Huldra

A female forest spirit of the Norwegian and Swedish record, recorded across the saeter (mountain pasture) tradition and the deep-forest oral corpus. The figure appeared as a beautiful young woman to the men working alone in the forest or pasture, indistinguishable from a human bride at the front, marked at the back by a cow's tail, hollow back, or fox-tail depending on the region. Asbjornsen's *Tales from the Fjeld* (1874) records the figure in continuous Norwegian folk practice, where the *huldra* offered marriage and reward to those she favoured and madness or death to those she resented. Dasent's *Popular Tales from the Norse* (1859) carries the figure in the household tale tradition under several names.

The marriage of a man to a huldra was held in the older accounts to civilise the figure and remove the tail at the moment the church marriage was performed. The accounts diverge on whether the marriage held when the figure tired of the household. The saeter girls were warned to keep the door fastened and the fire bright until the men returned.