Nisse (folklore)
A nisse, tomte, tomtenisse, or tonttu is a household spirit from Nordic folklore which has always been described as a small human-like creature wearing a red cap and gray clothing, doing house and stable chores, and expecting to be rewarded at least once a year around winter solstice, with the gift of its favorite food, porridge.
Although there are several suggested etymologies, nisse may derive from the given name Niels or Nicholas, introduced 15–17th century, hence nisse is cognate to Saint Nicholas and related to the Saint Nicholas Day gift giver to children. In the 19th century the Scandinavian nisse became increasingly associated with the Christmas season and Christmas gift giving, its pictorial depiction strongly influenced by American Santa Claus in some opinion, evolving into the Julenisse.
The nisse is one of the most familiar creatures of Scandinavian folklore, and he has appeared in many works of Scandinavian literature.
The nisse is frequently introduced to English readership as an "elf" or "gnome"; the Christmas nisse often bears resemblance to the garden gnome.
Nomenclature
The word nisse is a pan-Scandinavian term. Its modern usage in Norway into the 19th century is evidenced in Asbjørnsen's collection. The Norwegian tufte is also equated to nisse or tomte. In Danish the form husnisse also occurs.Other synonyms include the Swedish names tomtenisse and tomtekarl. The names tomtegubbe and tomtebonde have occurred in Sweden and parts of Norway close to Sweden. The Finnish is borrowed from Swedish, but the Finnish spirit has gained a distinct identity and is no longer synonymous. There is also the tonttu-ukko but this is a literary Christmas elf.
There are also localized appellations, in and tuftekall in Gudbrandsdalen and Nordland regions of Norway.
Other variants include the Swedish names tomtenisse and tomtekarl; also in Sweden tomtegubbe and tomtebonde, and .
English translations
The term nisse in the native Norwegian is retained in Pat Shaw Iversen's English translation, appended with the parenthetical remark that it is a household spirit.Various English language publications also introduce the nisse as an "elf" or "gnome".
In the past, chose to substitute nisse with "brownie". 's dictionary glossed nisse as 'goblin' or 'hobgoblin'.
In the English editions of the Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales the Danish word nisse has been translated as 'goblin', for example, in the tale "The Goblin at the Grocer's".
Dialects
Forms such as tufte have been seen as dialect. Aasen noted the variant form tuftekall to be prevalent in the Nordland and Trondheim areas of Norway, and the tale "Tuftefolket på Sandflesa" published by Asbjørnsen is localized in Træna Municipality in Nordland. Another synonym is tunkall also found in the north and west.Thus ostensibly tomte prevails in eastern Norway,
although there are caveats attached to such over-generalizations by linguist. It might also be conceded that tomte is more a Swedish term than Norwegian. In Scania, Halland and Blekinge within Sweden, the tomte or nisse is also known as goanisse.
Reidar Thoralf Christiansen remarked that the "belief in the nisse is confined to the south and east" of Norway, and theorized the nisse was introduced to Norway in the 17th century, but there is already mention of "Nisse pugen" in a Norwegian legal tract c. 1600 or earlier, and believed the introduction to be as early as 13 to 14c. The Norsk Allkunnebok encyclopedia states less precisely that nisse was introduced from Denmark relatively late, whereas native names found in Norway such as tomte, tomtegubbe, tufte, tuftekall, gardvord, etc., date much earlier.
Etymology
It has repeatedly been conjectured that nisse might be a variant of "nixie" or nix but detractors including Jacob Grimm note that a nixie is a water sprite and its proper Dano-Norwegian cognate would be nøkk, not nisse.According to Grimm nisse was a form of Niels, like various house sprites that adopted human given names, and was therefore cognate to St. Nicholas, and related to the Christmas gift-giver. Indeed, the common explanation in Denmark is that nisse is the diminutive form of Niels, as Danes in 19th century used to refer to a nisse as "Lille Niels" or Niels Gårdbo.
An alternate etymology derives nisse from Old Norse niðsi, meaning "dear little relative".
The tomte, gardvord, and tunkall bear names that associated them with the farmstead. The Finnish tonttu is also borrowed from Swedish tomte, but "later tradition no longer consider these identical".
Additional synonyms
Faye also gives Dano-Norwegian forms toft-vætte or tomte-vætte. These are echoed by the Swedish, Norwegian Nynorsk.Norwegian gardvord is a synonym for nisse, or has become conflated with it. Likewise tunvord, "courtyard/farmstead guardian" is a synonym. Also the gårdbo,
Other synonyms are Norwegian god bonde, Danish god dreng. Also Danish gårdbuk and husbuk where buck could mean billygoat or ram.
Regionally in Uppland Sweden is gårdsrå, which being a rå often takes on a female form, which might relate to Western Norwegian garvor.
In the confines of Klepsland in Evje, Setesdal, Norway they spoke of fjøsnisse.
Near synonyms
Some commentators have equated or closely connected the tomte/nisse to the haugbonde. However there is caution expressed by linguist Oddrun Grønvik against completely equating the tomte/nissse with the mound dwellers of lore, called the haugkall or haugebonde, although the latter has become indistinguishable with tuss, as evident from the form haugtuss.The haugbonde is said to be the ghost of the first inhabitant of the farmstead, he who cleared the tomt, who subsequently becomes its guardian. This haugbonde has also connected with the Danish/Norwegian tuntræt or in Swedish cult.
Another near synonym is the drage-dukke, where dukke denotes a "dragger" or "drawer, puller", which is distinguishable from a nisse since it is considered not to haunt a specific household.
Origin theories
The story of propitiating a household deity for boons in Iceland occurs in the "Story of Þorvaldr Koðránsson the Far-Travelled" and the Kristni saga where the 10th century figure attended to his father Koðrán giving up worship of the heathen idol embodied in stone; this has been suggested as a precursor to the nisse in the monograph study by Henning Frederik Feilberg, though there are different opinions on what label or category should be applied to this spirit.Feilberg argued that in Christianized medieval Denmark the puge was the common name for the ancient pagan deities, regarded as devils or fallen angels. Whereas Feilberg here only drew a vague parallel between puge and nisse as nocturnally active, this puge or puk in medieval writings may be counted as the oldest documentation of nisse, by another name, according to Henning Eichberg. But Claude Lecouteux handles puk or puge as distinct from niss.
Feilberg made the fine point of distinction that tomte actually meant a planned building site, so that the Swedish tomtegubbe, Norwegian tuftekall, tomtevætte, etc. originally denoted the jordvætten. The thrust of Feilberg's argument considering the origins of the nisse was a combination of a nature spirit and an ancestral ghost guarding the family or particular plot. The nature spirits―i.e., tomtevætte, haugbue, "underground wights", or dwarves, or vætte of the forests―originally freely moved around Nature, occasionally staying for short or long periods at people's homes, and these transitioned into house-wights that took up permanent residence at homes. In one tale, the sprite is called nisse but is encountered but by a tree stump, and this is given as an example of the folk-belief at its transitional stage. But there is also the aspect of the ghost of the pioneer who first cleared the land, generally abiding in the woods or heaths he cleared, or seeking a place at the family hearth, eventually thought to outright dwelling in the home, taking interest in the welfare of the homestead, its crops, and the family members.
There are two 14th century Old Swedish attestations to the tomta gudhane "the gods of the building site". In the "Själinna thröst", a woman sets the table after her meal for the deities, and if the offering is consumed, she is certain her livestock will be taken care of. In the Revelations of Saint Birgitta, it is recorded that the priests forbade their congregation from providing offerings to the tompta gudhi or "tomte gods", apparently perceiving this to be competition to their entitlement to the tithe. There is not enough here to precisely narrow down the nature of the deity, whether it was land spirit or a household spirit.
Several helper-demons were illustrated in the Swedish writer Olaus Magnus's 1555 work, including the center figure of a spiritual being laboring at a stable by night. It reprints the same stable-worker picture found on the map Carta Marina, B, k. The prose annotation to the map, Ain kurze Auslegung und Verklerung writes that these unnamed beings in the stables and mine-works were more prevalent in the pre-Christian period than the current time. The sector "B" of this map where the drawing occurs spanned Finnmark and West Lappland. While Olaus does not explicitly give the local vernacular names, the woodcuts probably represent the tomte or nisse according to modern commentators.
Later folklore says that a tomte is the soul of a slave during heathen times, placed in charge of the maintenance of the household's farmland and fields while the master was away on viking raids, and was duty-bound to continue until doomsday.