De underjordiske — the neighbors living under your hill

Dig a new well, throw your dishwater the wrong way, or set a barn post a foot too far north, and you might be living on top of someone. The Norwegians called them de underjordiske — the ones below — and the danger they posed was mostly the offence you could give without meaning to: a whole neighbourhood ran underneath your own, and you could trespass on it without knowing.

The oldest of them was the gardvord Gardvord × Erik Werenskiold, Farmannshaugen (c. 1899), from the 1899 Heimskringla edition About this image ▸ The farm's guardian spirit in Norwegian tradition — also tunkall, tomtegubbe, and, in the mound-form, haugebonde. The recorded lore identified him with the first man who cleared the land — the rudkall — dead in the burial mound at the farmyard's edge and still keeping watch over the farm his clearing made. A household on good terms with him kept his dues: the mound stayed unploughed, and the first beer from every new barrel was poured at the mound or at the roots of the tuntre, the farm's guardian tree. Andreas Faye set the tradition in print in Norske Sagn (1833); folklorists have read the gardvord as the plainest survival of the pre-Christian ancestor cult, and as the figure that later shrank into the porridge-fed nisse. , the farm’s guardian — the first man who ever cleared that ground, dead in the mound at its edge and still watching over the buildings his clearing made possible. You did not plough the mound. You poured him the first beer from every new barrel. Others lived in the old burial cairns, or under the rocks — the same folk under other names: tusser, haugfolk, huldrefolk, or just vetter, the beings. The huldra Huldra × Theodor Kittelsen, Da Huldra forsvant (1908), private collection About this image ▸ The hulder (definite huldra; from Old Norse hylja, 'to hide') is a supernatural female being of Norwegian legend: a beautiful young woman from the front, marked from behind by a cow's tail and, in many tellings, a hollow back. She haunts summer pastures and logging camps, lures men with her herding-call, and belongs to the huldrefolk, the hidden people also called de underjordiske. A hulder who marries a man loses her tail at the church blessing — and her beauty, though not her strength; legend holds that seven such tails hang in Seljord church. Andreas Faye first collected the tradition in Norske Sagn (1833); Asbjørnsen's Norske Huldreeventyr og Folkesagn (1845–48) lent the genre its name; Theodor Kittelsen painted her vanishing in Da Huldra forsvant (1908). On the trip On Day 3 the Ungdommene (the Youngsters) ride the Flåm Railway down toward the fjord, and the train slows at the Kjosfossen waterfall. In the summer season the railway sometimes stages a performance of the huldra legend there — a costumed dancer in a red dress moving through the spray to a folk tune. The performance runs on some departures and not others, so it is one to watch for rather than count on: if something moves in the mist above the falls, the Ungdommene (the Youngsters) will know what they are looking at. Also discussed in Huldra — the girl in the forest with a secretThe Flåmsbana railway between Myrdal and FlåmThe Nutshell day — Oslo to Bergen by rail, bus, fjord, rail of the forest was their one famous face; most of the underjordiske kept out of sight.

They lived a life parallel to the one above — cattle, weddings, quarrels, music. The music of an underground wedding could carry up through the floorboards at night, and a household that heard it did not say so. Tools left out were borrowed and came back blunt. A child or animal that sickened for no reason had probably crossed them. The commonest offence was scalding: dishwater or hot grease thrown onto the ground splashed invisibly onto the family below, and within days a child took ill — so you shouted a warning before you threw. The bluntest punishment in the lore fell on the farmer who built his new byre over the underjordiske’s sitting room: their ceiling ran with muck from his cattle until they made his life unlivable, and he pulled the building down and moved it.

Their origin was told as a footnote to scripture. Eve was washing her children when God came to visit, and she hid the ones she had not finished washing. God said: then let what is hidden stay hidden — and they have been under the ground ever since, neither damned nor blessed, between angels and humans, kin to the family upstairs and not to be feared the way demons were.

At Mollestad in Birkenes, in southern Norway, an oak nine metres around still stands over a burial mound. Every old Norwegian farm once had a tree like it: people poured the first beer from a new barrel at its roots, set out bread and milk, and would not break a twig. It is called the Vetteika, the spirits’ oak — and the instinct outlived the belief that explained it: into the twentieth century, road crews still bent a new road around a particular boulder rather than blast a stone someone’s grandfather had called occupied.