In addition to the giants and demons we meet in Norse mythology, Scandinavian folklore contains many menacing and horrifying creatures who can cause havoc for individuals and communities.
Meet ten of the most interesting and intimidating creatures from Norse folklore.
1. Brunnmigi
The name Brunnmigi means “pees in wells,” which is a pretty good description of what this monster does, defiling water supplies resulting in disease and death.
Their defiling activities could also result in droughts.
They sometimes appear as a large fox-human hybrid.
While they were rarely seen, they could have a devastating impact on communities that relied on wells to provide water for their communities.
King Hjorleifr encounters the spirit in the Hálfs saga ok Hálfsrekka, as it prepares to defile water from a spring. He threatens the creature with a burning spear.
The creature retaliates by sharing a prophecy that bad fortune will befall Hjorleifr and his wife Hidlr.
Rather than a prophecy, this proclamation seems to have been a curse, suggesting that the beast was a natural magic worker.
The practice of Seidr magic involved divining and influencing the course of fate.
2. Druagr
Draugr was one of the many names used for the undead in Scandinavian stories.
They were usually people who led a wicked life and refused to pass on, or who were killed by another draugr and “infected” with the same ailment.
They could form small armies of draugr that could terrorize communities.
The draugr were variously described as bodies that looked eerily similar to the person in life but with an icy blue quality, or as animated rotting corpses.
They had superstrength and could tear apart buildings with their bare hands.
They were also sometimes described as having supernatural powers, such as being able to enter a person’s dreams and send them mad.
The best way to deal with a draugr was the body, ensuring that it could not rise, but this became problematic in Christian times when it was believed that the body had to be preserved for future resurrection.
Once the Vikings adopted Christian burial practices they tried other ways to deal with draugr, such as burying them far away from settlements, often behind high walls, weighing their bodies down with weights, and beheadings.
If none of these approaches were successful, they would eventually burn the body.
3. Hafgufa
The Hafgufa was a sea monster believed to occupy the waters around Iceland and Greenland.
According to the stories, the enormous “sea steamer” vomited up a kind of “chumming bait” to attract larger fish as prey, including even whales and occasionally ships full of men.
According to a Norwegian philosophical treatise known as The Kings Mirror from the 13th century, the king told his son about the Hafgufa.
He had seen it himself but thought no one would believe him if they did not see it with their own two eyes.
He described it as a massive fish so large that it looked like an island to anyone sailing past.
He believed that there were only two of them and that they must be infertile, or the sea would be full of them.
It is this king who described how the monster vomits up bile to attract fish towards its open mouth, and when the area is full of creatures, closes its mouth to devour them.
The creature also appears in the 14th-century Orvar-Odds Saga, in which a deck officer named Vignir Oddsson explains that the creature feeds on whales, ships, men, and anything else it can catch.
He described how the beast lives under the sea but allows its nostrils and jaws to poke up out of the water. He was once on a ship that sailed between them assuming they were rocks.
He says that he was sailing down the coast of Greenland when they encountered the monster.
4. Huldra
A Hulder, or Huldra in the plural, was a seductive female forest creature in Norse folklore.
But they are only beautiful at first site.
On closer inspection, they have an animal’s tail or a back that resembles a hollowed-out tree.
They used their good looks to seduce men and lead them away to their hidden dens.
They were also sometimes described as switching human babies with their own half-huldra babies made with their victims.
When she was done with her victim she would suck the life out of him, or let him go, forever infected with the desire to return to her.
If hunters or fishers encountered a Hulder and treated her with respect, neither trying to seduce her or commenting on her animal tail, she might bring them good luck in hunting.
She could just as easily cause him bad luck and get lost.
It was unclear whether the right thing to do was give in to her advances or reject her.
Also known as Skogsrå, Vittra, Ellefolk, and a variety of other names, they represented the hidden dangers of the forest.
5. Kraken
Probably the most famous sea monster from Norse law, the Kraken was believed to be a colossal octopus or squid that lived in the sea between Norway and Iceland.
Legends of the monster may have started with genuine sightings of giant squid, often 12-15 meters in length, exaggerated on retelling.
The earliest recorded references to the creature come from the early 1700s, but the first proper written description was made by a Danish bishop called Pontoppidan in 1753, who called it an octopus of enormous size able to pull down ships.
The monster also seems to appear on a map drawn by Olaus Magnus in 1539.
While he does not give the creature a name, he shows a sea monster between Norway and Iceland.
His depiction seems more like a fish with tentacles growing out of its head.
6. Lindworm
A lindworm is a kind of dragon or serpent since the Norse did not distinguish between the two, though often drawn with small legs.
Jormungandr may be the most famous lindworm, who lived in the seas around Midgard.
He was famously so large that he could encircle the whole world and hold his tail in his mouth.
While he was unusually large for a lindworm, the idea of forming an ouroboros was common, and they were often described as gripping their tail to form themselves in a tire as a form of travel.
Most are also described as living in forests rather than water.
Eating part of a lindworm was believed to bestow wisdom.
When the hero Sigurd killed the lindworm Fafnir, the man who commissioned him asked Sigurd to bring back the heart for him to eat to imbibe its magic.
But Sigurd accidentally got blood on his finger and licked it, which gave him the power to talk to birds.
Similarly, in the story of Geijer and Afzelius, a boy catches hold of a lindworm, which sheds its skin to escape.
He then cooked the skin into a stew, and once he ate it, he became very wise about minerals, plants, and animals as medicines.
In a number of other stories young men were changed into lindworms and had to be freed from their curse by love, not unlike Beauty and the Beast.
In contrast, many lindworms are also female, laying their eggs under the bark of trees.
All lindworms can also spit a foul milk-like substance at their enemies.
7. Mare
Mare are malicious creatures that visit people at night and sit on their chests while they sleep causing nightmares.
You could tell if a person had been visited by a Mare because they would wake up with their hair tangled.
Some believed that the Mare were actually Volva witches, who sent out animal projections of themselves to visit others and cause nightmares.
A Mare appears in the 13th-century Ynglinga Saga in which King Vanlandi Sveigdisson of Uppsala lost his life to a nightmare caused by the Finnish witch Hulda.
In an association with Finnish witches, the Sami believed in an evil spirit called Deattan who could transform into a bird and other animals and sit on the chests of sleeping people to give them nightmares.
8. Nokken
The Nokken or Nixie were yet another threatening water spirit that created danger in the Norse world.
In some cases, they were male water spirits who played the violin to lure women and children, but also sometimes men, into lakes and streams so that they could drown them.
They were thought to be particularly active at Midsummer’s Night and Yule when the veils between the worlds were at their thinnest.
They may have been the same as the Fossegrim, who, if approached properly, would teach a musician to play so adeptly that trees and waterfalls would dance.
A drop of blood from a Nokken, presumably imbibed, could provide the same knowledge.
The Nokken were shapeshifters and so had no specific form, but they were often described as appearing in the movement of the water, or as a white horse, perhaps representing the white rapids of a flowing stream.
9. Selkolla
A Selkolla was a woman who sometimes looked normal and sometimes appeared with the head of a seal in Icelandic folklore.
She goes around trying to seduce innocent men, leaving them sick from her “assault on their virility” according to the 13th-century Christian bishop Gudmundr Arason.
He claims that she was created when her parents were taking her to be baptized, but stopped to have sex on the journey, leaving the baby girl unattended.
When they returned, they found that she was black, dead, and hideous, and decided to leave, but were called back by her crying.
Still, she was so hideous that they dared not touch the baby girl.
Instead, they went for help.
But when they got back, she was gone.
Describing her as black and dead but still living recalls the description of the goddess Hel, who is described as half black or blue and half flesh-colored, implying that she is half living and half dead.
The bishop eventually drives off the Selkolla from the area where she is causing harm by denouncing her as a devil and setting up seven crosses around it.
10. Trolls
Trolls are probably some of the most famous creatures from Scandinavian folklore, though the lines between dwarves and trolls are unclear in Norse mythology.
For example, when the dwarf Alvis approaches Thor for his daughter’s hand in marriage, Thor tricks him into staying up until sunrise, with the sun turning him to stone.
This is a characteristic that the dwarf seems to have shared with trolls.
But the Vikings also did not draw clear lines between their supernatural beings, with the difference between gods, giants, and elves rather unclear.
Perhaps the same was true with dwarves and trolls, they were both just menacing supernatural beings that inhabited dark spaces.
In folklore, there were ugly trolls that dwelled in forests and mountains and smaller gnome-like trolls that lived underground in deep caves and cabins.
They were sometimes described as incredibly old, almost part of nature themselves, and as a result quite slow. In other cases, they appear almost human but living on the edges of the supernatural world.
They tended to live in small family groups far from humans, keeping to themselves.
They represent a danger to humans who visit more remote regions and disturb the trolls there.
