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Housewights and Home Spirits
Not only is the landscape and the wilderness populated with living intelligent beings, so are houses and yards.
All over Europe, we find a folk belief in spirits living in a home or on a farm, generally helping the people that live there, as long as they are respected and treated well.
Though usually helpful, they can turn on humans who slight them, and it’s always best to stay on good terms with them and give them their earned rewards. Beliefs are very diverse as to what these wights are called, what they look like, what they do, and even how many of them there are, but the underlying theme remains the same.
- In Scandinavia, a housewight might be a nisse (nickname for Nicholas), goanisse (“good old Nicholas”), tomte (“household”), gardvord (“enclosure guardian”), tunkall (“yard fellow”), or tusse (derived from þurs).
- German homes might be inhabited by a schrat, drac, kobold, or taterman
- Dutch households might have a kabouter
- English households might have a brownie, hob, or hobthrush.
We can’t possibly review every “species” of housewight and farm-wight found in Germanic-speaking Europe, and can only try to give a general overview. (Claude Lecouteux’s book The Tradition of Household Spirits is useful as a wider survey.)
The housewight may have originally been seen as a deceased ancestor, and in many areas, he still is.
Scandinavian farms may pass down through many generations of one family, and the housewight is sometimes thought to be the first owner of the farm, looking after his descendants and ensuring that they are getting on well and doing things properly. In parts of Norway, the housewight may be known as haugbo (mound-dweller) or haugbonde (mound farmer).
The same words appear in Orkney as hogboy or hogboon. Folk names like haugkall (mound fellow) and kullebonden (farmer in the hill) also refer to housewights that are presumably dead. Thus the housewights may have originally been the same as mound-álfs: departed ancestors who still take an interest in the welfare of their kin.
The belief in Housewights persisted over a long period of time: Christian clergy worked very hard to stamp out the belief in housewights, which has lead us to believe that this belief was a persistent holdover from Paganism.
The little household rituals people have done throughout the years have been a thorn in the side of uptight clergy, who believed the practice to be a holdover from Paganism.
- Around 1250, a Silesian clergyman named Rudolf condemned the practice of burying offerings and placing food in the corners of the house, or behind the stove, for the stetewaldiu, “masters of the premises,” whom he calls Penates, the Latin word for household gods (Lecouteux, The Tradition of Household Spirits, pp. 97-98).
- The British scholar Gervase of Tilbury, writing around the year 1210, recorded the belief in helpful spirits called portuni: “if there is anything to be done about the house or any laborious work to be finished, they will get through it more quickly than would a human” (Oman, “English Folklore,” p. 5).
- In the 1300s, St. Brigitta of Sweden condemned those who dyrka ok hedhra tompta gudhi ok gaa ey til kirkio vtan for manna blygdh, “worship and honor the tompta gudhi [homestead gods], and do not go to church unless people shame them.”
Today, Scandinavian housewights are usually depicted as little men wearing old-fashioned clothes and pointed red caps.
They frequently appear at Yule in cards and decorations. Viktor Rydberg’s poem “Tomten” (Dikter, pp. 139-144) describes a tomte making his rounds on a farm on a cold midwinter night. It remains a Yuletide favorite in Sweden.
Many Scandinavian families still set out porridge or other offerings for the tomte or nisse at Christmas, although non-Heathen families may do it simply as an old holiday tradition that’s fun for the kids, rather like American families setting out cookies and milk for Santa Claus.
Indeed, in Sweden, Jultomten, the Yule Tomte, has become the equivalent of Santa Claus, bringing presents to good little boys and girls on Christmas Eve. The prolific Swedish artist Jenny Nyström did the most to create the popular image of Jultomten, and of the tomte in general.
In older folklore, housewights are not necessarily small, nor especially cute.
One Norwegian story tells of a man chased by a man-eating troll; the man’s housewight charged at the troll and beat it to death (Christiansen, Folktales of Norway, p. 143). Whatever their names, these wights’ job is to take care of the household. In rural households, they make sure that the cream churns to butter, the bread rises, the doors are latched securely, the animals are fed, and the work of the house and fields goes as it should.
In the modern age, they make sure that your house wiring is safe, your keys and glasses don’t go missing, your pets are healthy, and your level of household mess stays within manageable limits (as long as you do your share of cleaning).
They warn people of accidents about to happen, and they wake people who have dozed off in the middle of work. Lazy folks annoy them and inspire them to play pranks ranging from bothersome to deadly, but hard workers find them to be most helpful allies.
They bring prosperity to the household, although they are known to do this by stealing from other homes; in one story from Denmark, when a farmer had no fodder for his cattle, his nisse went out and stole a load of hay (Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief 48.2, pp. 239-240).
They defend their homes against other housewights trying to steal from them, which sometimes leads to epic brawls (Kvideland and Sehmsdorf 48.1, p. 239). In one tale known from all over Scandinavia, a man laughs when he sees his tusse struggling to carry a single seed or a blade of grass. The tusse angrily replies “You’ll see how heavy it is!” and starts carrying it off in the other direction. The man and his family are soon stricken with poverty and misfortune, because what the tusse was really carrying was the farm’s prosperity (Kvideland and Sehmsdorf 48.3, pp. 240-241).
Clearly, the housewight needs to be respected and treated well.
If you are foolish enough to anger your own housewight, all sorts of bad things can happen. According to one report from Caithness (northernmost Scotland) from around 1840, a small old man in ragged clothes was seen in a cow byre, complaining about raindrops in his house and threatening the farmer with dire consequences unless it was stopped at once. Two of the farm’s oxen were found dead before the master of the farm closed up a hole in a prehistoric mound that the herdboys had dug.
If you plan to host a party that might get loud, warn the housewight beforehand, and offer especially good food and drink before and after to compensate for any inconvenience.
Versions of the story recorded by the brothers Grimm as “The Shoemaker and the Elves” are known from Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia: A farmer sees his housewight dressed in rags and has new clothes made for him, either out of pity or as a reward for his service. The housewight puts on the clothes, announces that now he is too fine to do manual labor, and is never seen again. Sometimes the wight is offended by the gift, for reasons that seem unclear (Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief 48.10, p. 245; Henderson, Notes on the Folk Lore of the Northern Counties, pp. 210-213).
Some modern Heathens keep statues or figurines as dwellings for housewights where they can put offerings.
These figurines may range from the slightly kitschy gnomes that Troth leader and “Gnome-Giver” Rod Landreth loved to give people at sumbel; to the stuffed bear and cat that housed the rather outspoken housewights of the editor’s first Heathen friends; to the troll figurine that houses Winifred Hodge Rose’s beloved housewight Elmindreda Puckwudgie (see “Tales of a Heathen Housewight” in Idunna 95).
You might find that you already have a statue somewhere in your house which has attracted a wight on its own. If not, you could acquire such a figure and try to call one to you, leaving out offerings and waiting for a presence to move in. In many areas, every house had a corner that was reserved for the housewight (Lecouteux, The Tradition of Household Spirits, p. 81-85).
He might have a particular piece of furniture, or even a room of his own; stories are recorded from both Norway and Germany that anyone who tried to sleep in the housewight’s bed would be thrown onto the floor (Solheim, “Gardvorden og Senga Hans,” pp. 144-150; Lecouteux, p. 149).
If your home has a corner or a piece of furniture that is otherwise comfortable, but that you just don’t feel entirely right about occupying, it may be your housewight’s home.
Some Heathens place small houses in their homes or yards, where their housewights can live; a dollhouse or a decorated birdhouse works fine. You could also set a stone by the hearth for the housewight to live in, periodically placing his plate of food on the stone. If you have no hearth, the stone should go by the stove, or in whatever place you have chosen as the heart of the house. Rod Landreth had suggestions for additional ways to honor housewights (“The Hip Heathen,” Idunna 52, pp. 34-35):
The most important thing is that you respect and honor your house wights as fellow house members and friends, as they can often intercede for us to the God/desses.
Some wights, like Brownies or Gnomes, are known to like particular things. However, just as most heathens are practical, they are also. If setting out a bowl full of mead would only attract roaches and/or other undesirables, try non-food offerings.
Finding them a nice wight house always impresses and charms them. Take a trip to a craft and hobby store and head to the wood making section. They have these amazing birdhouses that are quite elaborate. After applying a little paint and appropriate runes (I recommend at least one othala), you’ll have a house that would please any wight.
Remember, you know this is an honor to your wight, and that is what is important. Just make sure that when you give them to your house wight that it is in or around their “home” and that the present is for them and them alone.