The Gloson: The Grave-Sow with the Razor Back
Of all the things abroad in the Scandinavian midwinter — and the old North's Yuletide nights were as crowded as any season in Europe — the one the walkers of Skåne and Småland feared on the road itself was a pig. Not a boar of flesh: the gloson — the "glowing sow," the grave-sow, gravso in her older and darker name — a spectral sow, huge, black or ash-grey, with eyes that burn like embers in the dark (the glow that names her) and, running the length of her spine, her dreadful signature: a back like a saw — a ridge of bristles sharp as razors, hard as iron, set like the teeth of a blade. She runs the roads between Christmas and New Year — above all the church roads, the paths the parishes walked to the early Yule service in the black of the morning — and she runs them low and fast , head down, silent but for the click of her feet on the frozen ruts. And her method is the most anatomically specific horror in all northern folklore: the gloson runs between the legs of th...