buildings in heathen times while their masters were away at sea raiding, and who went on with the same labour, and would go on until doomsday.

He was in writing by the fourteenth century. The Revelations of Saint Birgitta name the tompta gudhi, the tomte gods, among the things her countrymen worshipped and honoured, and the Latin renders them penates, as if the Roman household gods had turned up in Swedish barns. The Old Swedish devotional book Själinna thröst, the Comfort of the Soul, tells its reader not to believe in them, speaks of food left out for them to eat, and has them come in the night and sit down at the table until a holy man named Germanus speaks to them. In 1555 the exiled churchman Olaus Magnus printed a woodcut in his history of the northern peoples showing a small spirit at work in a stable. Protestant clergy spent the next three centuries calling all of it superstition. A priest in Scania searched a peasant’s house to prove no nisse lived there, and when asked where the food on the stove went every night, answered that Satan collected it in a kettle in hell, to boil the family’s souls in forever. That household stopped setting it out.

Everywhere else the food kept going out, and most of all at Christmas. In Norway it was sweet porridge, cakes and beer on Christmas Eve and on Thursday evenings. In Denmark it was sweet porridge with a pat of butter every Saturday evening and on holidays. Swedes set bowls of Yule porridge on the barn floor with a jacket beside them, and Afzelius recorded Christmas-morning gifts of coarse gray cloth, a little tobacco and a shovelful of earth. In Blekinge people eating their meal out in the fields slipped bread and cheese under a green turf for the good nisse. None of this was charity. It was payment.

The butter mattered. Evald Tang Kristensen took down a tale from Marius Hansen of Mølvang about a man in Kjærbølling, in Jutland, who had two nisser working his farm and then wanted to be rid of them. His wife Sidsel put the butter at the bottom of the porridge bowl instead of on top. The nisse looked down into a bowl of plain porridge, went out to the byre, and wrung the necks of two or three cows. Later he made the loss good, bringing better cattle over from the neighbour’s farm to fill the empty stalls.

His temper ran from mischief to murder. In Norway he let all the cows loose in the cowhouse, blew out the milkmaids’ light, or held the hay in the crib so tight that a girl hauling at it went flat on her back when he suddenly let go, and then he laughed like a horse. He stole hay from the neighbours for his own master’s animals, and when the nisser of two farms fell out over it, hay and straw could be seen flying in every direction. A girl who brought him his Christmas Eve food with a mocking word was made to dance with him, and was found dead in the barn next morning. Horses he favoured woke with tangles worked into their manes that no comb would bring out, and Norwegians called them nisseflette, nisse-plaits, though the mara was blamed for the same knot.

The kindly gift bringer of Christmas cards is a much younger man. In Denmark Just Mathias Thiele collected nisse legends between 1819 and 1823, the painter Constantin Hansen’s household kept a special Christmas nisse in 1836, Johan Thomas Lundbye and A. F. Flinch cut early woodcuts of him in 1842, and around 1850 somebody gave him a wife. In Sweden the turn came in 1881 with Viktor Rydberg’s poem Tomten, illustrated by Jenny Nyström, who went on drawing him for the rest of her long career. Before then the Swedish Christmas presents had been brought by the julbock, the Yule goat. The old tomte never delivered anything. He was already in the barn.

Kept content, he was worth more than a hired man. Afzelius set it out as two farmers in one village with the same fields, meadow and woodland, one growing richer every year in a red, well-tarred house under a sound turf roof, the other growing poorer under moss and rotten walls, and everyone in the parish knew which one had a tomte. He showed himself to the master, and to the mistress too if she was kind. When a house was being built, the tomtar could be seen working with small axes while the carpenters were at their dinner, and when a tree came down in the forest people said the woodman holds the axe, but the tomte fells the tree.

His weak point was pride. At noon in summer and autumn he might be seen dragging a single straw or ear of grain, panting at every step as if under a crushing load. One peasant laughed and asked what difference it made whether he brought that or nothing. The tomte moved to the farm of a poor beginner who took care of every straw, and from that day the first man’s prosperity drained away while the second grew rich. Kindness could lose him just as surely. A housewife wondered for years why her meal tub stayed so heavy however much she took from it, until she looked through a chink in the storeroom door and saw a little tomte in tattered gray clothes sifting away in the tub. She made him a handsome new kirtle and hung it on the edge. He put it on at once and started sifting, saw the meal dusting his fine new clothes, threw down the sieve, and declared that so fine a fellow would never sift again. The tub was lighter after that.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a tomte?

A tomte is the farmstead spirit of Swedish folklore, called a nisse in Denmark and Norway. He belongs to one farm, lives in its barns and stables, and looks after the animals and the harvest in return for food and respect. The name comes from the Swedish word tomt, the lot a house stands on.

What does a tomte look like?

Swedish tradition, as recorded by Arvid August Afzelius in the 1840s, makes the tomte the size of a one-year-old child, with an old, shrewd face, a small red cap, a coarse gray woollen jacket, short breeches and peasant children’s shoes. Danish tradition makes him about the size of a boy of ten or twelve, and some Norwegian accounts give him a gray or white beard. He is always described as far stronger than his size suggests.

What do you give a tomte at Christmas?

The tomte was paid in food, especially at Christmas. Norwegians set out sweet porridge, cakes and beer on Christmas Eve, Danes gave sweet porridge with a pat of butter, and Swedes put bowls of Yule porridge on the barn floor, sometimes with gifts of gray cloth, tobacco and a shovelful of earth. Getting the offering wrong could be dangerous.

What happens if the butter is missing from the tomte’s porridge?

In a Danish tale recorded by Evald Tang Kristensen, a farmer’s wife in Kjærbølling hid the butter at the bottom of the nisse’s porridge to drive him away. The nisse thought he had been cheated and wrung the necks of two or three cows. He later replaced them with better cattle taken from the neighbour’s farm.

Is the tomte the same as Santa Claus?

No. The tomte is a farm spirit who never leaves his farm, while the Christmas gift bringer called the jultomte in Sweden and the julenisse in Denmark and Norway took shape in the nineteenth century. In Sweden the change owes most to Viktor Rydberg’s 1881 poem Tomten and Jenny Nyström’s illustrations for it. Before that, Swedish Christmas presents were brought by the julbock, the Yule goat.

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