#swedish folktale

[sassafrasmoonshine]

John Bauer, illustrator (Swedish, 1882–1918) • Agneta and the Sea King, illustration to Swedish Folktales • c. 1911

[mugoki]

(source / source)

[froggytroll]

Some of you don't know Trolska Polska and I'm here to change that. If you like the goblincore aesthetic this might be your new favorite band.

[chunkathang]

I drew some trolls I love Swedish trolls so much aaaaa

These are just two trolls I made. Helgan and Boldr. Helgan is like a grumpy mama figure and Boldr is shy and surprisingly polite compared to many of the other trolls.

[drunkenclown555]

FUCK ALL OF YOU I am drawing a troll

[snigepippi]

I cannot recommend Heimskringla.no enough

Every original Norse text is digitalised and uploaded. All translations that are creative commons are there. More modern folktales and oral stores are there. Several research papers, analyses, commentary and opinion pieces have been added. And they offer very cheap physical prints of many things that are out of print.

They now have 7600 texts!

Of course most texts are old Norse, Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Finn. But you can find English papers and translations too.

If you want to learn one Scandinavian language I recommend Norwegian. Then you can read Danish and understand Swedish.

[littlestpersimmon]

Last ditch effort trying to look for this music vid. Maybe someone who follows me might know. Have asked everywhere on reddit. Animated, fairly recent, I got it on my youtube recs maybe last year? I genuinelu do not remember. Looking for a music video of a Japanese artist. Very very well made animation, like on levels of Makoto Shinkai. I don't remember the song nor the music video exactly, but I remember it was fantasy, had the vibes of norse or Scandinavian culture. Saw a couple of people also say it was based on a Swedish? Folktale. Somewhere along those lines. Characters were a boy who looked like a girl, and he had someone with him whose gender is unknown, but also androgynous in appearance, and they had long black hair and taller than the blonde boy. This second person was associated with crows or ravens or something. Plz help, I have been looking for this vid for months now.

Edit. Thanks! It's white snow by eve.

[creature-wizard]

how is she (Lilith) closed when she exists in Swedish folklore with a different name (Her name is Lucia but it developed into the Saint Lucia tradition to be exact but in northern Swedish folklore she has a darker past where she was adams first wife and her story is very similar to Jewish Lilith).

Edit to add: It's extremely likely that this story about Lucia being the first wife of Adam is more of a modern Internet tale than an old Swedish folktale. I can find no reputable sources to back it up, and people who have familiarity with Saint Lucia/Lussi have informed me that they've heard nothing of this kind, either. That said, my point that similarity between figures does not justify appropriation still stands.

The uniqueness of figures has nothing to do with whether they're open or closed. Your argument is like saying, "well how can this storm god from an African traditional religion be closed when Thor exists?"

The ATR god is closed because the people who whom that tradition belongs said so. If you want to worship a storm god, Thor is right there. Likewise, you are free to work with this folkloric version of Saint Lucy.

Lilith isn't closed because she's supposedly unique. That never had anything to do with it. In fact, "oh but this open figure and that closed figure are basically the same though, that means I'm entitled to the one you're claiming is closed" is the rhetoric of spiritual colonialism, used to justify the misrepresentation and commodification of spiritual figures from marginalized groups, to that group's detriment.

Now, not every Jew agrees that Lilith is closed, because Jews aren't a monolith. But I have seen no shortage of Jews arguing for Lilith as a closed figure, and I find their arguments pretty damn compelling

So, Christians have spent centuries digging into Jewish traditions to find something they could weaponize against Jews; EG, getting into Kabbalah to try and find places they could project Jesus so they could try and convince Jews to convert to Christianity. Something very similar is absolutely happening with the gentile Lilith worshipers. There's a strong tendency toward antisemitic conspiracy theory among them; EG, believing that patriarchy was a Jewish conspiracy that was later expressed through Christianity.

These people often claim that Lilith was this ancient mother goddess who was demonized by the Jews. They try to claim that these old mentions of lilitu are somehow evidence. In reality, ancient cultures in the Near East worshiped a number of mother goddesses (EG, Ninhursag), and none of whom were Lilith.

Many deities did get demonized at some point (EG, Astarte became Ashtoreth, and Baal became Bael), but this had nothing to do with a patriarchal conspiracy; rather it was a generalized demonization of rival gods. And Lilith was not among them, because Lilith was never a goddess.

In fact, I have yet to see a single gentile Lilith worshiper who isn't deep into conspiracy theories and doesn't quote pseudohistory of some kind. Not a single one. So yeah, I will continue taking the side of the Jews who say that Lilith should be closed, because I've seen the bullshit gentiles are pulling with her.

[olderthannetfic]

Here's a random observation I made recently about dumb buzzword salad in trad publishing. And another reason I have a big fucking beef with how lazy and copy paste trad publishing is, and how little of a shit they actually give about properly representing their talents and the talents experience.

My local bookstore has a section which is basically just the "written by diaspora" corner. If you're "diaspora"-(insert other country) your book will probably end up there. It's a bit weird but makes sense when you consider the community in my town and surrounding area.

I saw a book that was a "(Asian) reimagining of a (Western) story" Here's where the buzz-description came in. The blurb on the back praised the author for combining their own heritage, with that of a "Western" story. This is a fake example to not put any negative attention on the book: Dealing with being Asian in the UK. The focus of the blurb was 100% on them being a diaspora and how that affected their writing. If you've seen one of these blurbs you basically know all of them.

The thing is, the story they reimagined had absolutely nothing to do with the "UK" UK culture, folk lore or anything else. Let's pretend it was Baba Yaga. Nothing else implied that they had any other connection to the the culture Baba Yaga comes from. Yes it's a reimagining, but how does reimagining a story with absolutely no ties to your life count as fusing your specific experience of being diaspora and living the UK?

Once again, the example isn't real, and just to explain the basics of it: If a Chinese-British person wrote a book reimagining the story of Baba Yaga with a "Chinese twist." You can do that, could even be super fun. But a British person, Chinese heritage or not, Baba Yaga isn't "your culture". The UK and Russia are not interchangeable, neither is Chinese and Russian. So why does trad publishing treat it like the Chinese-British writer is just conflating the two? Why not make the focus on the Chinese-British writer having a passion for Slavic folk tales, specifically Baba Yaga? No, instead they do this copy paste fusion bullshit, that doesn't even match the experience.

It just makes it so painfully obvious how little trad publishing cares about the writers works. And I've seen this several times, some times with more obvious examples. Some times titling the Western story with a general wording, so it isn't too blatantly obvious that the story's from the completely wrong country and culture.

It's be just as silly if a European, Idk Swedish lived their whole life in Thailand, and then in order to "deal with being a Thai-Swede" wrote a book reimagining Indian folktales with a Swedish twist. "UK and Russian" isn't interchangeable. Thai and Indian isn't interchangeable. So why does trad publishing have the guts?

--

[bestiarium]

The Bäckahäst [Swedish folklore]

Evil aquatic horse spirits are a common trope in Germanic, Nordic and British folktales. The Scottish Kelpie, the Icelandic Nykur, the Norwegian Nøkk etc are all variations of (and derived from) the same story. In Sweden, this role is given to the Näck: an evil supernatural horse creature that convinces people to mount it and ends up drowning the victim.

In southern Sweden however, the Näck is replaced by the Bäckahäst, a similar monster. Originating in Skåne, this creature appears as a pale white horse (although this isn’t set in stone and some artists portray it as black) but otherwise resembles the Näck in most aspects, sometimes the two terms are even used as synonyms. But there are some regional differences. Interestingly, the Bäckahäst seems less dangerous than the more traditional Kelpie-like creatures. There are stories of these beings being tamed simply by putting a bridle on them, although they could also be forced into submission by using iron and steel. Once tamed, the creature could be used for ploughing or other agricultural activities which it excelled at because it needed neither rest nor food.

The name ‘Bäckahäst’ translate roughly to ‘stream horse’ or ‘brook horse’. The creature is also related to the Sjörå from northern Sweden.

Egerkrans’ popular modern book ‘Nordiska Väsen’ describes the Bäckahäst as having a mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth and claims that it has a particular fondness for human children, preferring them over other prey.

Interestingly, according to Höök, an old Swedish tradition claims that Bäckahäst is only able to hurt unwashed people. Clean people who have recently bathed cannot be harmed by the monster. Supposedly, this is because supernatural monsters were traditionally associated with filth and a lack of hygiene. Being clean and hygienic would hold evil at bay, and you can’t really blame people for believing in that superstition because many stories of evil spirits at the time were associated with real diseases. If illnesses were the work of evil monsters and personal hygiene was an effective tool against illness, it only makes sense that proper hygiene was thought to also keep evil spirits at bay.

Sources: Egerkrans, J., 2013, Nordiska Väsen, B.Wahlströms, 126 pp. Lindow, J., 1978, Swedish Legends and Folktales, University of California Press, 219 pp. Höök, L. K., 2004, Vattnets renande och läkande kraft: Om hälsobrunnar, offerkällor och volontären Johan Lundin, Tio tvättar sig, Nordiska Museets Förlag, 47 pp. (image source 1: Jessica Hardarson on Artstation) (image source 2: Johan Egerkrans)

[b-skarsgard]

•“Wrapping the movie was a fucking relief,” Bill Skarsgard says. Yes — the face of an entire horror franchise with his twisted portrayal of It clown Pennywise — was more than ready to set free Robert Eggers‘ Nosferatu. “Everything that he represents is so intense, I was happy to let go of the chains he had on me.”

Skarsgard first read the script for Eggers’ macabre folktale 10 years ago. The filmmaker had just released The Witch (2015) and Skarsgard believed he was sitting with someone who represented the future of cinema. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is so exciting,'” the Swedish actor recalls to The Hollywood Reporter about Eggers’ interest in him for the role of the century-old villain. “The script floored me. … It was flattering but also very daunting.”

•“But I think Bill’s vampire is sexy,” Eggers adds, followed by a chorus of agreement from his cast. Says Dafoe: “He’s pure appetite.”

Appetite is a good word to capture the magnetism of Skarsgard’s portrayal. He has the bald head, the pointed ears and spindly fingers per both Murnau’s film and Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre from 1979. But it’s a deep, gritty, Transylvanian rasp that does a good chunk of the leg work for Eggers’ creature. “I knew that he was going to live in the shadows for so long,” Skarsgard says. “The voice was my [only] form of expression.” He worked with an opera singer to lower his voice by an entire octave. “We showed the film in Stockholm last week, with my friends and family, and some of them didn’t believe it was my voice, or they thought that it was a voice actor.” (Laughs.) “Rob and I built it together and it meant we had the freedom to create our version of it, to make it different than, you know, [in a heavy, imitative Transylvanian accent], ‘Dracula!’”

At this moment, Depp herself performs her Dracula impression for the group. They erupt laughing. “It’s very Italian,” she says. “I think it’s the last [role] in the world that I could play.”

Skarsgard begins to unpack the significance of a novella on Orlok’s back story that Eggers wrote just for him. The Count had a family and was once married, the actor says, before his director intervenes: “I don’t want the world to know his backstory. But he had a very detailed one.”

full article at the link above

[mixed-up-media]

HOW THE LAIKA MOVIES CONNECT TOGETHER!!!!!

Also known as history of the beldam!

Warning: most of this is just crack. This was my shower thought this morning and the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. None of this is canon. This is just dumb crap. It is held together by 2 strings, 3 old gum pieces, a roll of duct tape, and a used bandaid I found behind the school bleachers. This post is also a long one. You have been warned.

Ok, let's start off with something that has been bothering me, and the rest of the Coraline fandom, FOR YEARS! What is the Beldam? As far as the internet is concerned, she's the villain in Coraline, not much more than that. However, other sources say that another meaning of beldam is "old hag" or "witch" which makes sense. Something that also stuck out to me was another website stating she was an evil fairy. I feel like a beldam is not a singular term for the other mother but rather a species of evil fairies. Once again this connects to one of our favorite detail in that movie, the mushroom circle.

Mushroom circles are known throughout folktales as gateways to fairy realms. Keep this in mind! So what other thing is connected to fairy realms? OH YEAH, TROLLS!

So, I have not read "Here be monster," that is my summer reading goal, it just has to come. So I don't know what lore drops are in there, all I know is that the book is the reason people say Egg's real name is Arthur, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯! What I do know that that in most mythologies trolls are evil and here that is not the case. Something that I noticed in Boxtrolls and in the little info piece on amazon for "Here be monsters" is that both towns end with a bridge. Cheesebridge, Ratbridge, you get the picture. So that means to me is that the trolls are connected to bridges. If you don't know what I'm going for here is the trolls that live under toll bridges. You know that thing that we were all terrified of happening to us from Monty Python and the Holy grail, yeah that thing. They make it very clear there is some sort of connection." Lindow states that the etymology of the word "troll" remains uncertain, though he defines trolls in later Swedish folklore as "nature beings" and as "all-purpose otherworldly being[s], equivalent, for example, to fairies in Anglo-Celtic traditions". (Wikipedia)

Otherworldly you say? Well as a fandom, WE KNOW PLENTY ABOUT THAT! So I'm getting that there is some sort of fairy world situation going on. Like there's a world with magic separate from our own where creatures come from, K.

Some else I noticed was the similarities between Kubo's aunts and the other mother.

Notice the white faces,red lips, and lack of eyes. Now I'm aware that the sister's designs are biased off of the Geisha, however there is something else that connects them, the obsession with ripping a child's eye out, which I would assume is something Geisha women don't do ( I could be wrong.) So I feel like there is some sort of connection between the Beldam and the moon king. A partnership, a teacher of how to remove the eyes of kids, the biological mother of his children. (Low key shipping them)

Then there the witch situation. Witches have been known throughout history as evil, but we watched ParaNorman, and we paid attention! WE KNOW THEY'RE JUST MISUNDERSTOOD! So we've established that there's magic, but we've never really come up with where the magic comes from. I have a whole theory on why Norman can see ghosts, ( I'll post that one later) but I'm pretty sure the magic effects genetics. Now, hear me out, what if the magic comes from the magic fairy realm thing from earlier.

SO POSSIBLE TIMELINE, MAYBE!

A LONG LONG LONG LONG TIME AGO, the Pre-Beldam Fairy was just livin her life. She discovers some sort of dark magic and turn evil. She goes down to earth but uses a portal thing to get there. Out from that portal thing comes some trolls that find a home under a bridge. After years of evolution they become boxtrolls. Then Beldam fairy meets the moon king and has his daughters helps him tear his grandsons eye out. The fairies in charge are like: Dude, the frick is wrong with you, and banashes her to what would become the american continent. They also strip her of her powers which then finds its way to the other side of the soon to be continent. There her magic connects to several families including the one of a little girl with long black hair. Over in Oregon country the beldam finds herself hiding for years and years. Eventually a family of pioneers show up and build a house. Not wasting any time, the beast uses her dark powers and finds a small hole in the wall. She discovers that it's made out of some of the magic ripped from her and uses it for her advantage. Eventually she develops the persona of "The Other World," and The other Mother. She eats kids souls until a blue haired girl defeats her. Who knows if she actually killed her or not!

How does Missing Link fit all this? Well TADA

Lionel found an old monkey carving from a old Japanese town, a newspaper clipping from a few years back about "Boxtrolls" and an old book from back when the mayflower first set sale (I feel like the book was something Aggie's mom brought with her to the new world and read it to Aggie for years)

THE END

People who might find this humorous

@evenceflux18

@officermaddie23

@kpyeeper

TAG MOREEEE

[buckets-and-trees]

haunting thoughts on Silent Screams

read it here: SILENT SCREAMS IN WILDEST DREAMS

Fandom: MCU Characters/Pairings: Bucky x Reader, side of Steve Word Count: 8k Content Warnings: dark dark DARK tale, smut, main character death, rough sex, fingering, oral (f receiving), unprotected p in v sex, creampie, talk of wounds, slight dub/con, elements of somnophilia

RECAP: A dark tale with an unhappy ending. Just when you’ve married the man of your dreams, only just closed the chapter of your honeymoon, happily ever after is wrenched away, and you’re met with a nightmare you never could have imagined.

I published this in late November 2022, but I worked on it on and off between other projects for about six weeks from concept to research to writing. I wrote it for @darkficsyouneveraskedfor's Hallo-Cream Extravaganza, which was a cool challenge because there was a collection of numbered images you could choose from, and then when my image was confirmed, there was a prompt to go along with it.

It was also my first time participating in a challenge since getting back into writing fanfic. When I thought I was getting the sun alone, I was thinking vampires, but when I got the phrase along with the image, it halted the vampire idea I thought I would go with, and since I was already going to re-evaluate, it got my mind going even more. At the time I was also redefining a lot of pieces in my life and I had signed up to go solo on this 5-day retreat to a cabin in the woods... I ended up talking about some of the research and concept ideas for this fic on the six-hour drive to and from that cabin with a girl I carpooled with (we talked about so many things as you do with a stranger you just met when you're both going to the same retreat and want to save on gas). But I'll put the rest under a cut so as not to spoil for those who haven't read it.

When I realized it wasn't going to be vampires, I really wanted to then get totally outside of the box of things we see all the time. I decided I wanted to look up Scandinavian folklore as I was also trying to throw off some of the USAmerican culture I'd just been sitting in my whole life and explore some of my ancestral heritage. I figured there had to be a ton of stuff I'd just never learned about or heard of before and of course there was. One of the ideas I have buried for another day is to do kind of a Grimm or Phillip Pullman thing and do an anthology retelling of some of Scandinavian folktales because they were fascinating, and there were elements I was familiar with alongside very new pieces. It was so cool to begin to uncover the stories there...

But I was looking for a story that would also fit my prompt and lend itself to Bucky x Reader application.

I found the Gengångare. The lore is that they're a revenant/walker, and particularly in the Swedish tradition they're a corporeal form of a spirit that comes back after death. The spirit would have been murdered or killed and came back for mixes of revenge or unfinished business. That I could give Bucky - going on a mission, being killed, and having both revenge he could seek (against still living HYDRA folks who tormented and used him) and unfinished business in a promise that he makes to you, his reader newlywed bride, to come back to you.

And so the story begins with what I was hoping to be this blissful newlywed haze - the first morning after your honeymoon. Bucky is leaving for a mission - he'd said they were leaving later than he's actually going to leave because he didn't want you to get up hours before you needed to in order to send him off, but he does wake you up to share some kisses and say goodbye, it gets a little more heated, but there's no time for smut since he has to go, but he promises to pick up where you to left off when he returns, and there we have the tie he makes to come back to you.

I listen to music heavily throughout the day, but I wrote this fic with some very specific music through different sections. And for the opening, I was listening to This Love by Taylor Swift because its very romantically evocative for me, but some of the lyrics I knew could also be ripped into the horrific elements of this story, and so I truly loved it for that even more! - this love is good/this love is bad/this love is alive back from the dead

Then there are some other deep musical cues that when I was writing the rest of the fic, I was literally listening to these songs on repeat - a track from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, two tracks from Netflix's The Empress series, etc - and so I actually embedded the Spotify players for them at particular parts for the particular songs. That's the only fic where I've so heavily "scored" it.

I put into the narrative that they didn't recover a body from Bucky for what I never specifically defined but figure was an explosion or an accident of some sort where not finding a body would be believable - but it's the Gengångare Bucky escaping. His undead soul seeks some revenge first, then he's pulled back to your door, but I wanted/tried to imply that he moves by these motivations and doesn't really remember much until he encounters something. So he shows up back on your doorstep, and it's as he interacts with you that he remembers more and more pieces of himself that are added back into the primal gengångare motivations.

The sex after he returns is frequently more rough and desperate, but since you're just as desperate for him, you don't question that it's the fact that his nature has changed - no longer human, but a creature that needs to leech the energy of another living thing to survive. He doesn't realize it at first either. But the first night he returns, his body is very cold, and he gets warmer the longer he's with you.

His bruises haven't healed, and you notice that, but he brushes it off. There's an inadvertent pinching on your back that's the beginning of the marks he can't help consuming you. He's truly insatiable, but since you were so consumed with grief and so deeply and desperately in love, you don't question it. When you finally do bring up having Bruce examine him or bringing Steve into things, he doesn't want that and presents good reasons - not wanting to be a body poked and prodded, and not wanting to worry Steve until he has more of his memory cleared up.

There's only a little bit of Alpine in this fic, but Alpine can tell that something is wrong with Bucky and so she is not around when he is at all after he comes back. The sex is exhausting, but it's because it's with this creature form of Bucky taking more and more of your life.

And then the spill of the story/the reveal. And it's all discovered when you're basically doomed by your love. And he literally makes love and fucks you to death, and is still so in love with you while doing it. Very sad. And his goodbye is the same goodbye he said to you in the first scenes of the story.

This was the darkest thing I'd written up to this point, and I really just wanted it to feel gothic and doomed, but twisted up in this all-consuming love. As I knew where the story was headed, I sort of just took deep breaths and steadied myself to dive into letting it have its dark ending. And I loved taking it there even though it was kind of scary for my first time. It was very haunting to write and I really tried to convey that feeling and have it bleed through.

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[tlbodine]

Fae Horrors: Errementari & Draug

Our fae horror film series continues! This pairing was loosely coupled as "period pieces," which was one of the only things they had in common.

Errementari: The Blacksmith & The Devil is a 2017 film written and directed by Paul Urkijo Alijo. It's produced in the Basque language and based on a Basque folktale, which already makes it super interesting.

Basque, for the uninitiated, is a distinct cultural and ethnic group of people living at the border of France and Spain in the remote area of the Pyrenees (the mountains, not the dog), whose historic seclusion and cultural isolation meant their language developed completely independently. Apparently Basque has really nothing linguistically in common with any other language. Neat!

Anyhoo, the plot here is pretty simple: It's the year 1835 and a blacksmith who sold his soul to the devil to return home from war, only to come home to find his wife cheating on him and his life in shambles. Now he lives alone and everyone tells rumors about him being a real scary dude, supported by the quantity of barbed wire and bear traps around his home. But things are not what they seem, and it's all blown wide open when a mistreated orphan girl from the town crosses his path.

I don't want to spoil anything about the plot because I think this movie is delightful and I want you all to go watch it. Aside from how cool it is as a cultural and linguistic artifact of a culture we don't get to see much of here in America, it's a well-made film with excellent practical effects and a solid story.

Also mad props to the little girl in this, played by Spanish actress Uma Bracaglia. She kills it in the role, bringing pathos, vulnerability, and feistiness to it. I was solidly in her camp the whole time.

Movies with similar vibes:

Pan's Labyrinth

Apostle

Tale of Tales

Draug (2018) is a Swedish film written and directed by Klas Persson. It's set in the 11th Century, at the end of the Viking age, and is centered on a rescue party who venture into a rural pocket of pagan worship in search of a missing missionary. There they encounter a witch and some restless undead spirit creature ice zombie fellows called draugr. They're known for guarding burial mounds and killing those who try to grave-rob them.

I didn't enjoy this one as much. It was a bit of a slog and honestly pretty forgettable. There are some wonderful spooky visuals and the vibes are good, but I kind of lost the thread with the plot and checked out mentally somewhere along the way. We're having rough luck with Swedish filmmaking over here.

Movies with similar vibes:

The Northman

The Blair Witch Project

The 13th Warrior

[furashuban]

Do you have any Random Sketchbook Headconnons?

Surprisingly I don't have as many headcanons about them as I thought I did, but I've still got a handful to share nonetheless :>

Since Johanna found out she could play the pan flute super well in The Forgotten Lake, a headcanon I have is that one of the cassettes Kaisa listens to on her Walkman is a homemade compilation of Johanna playing somft songs on the pan flute just for her to have and listen to.

(I also like to think that in between songs, Johanna leaves in these quick and rambly intermissions saying things like "I don't know what I'm doing exactly *chuckles*, but I hope you like this next one, dear." <33)

This next one I remember sharing a long time ago in the Sketchbook Ship server when it was still around :0 being that Kaisa speaks Swedish (I could've chosen any other Scandinavian language but I just settled with Swedish sdfgsdw) and Johanna makes an effort to learn the language so she could have another, more special way of flirting connecting with her, just that she's prone to grammatical mistakes and pronouncing some words wrong and she gets flustered every time Kaisa would have to gently correct her, but Kaisa would still understand what Johanna was going for anyway and feels all warm inside nevertheless.

This last and rather brief one I have is that Johanna and Kaisa share the same taste in books as children, being ones about folktales (something I wrote in at Chapter 1 of my fic Visitations :>)

[inspofromancientworld]

Legendary Creatures: Nixie

By Nils Blommér - Nationalmuseum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52118377

The Nixie, Nyxy, Nix, Näcken, Nicor, Nøkk, or Nøkken is a shape-changing humanoid water spirits from Germanic mythology. The variety of names are from the various Germanic people groups including German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Faroese, Finish, Icelandic, Estonian, and Old English. This spread of cultures places the origin before the peoples separated geographically. They have a common Germanic root of *nikwus or *nikwis(i), which comes from the Proto Indo-European root *neigw, which means 'to wash' and are related to the Sanskrit nḗnēkti, the Greek νίζ�� (nízō) and νίπτω (níptō) as well as the Irish Gaelic nigh, which all mean 'to wash' or 'to be washed'.

By Ernst Josephson - Nationalmuseum, Stockholm: Näcken Folktales and traditions, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7657940

Since the Nixie changes shapes, it's difficult to know exactly how they looked, that generally dwell in lakes or rivers. Regardless what form they have, they have some way of attracting victims to drown. Among the Nordic and Germans, the primary form was humanoid. Among the Faroese, they were white supernatural horses that are closely related to the Scottish Kelpie and the Welsh Ceffyl Dŵr or as a handsome youth.

By Full steam - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15167624

In addition to being shape-shifting, the Nordic Nixie also is an expert musician. If approached properly, they can teach a musician to play so well 'that the trees dance and waterfalls stop at his music', a trait also found among the Norwegian Fossegrim or Grim or the Swedish strömkarl. They were most dangerous to women and children, most active during Midsummer's Night, Christmas Eve, and Thursdays, superstitions that developed after the spread of Christianity to northern Europe, like many superstitions about faeries. They can be stopped from carrying someone off by calling out their name, which might cause their death, or by a gift of three drops of blood, a black animal of some type, some type of alcohol or snuff dropped into the water.

By Theodor Kittelsen - 2. Nasjonalmuseet: No.21. kittelsen.efenstor.net, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1340906

Among the Germans, the Nixie were a type of freshwater merperson who lured men to their deaths by drowning. The males were more capable of changing shapes while the females usually had the tail of a fish. A wet hem was the give away of a Nixie in human form. Female Nixie were also known as the Rheintöchter (Rhine maidens).