Tomte

Four in the morning in a Swedish byre, and the air is already thick with the breath of cattle. Something moves down the row of stalls, too short to be a man and too purposeful to be a rat. Hay shifts in the manger. A halter is buckled. By the time the stable hand shoulders the door open there is nothing to see but one horse standing brighter than the rest, its coat glossy, its mane worked into a braid so tight that no comb will part it.

The braid was the signature. Farm households in Norway called it the nisse-plait, read it as proof that the place was occupied, and attached a rule to it: you picked it out with your fingers, however long it took, and you never went near it with scissors. The being who left it had a name that was not really a name at all. Tomt means a house lot, the cleared ground a building stands on, and the tomte belonged to that ground first and to the people on it second. Danes and Norwegians called him nisse. In Norwegian dialect he was tufte or tuftekall, gardvord, tunkall, all of them words about the yard and its keeping. Families came and went. He stayed with the plot.

Arvid August Afzelius, collecting Swedish tradition in the nineteenth century, put him at about the size of a one-year-old child, with a face already withered by age, a small red cap, a jacket of gray wadmal, short breeches, and the ordinary shoes any peasant would wear. Nothing about him was decorative. Danish tradition, as Axel Olrik and Hans Ellekilde recorded it, kept him beardless as a boy, and the long white beard everyone now pictures is a later addition. In Finland and in Swedish-speaking Finland he was one-eyed, common enough to harden into a stock phrase: one-eyed as the tomte. He stood barely an ell high, a little under two feet, and was strong past any accounting for it.

Where he came from depended on who was asked. Henning Frederik Feilberg argued that the tomte was two older ideas grown together, an earth-wight of the kind that lived loose in the landscape and drifted into houses, and the ghost of the pioneer who first cleared the plot and never entirely left it. That second strand runs through the Norwegian haugbonde, the mound farmer, and through the custom of the vårdträd, the warden tree that stood on the farm and was not to be cut. A later Swedish story took a harder line and made him the soul of a slave from heathen times, set to mind the fields while his master was away raiding, and bound to keep minding them until doomsday.

He is old in the written record. Two Old Swedish texts of the fourteenth century speak of the tomta gudhane, the gods of the building site. In Själinna thröst a woman lays food out on the table after her own meal, and if it is gone by morning she knows her livestock will be looked after. In Birgitta’s Revelationes the priests are recorded forbidding their congregations to make offerings to the tompta gudhi, which reads less like theology than like a complaint about a competitor for the tithe. In 1555 Olaus Magnus printed a woodcut of a small spirit labouring in a stable by night, the same figure that had already appeared on his Carta Marina of 1539.

The red-capped grandfather who now hands out presents is a much younger man, and the paper trail on him is clear. Danish artists made the turn first: Lorenz Frølich in 1840, Johan Thomas Lundbye in 1845, H. C. Ley in 1849, multiplying one farm nisse into a crowd of Yuletide gift bearers. Sweden followed in 1881, when Jenny Nyström illustrated Viktor Rydberg’s poem Tomten for the magazine Ny Illustrerad Tidning and built the face from her own father. By 1884 she was drawing him distributing parcels. Carl Wilhelm von Sydow later blamed English Christmas cards, with their bearded and fur-coated Father Christmas, for the whole makeover, a charge Nyström denied. Before any of it the Swedish gift bringer had been the julbock, a straw goat. The old tomte never visited anyone. He was already in the barn.

His wages were porridge. On Christmas Eve the bowl went out to the corner of the cottage, or the grain barn, or the stable, and in Finland to the drying kiln or the sauna, with butter or honey on top. Hilding Celander described the arrangement flatly as an annual salary paid to a spirit hired as the broom for the whole year, and like any wage it could be withheld, at which point the contract lapsed and the tomte was free to leave. Other payments turn up in the records: scraps of wadmal, tobacco, a shovelful of dirt, bread or cheese slipped under the turf in Blekinge. In Skokloster parish in Uppland they were generous and gave him a fur coat and a red winter cap.

The porridge had to be right. In a tale told across Scandinavia a farmer set the bowl out with the butter hidden underneath instead of melting on top. The tomte saw plain gruel, took it as an insult, went into the barn and killed the cow standing there. Then, still hungry, he came back and ate the porridge, and found the butter at the bottom. He went out across the countryside until he found a farm with a cow identical to the one he had killed, brought it home, and put it in the empty stall.

Servants who ate the offering themselves fared worse than the cow. In one Norwegian account a maid helped herself to the bowl and was found nearly lifeless the next morning, the tomte having sung at her while he beat her that since she had eaten the porridge meant for him, she could dance with him instead. Lesser offences drew lesser answers. Milk pails went over. Cream soured. Harness straps parted at the wrong moment. A stable hand who missed the four in the morning or the ten at night feeding could expect a blow to the ear on his way through the door, and a milkmaid who irritated him would find the hay held fast in the rack until she hauled at it hard enough to land flat on her back, at which point she would hear him laughing.

Kept sweet, he was worth more than a hired man. He mucked out, fed, and watched, and the horse he favoured could be picked out of the row by its condition alone. He carried hay and grain into his own farm’s barn from the neighbours’, which started as many quarrels as it settled. Carpenters knew to leave their tools at the meal break and listen, because the tomtar would take up their own small axes and carry on, and Swedish weddings sometimes had a carpenter present alongside the priest so the household could hear whether a tomtegubbe had joined the building. Afzelius set the arithmetic out as two neighbours with identical land, one in a tarred red house with a sound turf roof getting richer every year, the other under a leaking roof and rotting walls getting poorer, and nobody in the parish was in any doubt about the difference.

His limits were mostly matters of pride, which made them dangerous. He might be seen straining under a single ear of barley, and a farmer who laughed at so small a haul lost him and his luck together, while a poor beginner who valued every ear prospered. Generosity could undo him as surely as contempt. A woman who spied on a tomte sifting meal in her shed saw how shabby his gray clothes were and sewed him a new kirtle, and he put it on, and sang that he would sift no more now that he had something too fine to dirty, and went. That pattern is widespread enough across northern Europe to carry its own number in the index of migratory legends. Priests worked at him from the other side, retelling his expulsions as exorcisms, and one Swedish peasant was talked out of feeding his tomtar by being told that Satan collected the offerings in a kettle in hell for boiling souls. However he went, he did not go alone. The farm’s fortune went out through the door with him.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a tomte?

A tomte is a household and farm spirit of Swedish folklore, known as a nisse in Denmark and Norway. He lives on a single farmstead, usually under the floorboards of the house, stable or barn, and does chores at night in exchange for food. He is attached to the property rather than to the family, so he stays on when people move away.

What do you feed a tomte?

Porridge, with butter or honey on top, put out on Christmas Eve at the corner of the cottage or in the barn, grain store or stable. In Finland the bowl went to the drying kiln or the sauna. Folklorists describe the offering as an annual wage rather than a treat, and withholding it broke the arrangement and freed the tomte to leave. Other recorded payments include cloth, tobacco, bread, cheese and, in one Uppland parish, a fur coat and a red cap.

Why did the tomte kill the cow in the porridge story?

Because a farmer put the butter underneath the porridge instead of on top, and the tomte read the plain gruel as an insult. He killed the cow in the barn, then ate the porridge, found the butter at the bottom, and understood his mistake. He searched the surrounding farms until he found an identical cow and brought it back to fill the empty stall.

Is the tomte the same as Santa Claus?

No. The Swedish jultomte and Norwegian and Danish julenisse grew out of the old farm spirit in the nineteenth century, through Danish illustrators from 1840 onwards and, in Sweden, Jenny Nyström’s 1881 pictures for Viktor Rydberg’s poem Tomten. The traditional tomte was a resident, not a visitor, and was the size of a small child rather than a full-grown man. Before the jultomte took over, the Swedish Christmas gift bringer was the julbock, a straw goat.

How can you tell a tomte is on the farm?

The clearest sign is a horse’s mane braided into tight plaits, called nisse-plaits in Norway, along with one animal in the herd looking noticeably better kept than the rest. A farm that prospers beyond what its land should yield was also taken as evidence. Tradition held that the braids must be unpicked by hand and never cut with scissors.

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