In the far north, there is a stretch of winter called mørketid, “the murky time”, when the sun barely rises. It is no surprise that the people who lived through those long nights filled the darkness with things that ride, drown, sweep and hide. These four creatures from Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland are the stars of our Mørketid series, and each one is still remembered today.
1. The Mare: the demon behind the word “nightmare”
The “mare” in nightmare has nothing to do with horses. It comes from mara, an Old Norse and Old English name for a spirit that sits on a sleeper’s chest, crushing the breath out of them and bringing bad dreams. You can still hear her in the Scandinavian words for a nightmare: mareridt in Danish, mareritt in Norwegian and mardröm in Swedish.
She appears in one of the oldest Norse histories, the Ynglinga saga. It tells how the Swedish king Vanlandi was cursed by a sorceress. He grew sleepy, lay down, and cried out that the mare was trampling him. His men tried to help, but she moved between his legs and his head until she smothered him.
Danish folk tales tell how to catch a mare: find the hole she slips in through and plug it. But there was a catch. A captured mare often turned out to be a woman, and in some stories the man who trapped her ended up marrying her. What the mare does to her victims is strikingly close to what we now call sleep paralysis.
2. The Bäckahäst: Sweden’s brook horse
In Swedish folklore, the bäckahäst (“brook horse”) is a beautiful white horse that appears by lakes and rivers. It is one of the forms of the water spirit Näcken (Nøkken in Norway). It seems gentle, and it lets children stroke it and climb onto its back.
That is the trap. In many tales, the horse’s back grows longer with every child who climbs on, until it can carry them all, and then it charges into the water to drown them. The way to break its power was to call on God, or throw a piece of steel between the horse and the water. In one well-known story, a boy cries out “Oh my God”, and the horse throws the children off into the grass and vanishes into the lake.
3. Pesta: Norway’s plague hag
When the Black Death swept through Norway in the 1300s, folk tradition gave it a face. In Norwegian and Swedish legends, the plague often travelled as a wandering old woman, or sometimes as a pair of children, carrying a rake and a broom.
Her tools decided everyone’s fate. If she used the rake on a farm, some people would survive, because a rake lets things slip through its teeth. If she used the broom, she swept the whole household away. The Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen made Pesta famous in his haunting drawings of the Black Death, including one where she climbs the stairs of a house.
4. Metsänpeitto: the Finnish forest that hides people
Finnish folklore has a word for a person who is neither lost nor taken, but simply cannot be found: metsänpeitto, “the forest’s cover”. People under it would fail to recognise land they knew well, or walk endlessly through unfamiliar country. Sometimes they couldn’t move or speak, and the sounds of the forest fell silent around them.
Worse, searchers could walk right past them. A person or animal under metsänpeitto might look like part of the landscape, such as a rock or a tree stump. One story tells of a man who struck a stump with his axe while searching for his lost cow, and the stump turned back into the cow.
The cure was to turn the world upside down: wear your clothes inside out, swap your shoes onto the wrong feet, or bend over and look back through your legs. Some people came home with no explanation. Others were never seen again.
More folklore to explore
Find more legends from around the world in our Folk Stories collection, or head east to Japanese Urban Legends, Yokai & Folklore, where Japan has its own version of being hidden: kamikakushi, being spirited away.
Sources
- The Nightmare: legends collected by D. L. Ashliman (University of Pittsburgh)
- The Brook Horse (Huseby Bruk)
- Plague Legend Migration in Scandinavia (Medievalists.net)
- Theodor Kittelsen: a Norwegian bestiary
- Metsänpeitto (Wikipedia)