Ysätters-Kajsa

Also Known As: also written Ysätterskajsa; “Kajsa of Ysätter”, after Ysätterskärret, the Ysätter marsh in Asker parish, Närke
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Swedish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: She held the weather and the roads of the Närke plain, raising whirlwinds and fog, leading travellers astray, and vanishing the instant anyone looked at her directly.
Role in Mythos: She was the presiding spirit of eastern Närke, a local rå whose territory was a whole province rather than a single lake or hill.
Relation to Humans: She interfered constantly with farming, carting, charcoal burning and washing day, and reserved her worst for people who were quarrelsome or grasping. Those who kept on civil terms with her were helped, and honest folk and poor children were said to be under her protection.

A whirlwind with nowhere left to go will stand still and spin. On the flat farmland of Närke that happens often enough that people there had a name for whatever was at the centre of it. Chaff lifting off a threshing floor, a line of washing torn down and coming back grey with dust, smoke shoved back down a chimney into a cottage full of people at supper: all of it was Ysätters-Kajsa, out enjoying herself.

Närke is a plain with a wall around it. Wooded high ground closes it on every side, and the only real gap is in the north-east, where Hjälmaren runs out of the province. Wind gathering over the Baltic gets in through that gap without much trouble, races west across the open fields, and hits the long ridge of Kilsbergen. Thrown back, it curls south into Tiveden, is knocked east into Tylöskog, is sent north again to Käglan, and comes round to Kilsbergen once more. It circles in tighter and tighter rings until it is standing in the middle of the plain like a spun top. On days like that she was inside it, dancing, her hair up among the clouds and the train of her skirt sweeping the ground as a moving column of dust.

Mornings she liked a high seat, a tall pine on a crag with the whole plain laid out below it. If it was winter and the sleighing was good and the roads were full of people, she got up a snowstorm and threw drifts across them so high that travellers barely made it home by dark. If it was summer and the hay weather was perfect, she sat still and did nothing at all until the first wagons had been loaded to the top, and then came over with downpours that ended the working day. She waited on purpose.

The charcoal burners up in Kilsbergen hardly dared close their eyes. Leave a kiln unwatched and she would lean in and breathe on it until the smothered heat came up through the turf and burned with an open flame, which ruined the whole burn. The ore carters running late out of Laxå and Svartå got fog instead, dark enough that horses and men lost the road together and put the loaded sledges into bog and marsh. Sunday afternoons she worked on a smaller scale. The dean’s wife at Glanshammar would lay the coffee things out in the garden and a single gust would lift the cloth and take cups and plates with it. The mayor of Örebro would go after his hat across the whole length of the market square. The Vinön people would run their vegetable boats onto a shoal in Hjälmaren, and nobody in Närke had to ask who was responsible.

That is the Kajsa most readers meet, and she is younger than she looks. She reached print in that shape in 1906, when Selma Lagerlöf gave her the opening of chapter twenty-four of Nils Holgerssons underbara resa and called her a vindtroll, a wind-troll, probably the only one of her kind in the country. Go back nearly forty years and there is no wind in her at all. When Herman Hofberg gathered the legends of the province for Nerikes gamla minnen in 1868, he set her down as a rådande, a presiding spirit of the same family as the rå who own a forest or a lake and answer for what happens in it. Her ground was the forest country of eastern Närke, and above all Ysätterskärret, the marsh in Asker parish that gave her the first half of her name. The old people told him she had been alive through several generations of men.

She showed herself as a young woman in splendid clothes, and what everyone remembered was the hair. Hunters came on her in the forest sitting on a stump combing it, and the length of it lay out along the ground behind her. Women down at the water beating laundry would glance up and find her a little way off beating her own, and her linen was always whiter than anything they could get. She was there for a moment at a time. Take your eyes off her and she was gone.

Her regular routes across the parish were known and pointed out, and farmers complained about the corn she trampled going back and forth along them. At night her laugh came out of a tree or off a rock face, usually just after she had walked somebody into a ditch or turned over a cart, and it was a magpie’s laugh, that hard dry rattle. To anyone standing helpless in fog and dark it went straight through the blood. Old women with sharp tongues had the worst of her, because she took a particular pleasure in following them and copying their walk and their snappish gestures.

The hunter they called Bottorpa-Lasse had her favour, and it made him something close to unbeatable. He could stand in his own porch and call the bird he intended to kill, or draw the animal he wanted on a wall, and the thing dropped when his gun went off. One night he took a neighbour out with him and they built a brushwood shelter in the woods to wait for morning. Kajsa came to them in the dark and asked to see the guns. The neighbour’s she turned over once and gave back with a single word of disgust. Lasse’s she blew down the barrel of, checked the priming powder, and returned to him with three words of praise and a good boy on the end of it. In the morning Lasse took everything he aimed at. The other man never got off a shot.

Not all of it was malice. When the bell tower at Asker caught fire and the flames spread to the church itself, people said Kajsa was seen up on the church roof holding the fire back. The county’s record of that building dates the lightning strike to 21 July 1764 and confirms that both church and bell tower burned, with the church restored by 1768; by the time Hofberg’s informants described it to him they had slid the whole event back into the 1750s. Folk memory keeps the roof and loses the decade.

What she could do was mostly a matter of nerve and position rather than force. She was untouchable, unpredictable, and impossible to hold, and she was bound to her own country, which is the limit every rå lives inside. She could not be fought either, only provoked, and the last time anyone in Närke felt her presence was proof of it. There was a haymaking party on Ysätter meadow, and the workers had stopped for their evening meal and were in good spirits, and one farmhand said out loud that he would like to meet Kajsa face to face and give her a beating for all the trouble she had caused in the world. The fence beside them cracked violently. Something invisible caught him across the mouth and started his nose bleeding, and on everyone else’s bread the butter turned to blood.

Nobody wanted a closer acquaintance after that. When Hofberg asked about her, the old people did not tell him she had been disproved or explained away. They told him, with some regret, that it was over with Kajsa as it was with the rest of them, and that the thunder had killed her. Lagerlöf would not concede even that, and wrote that believing it was like being told the air over the plain had agreed to stand still.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ysätters-Kajsa?

Ysätters-Kajsa is a spirit of Swedish folklore associated with the province of Närke, best known as a wind-troll who raised whirlwinds, snowstorms and fog across the Närke plain. Her name means roughly “Kajsa of Ysätter”, after Ysätterskärret, a marsh in Asker parish where she was said to live. In the earliest recorded accounts she is not a wind spirit at all but a rådande, a presiding land-spirit of the eastern Närke forests.

What did Ysätters-Kajsa look like?

Ysätters-Kajsa appeared as a young woman in fine clothes with hair of extraordinary length. Hunters reported finding her seated on a tree stump in the forest, combing hair long enough to lie along the ground behind her. She was only ever visible for a few moments, and vanished the instant an observer looked away.

What did Ysätters-Kajsa do to people?

She caused constant small ruin: snowdrifts across winter roads, downpours the moment the hay wagons were loaded, fog that put ore carters and their sledges into the bog, and charcoal kilns fanned into open flame. She was hardest on the quarrelsome and the grasping, and often mocked sharp-tongued old women by imitating their walk. Honest people and poor children were said to be under her protection.

Is Ysätters-Kajsa connected to Selma Lagerlöf?

Yes. Selma Lagerlöf devoted the opening of chapter twenty-four of Nils Holgerssons underbara resa (1906 to 1907) to Ysätters-Kajsa, and it is her version, which calls the spirit a vindtroll or wind-troll, that almost every later retelling follows. The older account, collected by Herman Hofberg for Nerikes gamla minnen in 1868, describes a forest rådande with no weather powers attached.

Did Ysätters-Kajsa ever help anyone?

She did. Folk tradition credits her with standing on the roof of Asker church during a fire and keeping the flames off it, and with granting the hunter Bottorpa-Lasse a marksmanship no one could match. People who kept on good terms with her were said to receive help in many situations, while anyone who insulted her was answered immediately and physically.