The Woman Who Turns Away

Sunniva Aalto
Field Correspondent, The Northern Reaches

Fieldnotes — the Telemark uplands, late autumn

The old dairymaids up in the seter huts of Telemark did not speak of her lightly, even when I asked directly. She is there, one woman told me, gesturing past the treeline with the flat of her hand, as though the forest itself required no further introduction. That is the first thing you learn about the Huldra: she is rarely named without a glance over the shoulder.

She appears, in the tellings that have come down through Norway and Sweden, as a woman of unreasonable beauty, fair-haired, dressed sometimes in blue, sometimes in the grey of birch bark. She is not always alone. Cattle move with her, or she is seen milking in a clearing that was not there the day before, and hunters who have gone too far into the trees speak of losing the path entirely, of the light changing, of finding themselves led rather than lost. The lure is not violence. It is invitation.

The detail everyone reaches for first is the flaw built into her beauty. Seen from behind she is hollow, like a tree trunk gone soft with rot, or she carries a tail, a cow's tail in most Norwegian versions, a fox's in some of the Swedish ones, which she is forever arranging her skirts to hide. The versions disagree on how the flaw is discovered, whether a suitor catches sight of it by accident, in a mirror, in a startled turn, or whether she shows it to him herself, testing what he will do. What the stories agree on is that the reaction matters more than the flaw. A man who is kind about it, who does not recoil, may find the tail simply falls away, and the Huldra becomes, for all practical purposes, an ordinary wife. A man who shows disgust gets no such mercy.

She is not only a temptress. In the older tellings she is closer to a guardian, keeper of the forest's wild stock, and a hunter who pleased her, who left her a gift or spoke to her with proper respect, might find the game unusually plentiful that season, the bears leaving his cattle alone. Displease her, take timber carelessly from her ground or boast of what you meant to shoot, and the forest simply stopped cooperating. Farmers who lost their way home after dark, who heard their own name called from an unfamiliar direction, understood who was likely responsible.

She belongs to a wider Scandinavian idea of the hidden folk, the huldrefolk, who live alongside human settlement but slightly out of phase with it, in the mound, in the deep stand of spruce, in the fold of the hill nobody farms. Church bells are said to unsettle her, and there are tellings in which a Huldra, hearing them ring clear on three successive Sundays, is finally released into an ordinary human life, her hollowness closing over for good. Other tellings offer no such release at all. She simply withdraws further into the trees, and the forest closes behind her the way water closes behind a stone.

What stayed with me, sitting in that seter kitchen with the fire low, was less the warning than the wistfulness in how it was told. Nobody I spoke to treated her as purely monstrous. She was spoken of the way you might speak of weather that has taken someone you knew, with respect, and a little grief, and no real wish to have it explained away.

Sunniva Aalto is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Northern Reaches. High latitudes, deep winter, standing water — she works in the months when the light is briefest, on the theory that the north's stories were made at that time of year and are best understood in it. She travels alone and says little about it.