Fossegrimen — the waterfall fiddler who teaches you to play
The water-spirit who lives behind the white roar of a waterfall and teaches the fiddle to anyone who brings him a smoked leg of mutton. If your offering is too small he teaches you only how to tune; too generous and he plays so well you forget the way home.
If the nøkken is the water-spirit who takes, the fossegrim is the one who gives — for a price, on terms, and with a sense of humor about it. He lives behind the white roar of a waterfall, in the cool spray-soaked dark where the falling water hides everything, and what he has to offer is music. Specifically, he can teach the fiddle, and not ordinary fiddle: he can teach a person to play so well that the playing itself becomes a kind of power.
The bargain, and its small print
The fossegrim does not teach for free, and the folklore is unusually precise about the fee. The seeker brings him an offering of food — by tradition a smoked leg of mutton — and carries it to the waterfall, and the lesson he receives is calibrated, exactly, to the size of what he brought.
Bring something meager and the fossegrim is insulted: he will teach you only how to tune the instrument, and no more. Bring a proper offering and he teaches you to play. Bring something truly generous — a whole fat leg of mutton — and he teaches you everything he knows, until you can play so beautifully that, in the darker tellings, you forget the way home, or the trees themselves bend to listen, or you can no longer stop. The gift and the danger are the same gift. The fossegrim’s lesson always works; the question is only how much of yourself it costs.
The fiddle behind the folklore
This is one of the folk figures with a real cultural job behind it. Norway has a deep tradition of fiddle music — above all the Hardanger fiddle, the hardingfele, with its extra resonating strings that give the instrument its eerie ringing undertone — and a deep tradition of slåtter, the dance tunes that go with it. A virtuoso fiddler, in a culture without recording or formal conservatories, was a genuinely uncanny figure: where did the playing come from? The fossegrim is the answer the folk imagination supplied. The great fiddler learned it at the waterfall. The nineteenth-century Romantic-nationalist revival, which prized exactly this kind of rooted native art, took the fossegrim up gladly.
Where the family meets him
Every waterfall of any size, by the old reckoning, has its fossegrim — and the trip runs straight past one of the canonical ones. The Flåm railway, the Flåmsbana, stops at Kjosfossen, a tall waterfall where the train pauses and a performance takes place on the rocks beside the falling water — a staged folk dance, the figure in red appearing and vanishing in the spray. The performance officially belongs to the hulder, the forest woman. But the setting belongs to the fossegrim: the white roar, the cold spray, the dark behind the water where, the old people said, the music is kept. Stand on that platform and the folklore explains itself.