![]() ![]() ![]() Nineteenth-century depictions of the nisse show a child-sized, bearded man in a pointy red cap, the traditional garb for farmhands. He stands in the center, sweeping the barn. Olaus Magnus’s 1555 “A Description of the Northern Peoples” includes an early depiction of a farmhouse spirit. Disrespect him, and you might find your cow dead in the morning. ![]() Keep your farm’s nisse happy, and he’d make sure your milk stayed fresh and your livestock remained healthy. Farmers believed that surviving a hard winter depended on the nisse’s whims, which were mercurial. Whether or not one truly believes the tales, the barn-dwelling “house elves” often known as nisse have been figures in folklore across the Nordic region since at least the late Middle Ages. Tangherlini is now a professor of Scandinavian folklore at UC Berkeley. Assuming it was a trick, he told the couple that owned the farm about the encounter. When Tangherlini tried to speak to the stranger, the little man jumped out the barn window. One day, while brushing cattle in the barn, he spotted a tiny man in a hat sitting on the back of one of the cows. In the winter of 1984, Timothy Tangherlini worked on a dairy farm on the Danish island of Funen. This month, Gastro Obscura is sharing the recipes and stories behind amazing holiday dishes and drinks in an ongoing series, Home-Cooked Holidays. ![]()
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