Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The lindworm — the lindorm of the Scandinavian tongues — is the wingless serpent-dragon of northern Europe: a vast serpent, sometimes with two small forelegs, sometimes none, a limbless or near-limbless dragon of the old Germanic and Norse world, coiled around treasure-hoards and gnawing at the roots of things. But this chronicle, which has met a great many coiled and hoarding dragons, will follow the lindworm into the one tale that makes it unforgettable — the Danish and Scandinavian wonder-tale of Prince Lindworm , "King Lindworm," which is one of the deepest stories of transformation in all of European folklore, and which turns not on slaying the serpent but on undressing it. The Bride and the Nine Shifts A queen who could bear no child is given, by a wise woman, a means to conceive — two roses, or two onions, one to be eaten for a boy and one for a girl, and warned: eat only one. But the queen, greedy for children, eats both — and eats the wrong one first, or eats...

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...

Every churchyard in the old North of England and Scandinavia, the tradition says, has a guardian — and the guardian is not an angel. On certain evenings, in the long shadow of the tower, the sexton or a late mourner might glimpse it: a great black dog, moving among the headstones with the unhurried authority of a warden on his rounds, or watching from the churchyard wall with eyes that do not shine so much as weigh . It never barks at the living, unless the living have come to do harm. It never leaves the consecrated ground. It has been there, the old people said, since the church was built — and it will be there when the last grave is dug, because it is bound to the place in the most literal way anything can be bound. It is buried in the foundations. This is the Church Grim — the kirk grim of Yorkshire speech, the kyrkogrim of Sweden, the kirkegrim of Denmark — and behind its quiet patrols lies one of the darkest and most fascinating ideas in all of northern folklore: that a buil...

Ask the old Scandinavian countryside who really ran the farm, and the honest answer was never the farmer. It was a little man perhaps three feet high, dressed in gray homespun with a red pointed cap , bearded like a bishop, older than the oldest timber in the barn—and visible, as a rule, to no one. The Swedes call him the tomte , from tomt , the house-plot itself; Norwegians and Danes call him the nisse ; and both names carry his job description. He is the spirit of the ground the farm stands on —by the deepest stratum of the tradition, the first ancestor , the man who cleared the land and was buried in the founding mound beside the house, staying on to supervise—and his work is everything the daylight never sees: hay carried to the beasts at midnight, stalls groomed, grain shifted, tools mended, the cattle watched through the killing cold. A farm with a tomte prospered mysteriously; its horses were glossier, its harvest heavier, its luck thicker than the neighbors' could explain....

The heaviest ghost in the world's folklore is also the smallest. Scandinavian tradition calls it the myling —in Norway also the utburd , "that which was carried out"—and both names are case files. The myling is the ghost of a child killed and hidden : the newborn of desperation, born in secret to a servant girl or a starving household, killed or left to die, and disposed of outside every rite—buried under floorboards, sunk in the bog, left on the winter hill. Denied baptism, name, and churchyard, the child does not leave. It stays where it was put, and it cries : travelers on lonely roads at night heard the thin wailing from marsh or scree where no living infant could be; and the boldest of the old stories begin when someone, hearing it, does not hurry on. For the myling wants one thing, and the whole tradition hangs on it: to be carried to consecrated ground . It will leap upon the back of the night-walker—and then, as he carries it toward the churchyard, it grows heavi...