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What this episode is about
The second part of my look at the Nøkken is about his most dangerous side: music. It covers the pact at the waterfall, the eleventh tune, a fiddler who really lived, and two paintings that still shape how people picture the water spirit today.
The pact
Jacob Grimm recorded the recipe in 1835 in his Deutsche Mythologie (Teutonic Mythology), based on Swedish and Norwegian sources: on a Thursday evening, at a waterfall that flows north, with a white billy goat as the offering. If the offering is lean, you only learn to tune. If it is fat, the Fossegrim guides the student’s hand over the strings until the fingers bleed.
The eleventh tune
The Strömkarl knows eleven tunes. Ten are for people. The eleventh belongs to the spirits of the night. When it is played, tables, old men, babies and the dead dance, until someone cuts the strings or plays the tune backward.
Fanitullen
In 1724, at a wedding on the Myljo Larsgard farm in Hallingdal, a fight breaks out with knives. In the cellar the fiddler finds the Devil sitting on a barrel, holding his fiddle the wrong way around. Jørgen Moe turned this into the poem “Fanitullen” in 1849. The tune is still played on the Hardanger fiddle today.
The miller’s son
Torgeir Augundsson, known as Myllarguten, baptized in Telemark in 1801, played so well that people said he had learned from the Fossegrim. Ole Bull supported him and performed with him in 1849. Myllarguten himself denied the legend. His audience needed it more than he did. Pietist pastors long considered the Hardanger fiddle a sinful instrument, and it could not be played in churches until the 20th century.
Salvation or not
In a Swedish legend, a pastor tells the Näck he cannot be saved, but the pastor’s dry staff begins to bloom, and the Näck plays more beautifully than before. Erik Johan Stagnelius tells the opposite: a child tells the Näck he will never be a child of God, and he falls silent forever. Søren Kierkegaard also took up this figure in 1843.
Eyes in the water lilies
Theodor Kittelsen’s 1904 watercolor shows nothing but two eyes in a mass of roots and moss; his model was a pond on Jomfruland. Ernst Josephson painted the naked water fiddler over twelve years and shocked the public with it. A 2007 survey by the University of Iceland found that for many Icelanders, belief in such beings is “more than a fairy tale.”
Frequently asked questions
What is the Fossegrim?
A Norwegian water spirit who lives at waterfalls and, in exchange for an offering, teaches musicians to play the fiddle.
What is Fanitullen?
A Norwegian folk tune that the Devil is said to have played for a fiddler in Hallingdal in 1724. Jørgen Moe wrote the legend down as a poem in 1849.
Back to Part 1. More in the lexicon: Nøkken.
About this episode
In part two of our journey into the Nøkken, we go down into the cellar — to the place where music becomes more dangerous than any knife. Because the most terrifying thing about this Scandinavian water spirit isn’t that he can be a horse, or a bearded old man with water dripping from his beard. It’s his violin.We travel to the Norwegian valley of Hallingdal, to the farm Myljo Larsgard, in the spring of 1724. A wedding turns into a knife fight. The fiddle player goes down to tap a fresh barrel of mead — and finds someone already waiting for him. We unpack the exact recipe of the bargain at the waterfall: the white billy goat, the north-flowing falls, the Thursday night, the fingers that have to bleed before the gift is handed over. And we listen for the eleventh tune — the one no fiddler is ever allowed to play, because it brings even the dead back up to dance.We meet Torgeir Augundsson, known as Myllarguten, the miller’s boy from Telemark whose whole country believed he had really struck the deal. We stand in front of two of Scandinavia’s most haunting paintings, Kittelsen’s Nøkken and Ernst Josephson’s twelve-year obsession. We hear Stagnelius’s poem about an innocent child silencing a water spirit forever. And in the end, we ask the question that makes this creature so deeply human: does the Nøkken have a soul — and can it be saved?Subscribe and stay watchful.#GreyTales #Nokken #Folklore