Vittra

The dog barks twice, then nothing. That was how the girls at the summer shielings knew what was moving through the trees, because a farm dog after a fox barks itself ragged and this one gave two clean yelps and stopped. In the white nights of a Norrland July, when the light never properly leaves and the air off the marsh smells of bog myrtle and cold water, those two yelps belonged to the vitterhund. Where the dog went, its owners were somewhere just behind it, and the sensible thing was to stand still and let them pass.

The vittra is the underground people of northern Sweden, and the word itself is old country. It is the same word as vätte, running back to Old Norse vættr, which simply means a being. Olof Johansson Broman set it down in writing in 1707 in his Hälsingland manuscript Glysisvallur, in a list that reads like a farmer counting off hazards: elves, trolls, vitter-cattle and other such. He also knew about their roads, which turns out to be the important part.

They live underground, in families, and they farm. That is the whole of it, and it is what makes them stranger than a monster would be. The vitterfolk keep horses, cows, sheep and goats, as one old informant put it to a collector in the 1930s, and they drive them to pasture in the same woods and along the same slopes as everyone else, only on a plane tilted a few degrees away from the visible one. Most of the time you get them out of the corner of your eye and lose them when you turn your head. When they do come into full view the descriptions stop agreeing. A shieling girl named Anna Broman, walking up to a waterfall, had to stop dead at the treeline and simply watch: a herd bumping up the ridge, herdswomen inside it calling kou, kou, kou, small dogs yapping at the edges, and every living thing in the procession grey and no more than half the size it should have been. They went over the falls and melted into the wood above. She had the sense to keep out of their way, because she knew they watered their animals there.

Their cattle are the prize. A vitterko was said to be unusually large and entirely white, and if you were quick enough to throw a piece of steel over one the enchantment broke and the animal was yours. It would then give milk in quantities no ordinary cow could manage, filling whatever vessel you put under it, and it would go on doing so for exactly as long as you kept using the same pail. Change the pail and you got nothing, ever again. There is a whole agricultural theory folded into that detail, and it is not a flattering one about the reliability of luck.

The roads matter more than the cattle. Vittervägar are fixed routes, known and mapped by nobody but their users, and the rule was absolute: build across one and misfortune follows, because the vittror have to get through. Some time in the late 1860s a man from Junsele went out to sit at a capercaillie lek, cut spruce boughs to lie on, and made a fire to keep warm. At midnight a woman came up to him and told him, courteously enough, that he had built it in the middle of their road and they could not get past with their animals. If he would shift it a little to one side he would be doing them a considerable service, and in the morning he could shoot one of her fattest pigs. He moved the fire. After a while he heard people and livestock and the long calls of herders going by, and saw nothing at all. At dawn he shot a large bear.

That is the pattern the whole tradition runs on. Give the vittra room and you are paid. A farmer called Karl Otto Zetterström, thirsty after a walk to the Rogsjö shielings, found milk left behind in a trough by the girls who had gone home to the village. He was drinking it when an unknown woman came in and asked for some. He handed her the pail and she emptied it and said he would be rewarded for his kindness. When he came back a little later the trough was full again.

Get it wrong and the account runs the other way. Sickness caught out on the water or off in the forest was routinely laid at the door of the rå and the vitra. A Västerbotten writer in 1939 put it without decoration: vitra was a dangerous power, and a man had to protect himself and his own against her. Livestock went missing off the pasture and were said to be bergtagna or vittertagna, taken into the mountain, taken by the vittra, and there was not much to be done about it. At Hällbovallen the vittror were reportedly so thick that an old woman going past with a sledge could not drag it for the weight of things that had hitched a ride. At other shielings people gave up on sleep entirely and lay listening to doors banging and cowbells and calling voices in an empty yard.

So there were defences, and they were practical rather than pious. A vitterkors, a cross-shaped opening cut through the gable boarding of a storehouse or chopped into a stone near the pasture, kept them off. Steel took their enchantment off a cow. A saucer of milk bought goodwill cheaply. Above all people simply rerouted themselves, and the walking paths that curve oddly around a piece of ground in the Norrland woods are sometimes the fossil of a decision to leave the vittra’s road alone. That is the honest summary: the best protection was to go round.

The limits are as plain as the powers. Nothing in the record has anyone praying to a vittra. She is not asked for harvests or children or weather, only for permission and forbearance, and she can be satisfied with a bowl of milk and a moved fire. She is bound to her own roads as tightly as the farmer is bound to his. She yields to a scrap of iron. A writer on Swedish forests observed in 1928 that the vitterfolk would probably never quite leave the northern districts, for the plain reason that it is so hard to tell these beings apart from actual people. Ella Odstedt, born in Ångermanland in 1892, spent a working life taking down what people in those districts would tell her about them, and the thousand and more of her records that eventually reached print are thick with exactly that difficulty. On a tape made in the early 1960s, a farmer named Nicke Selin was asked whether he had ever met anything uncanny and said no, he had no time for that sort of thing. Then the word vittra came up. Oh, he said, those certainly exist. That is another matter altogether.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a vittra in Swedish folklore?

A vittra is one of the underground people of northern Sweden, an ordinarily invisible being who lives in family groups beneath the ground and farms and herds livestock much as human households do. The word is the northern form of vätte and goes back to Old Norse vættr, meaning simply “a being”. The plural is vittror, and the collective term for them is vitterfolket.

Where do the vittra live?

The vittra live underground in Norrland, the northern half of Sweden, and they settle close to human farms and especially close to the fäbodar, the summer mountain pastures. When the herding families went back down to the villages for the winter, the vitterfolk were said to have the shieling to themselves. Accounts of them are densest in Ångermanland, Hälsingland, Västerbotten and Lappland.

What is a vitterväg?

A vitterväg is a fixed route along which the vittror travel with their animals, recorded in writing as early as Broman’s Glysisvallur in 1707. Building a house, a fence or even a campfire across one was believed to bring certain misfortune, on the reasoning that the vittror have to get through regardless. People often chose to reroute a path rather than take the risk.

How do you protect yourself from the vittra?

The standard defence was a vitterkors, a cross cut through the gable boarding of an outbuilding or carved into a stone near the pasture. Steel was the other remedy: a piece of iron thrown over one of the vittra’s cows was said to break the enchantment and make the animal yours. Beyond that, the usual advice was courtesy, which meant leaving milk out and staying off their roads.

Are the vittra dangerous?

They can be, though they are not hostile by nature. Handled politely they repay favours generously, as in the accounts of a farmer given an endlessly refilling trough of milk and a hunter given a bear for moving his fire off their path. Cross them and they were blamed for illness caught in the forest and for cattle that vanished from the pasture, which were said to be vittertagna, taken by the vittra.

Related Entries

Hulder, Skogsrå, Bergsrå, Sjörå, Tomte, Bysen, Troll, Myling, Nix, Vættir, Landvættir, Huldufólk, Domovoi, Kobold