To Sophia and Aislinn

[IamLEAM1983]

I've been playing an iPhone game called Year Walk. It's basically a point-and-click exploration game like Myst, and it focuses heavily on late 19th-century Scandinavian folklore. The plot is fairly simple, as you play as a love-stricken teenager who finds out that the girl he loves is going to marry another man. Distraught and determined to change his fate, he goes on a Year Walk. Based on some of my research and on what the game and its companion app suggest, Year Walking involves locking yourself in a dark room for the last 24 hours of the year, not eating or drinking anything, or otherwise speaking to anyone. It's assumed the protagonist does just that, after which he takes off into the woods.

A bit like May's Eve or the "Blue Hour" for Celtic peoples, the end of the year had strong arcane significance. One of the means to try and peel back the veil of Time was to wander around the woods at the turn of the year, provided your little walk would end in front of a church. You'd bump into a few staples of Scandinavian folklore, like the Huldra, the Brook Horse, the Mylings, the Night Raven and the Church Grim.

I was wondering if you'd ever heard of the Huldra before, Sophia, considering how it essentially is a dryad of sorts. The main difference is that it's extremely chaotic in its response to visitors. Hunters could try being nice to it so she'd blow on their rifle's barrel, conferring them good luck while hunting. They could also offer their blood to her, but there was always a risk she'd suck them dry. At other times, no amount of politeness would stop her from tearing you apart if she wanted to.

Correct me if I'm wrong, Aislinn, but you might have heard of the Brook Horse before. It's thematically and visually linked to other concepts like Nixies or the Kelpie, in that it usually looks like a pale horse. More often than not, it looks like a horse with an elongated spine, suggesting his back can hold an infinite amount of riders. It would take kids out for a ride and then throw them onto a nearby brook's stones, where they'd be crushed under the animal's hooves or otherwise drowned. What's weirder is how some other tales use the Brook Horse as a bit of a benevolent instance - a sort of anthro horse who'd bring lost children back to their doorstep by leading them by the hand.

Does any of this ring a bell? I've also read that Church Grims could also be used as something like fast-and-dirty genius loci for other buildings. You'd dig underneath the church's foundations and entomb a sacrificial animal - usually a goat - alive. The animal's spirit would stay behind and become a Grim - something that's usually a protective instance, despite the name. There's also some cases where the first person to be interred in a church's attending graveyard would become a Grim - a kind of watchdog.

You're not exactly Meris and your roots aren't directly tied to the Orkneys, but I figured you would've heard about a few things from all this.

[TennyoCeres84]

"The Huldra are basically my Scandinavian and Winter-aligned cousins. One of the features of female Huldra is the fact their backs are hollow like a tree. The ribs, spine, and other body parts are made from plant parts just like any dryad, but they're something of an oddity. Due to their chaotic nature, they've occasionally been considered as a form of troll; there's no relation however. Even with the cow tails Huldra sport, they're about as likely to chase after a Gruff as they would any other invader. The stories of men marrying Huldra women are folly and merely a result of ignorant peasants. While it's not unheard of dryads to sometimes be romantically involved, marriages are not that common."

"The closest thing the Orkney Islands have to the Brook Horse is the Nuckelvee. Its demeanor is wholly monstrous; there's no positive side to it. This thing looks like the Chamberlain's twistedly sweet nightmares about undead centaurs that have been flayed alive and then cobbled together into one, horrifying mess! As for the Grim, I wouldn't be surprised if those islands had something similar. With the mish-mash of Scandinavian, Pictish, and Celtic cultures, there's loads of stories about weird spirits roaming the countryside. Skara Brae is right up there with the Egyptian pyramids in terms of age, so I'd imagine some variant on genus loci would develop."