The Tar-burner’s Stories

In Genastorps village there is a meadow along the Helge River, where during the darker times of year a light can be seen shining evenings and nights. It shines the brightest on New Year’s Eve. In that meadow many years ago two farmers are supposed to have bickered and fought over the boundary marker between their two properties.

In the same village there is a spring, and a long time ago there was a treasure in it, silver it was supposed to be, and it was guarded by a nasty dragon. Many people tried, time and time again, to pull up that treasure, but the dragon sprayed so much poison that noone could get close to the spring. Finally there was a man who came up with a plan: he hung his shirt and hat on a tree, then snuck behind the dragon and threw stones at him while he slept. The dragon woke up, saw the shirt and hat, and thinking that that was the man it sprayed all of its poison on the clothes. With no poison left, it was simple for the man to kill the dragon and take the treasure.

In Osby socken, there is a hill that’s bare stone that’s called Ebbarps Hill. Once there lived Finn the giant and a bunch of other giants and trolls, but also in Ebbarp a lindorm lived in a hole in the Helge River. Finn threw a huge stone at him, and whether it hit the lindorm or not, nobody knows for sure. These here giants and trolls also took a church bell from Osby church, and sunk it in Osby Lake, and when the weather is clear and calm you can still see the bell, down in the deeps. They say though that it could be pulled up by a pair of oxen if they were twins.

In the village of Sibbarp in Osby socken, there were once some farmers who found a cow that had gotten itself stuck in a bog. The whole village hurried out to see the cow and to help pull it out, because they believed it had to be owned by somebody in the village. They pulled, dragged, and shouted, and when they finally got the beast onto solid ground, it vanished, because this cow belonged to the trolls, you see. The trolls, in thanks for rescuing the cow, promised that Sibbarp would never be ravaged by fire. It was a nice promise, but in memory of the fact that Sibbarp’s people mistook the trolls’ cow for their own, they also promised that the village of Sibbarp would never be without its idiot. And true to their word, the trolls have kept both promises to this very day.

Once in a while it happens that a farmer’s cow gets exposed to a mountain troll’s bull, which is straight ruination: the cow dies if it isn’t slaughtered right away, for once the damage is done, there isn’t any cunning folk that can save the beast.

And in Simonstorp, Osby socken again, there lies a great big boulder. Before Christ was born trolls lived under it, but when the saviour died on the cross, the stone split in two, and at the same time it was marked with the sign of the cross, which can still be clearly seen today. Then the trolls had to flee and find some other, more hidden place to live.

In Glimåkra socken there is a stone that’s called the snake stone. Long ago a little girl happened to meet a snake there, and to save herself she hopped up onto another boulder right beside her and prayed the “Our Father.” Straight away the snake sunk into the first stone, but his image was pressed into the rock and can be seen there even now, as a sign that the child was saved by her prayer.

In the Trollhills, which are in Glimåkra socken, there are still trolls and giants, but there were more of them before the Church came. Then, when it was built, they got so angry that they took a stone, aimed for the tall, pointed tower, and knocked it right off. The stone is still there, a ways away from the church, and the church building itself has always, even after it was rebuilt, got to keep its stumpy tower.

Deep in the Trollhills there is a room that’s closed off with an iron door. More than one person has been there, but nobody dares to open it because there’s a big giant inside who sits and counts his money. His beard is so long that it has grown through the table. In the hall there is only one path or crevice that leads to the iron door, but be that as it may, one time there was a sheep that went down into that crevice and came out the other side, and so we have to believe that the giant must have opened the door, brought the sheep through his hall and to an exit that only he knows about. The highest stone in the Troll hills is so far up that not even the church steeple reached up to its point, and it has the shape of a sugarloaf split lengthwise. Up on the highest point there is a juniper bush, nearly dead, and under that there’s a golden axe, which the trolls forgot when they fled in terror from the ringing of Glimåkra’s church bells.

But even if the trolls have fled the Trollhills, it’s a sure thing that at least one giant still lives there, because a few years back there was a dragoon, Ågren his name was, who got visited by him one Christmas Eve. The way it happened was that the dragoon had gone out and got food for Christmas from his supplier. He was in high spirits as he walked by the Trollhills, so he called out “hey, neighbor! Come by and visit, I’ve got plenty of food now!” One does not make such an offer for nothing, and Ågren soon noticed that he had a big guest in his stuga. Though he couldn’t see him, he found that no matter which way he turned he bumped into somebody that seemed to fill the whole room. Finally, the dragoon had to squeeze his way forward just to get out of there.

In Bosarp, Glimåkra socken, a farmer found an infant that nobody recognized, so his wife, who happened to have a baby of her own, fostered the child. Both were girls, and they grew up together on the farm as sisters, though the woman suspected that the foundling was from the Trollhills. When the girls were all grown up, the farmer’s wife decided to see if she could get the foster daughter to reveal who her real parents were. So one day, when the girls were going to bake bread, she laid a bunch of snakes in the dough trough. The woman’s own daughter ran back, horrified, but the foster daughter walked out petting the snakes, and said “they’re nothing to be afraid of! These are just my mother’s grass-eels!” Now you could be nearly sure that this girl belonged to the trolls, but it became even more certain when her mother, since the secret was revealed, came and shouted by the window “Skrobbedona, my daughter, if you get married, we’ll give you a wedding where neither butter nor cheese will be lacking!” There was no wedding, of course, rather the troll had to take her girl back, but from that day on those in Bosarp have gotten more milk than other people.

One time there was a farmer living near the Troll Hills, whose wife happened to be in childbirth. In his anxiety he had walked to and fro, and tired, finally laid down. Just as he did, he heard a voice from inside a boulder that said, “Carve the feet big and broad, because that’s the kind Jeppe-Truesa Tora has!” Then the man understood that somehow the trolls had gotten the power to take his wife, and were going to leave a wooden image in her place. Now, you can imagine how he rushed home! When he got there, he placed a piece of steel over the door and noticed that the fire had gone out. So, it wasn’t to wonder at that the trolls were preparing themselves to come in through the chimney.

Some other place, the trolls really did make it into the stugan, because the people there had failed to stay awake and keep the fire going. The trolls tried to take the woman out through the chimney, but it was too narrow, and the next morning she was found stuck up in there, dead.

In Glimåkra socken there is a mountain where a giant still lives called Möllesjöberget,, and if you judge by the sounds coming from the mountain, you would guess that he is hammering scythe blades, and that’s what folks believe he’s doing. One evening a man was felling trees in the area, and he saw the giant come out of the mountain, wearing a broad-brimmed hat. The giant was so awfully tall that he laid his arm on a high outcropping of stone and stood for a while looking around, and then he just walked into the forest, where he disappeared.

By Lake Immelen in Hjersås socken - part of the lake is also in Villands härad - anyway there is a mountain called Ljummaberget, in which lives an old man called Ljummagubben, and he is the leader of a bunch trolls who also live there in the mountain. One time a fisherman out on Lake Immelen saw a girl walk out of the mountain, and she was so tall that you could make a ship’s mast out of a tree smaller than her. She came down to the shore with a pair of buckets, and she was crying and said to herself, “Oh why do I, who’s so small, always have to carry the water?” The fisherman shouted back, “If you’re little, then the devil must be huge!” But that was unwise, because when he now wanted to row back home with his catch, he couldn’t move out of the spot. He threw some of the smallest fish back into the water to appease Ljummagubben, but he cried out from the mountain, “They are mine, both the little and the big ones!” The fisherman had to throw all of his fish back into the lake before he could get his boat to move.

Another time a different fisherman saw a covered wagon travelling over the open lake. He asked them who their lordship could be, and they answered that they were from Elleklint and were on their way to a feast on Höje Island in Lake Immelen. Then the man understood that Ljummagubben must have invited guests, and that he would receive them out on the island.

A few years back, there was a man who, one winter, was going to drive over Lake Immelen and he went missing; but his horse and wagon returned unharmed. People assumed that the man went down through a hole in the ice. The following spring, when the ice broke up, the man returned and said that he really had gone down under the ice and sunk to the bottom of the lake. There he had, just like the swallows and the cuckoos, laid in hibernation the whole winter through. The perch swam about, hoping to eat him up, but a large pike took the man under his protection the whole time. He also said that he could hear when people drove over the ice. The ringing of the bells and the sound of people's voices caused him deep anguish. When the ice melted, he became fully awake, rose to the surface, swam to shore and went home.

In Lake Immelen there is an island called Lady Island, it got its name because a woman was rescued from the Ljummagubben there. What happened was this woman was going into labor, and just like I’ve said, her husband had forgotten to protect her with steel and fire and so the troll got the power to enter the home. The troll took her out of her bed where she lay, carried her out to his boat and rowed away from her home, towards Ljummaberget. She only had her night linen on and she got cold and sick. She whimpered “Oooh! Cold, so cold! Aren’t we to Ljumma yet?” See, she was already enchanted. The troll answered “good things come to those who wait.” But near Lady Island there was a farmer with his boat, and he heard both the woman’s complaint and the troll’s reply, and he figured out what was going on. Also he happened to be a “cunning man” himself, so he knew what to do. The woman continued to ask how far it was to Ljummaberget, but now the farmer rowed up and said “it doesn’t make any difference to you, for to Ljummaberget you shall never come!” Then he used his secret power and forced the troll to leave the woman to him. The farmer wrapped his coat around her and brought her back to his house. He then set out, alone, to the woman’s home, where her family was clueless about the whole thing, because the troll had placed a copy of the woman made from an alder tree in her bed, and he had given it the ability to sound like a woman in childbirth. The farmer asked the woman’s husband “How is your wife doing?” “Not well,” he answered, “there’s no change, she just groans in her sleep, so we just keep trying to move and roll her over.” “Well then, lend me your axe, and I will cure her!” said the guest. He got the axe, and to the husband’s horror he swung it right into the whimpering creature’s forehead, so that it split. The husband jumped, of course, but to his further horror he saw that it was just a block of alder wood lying in the bed. “If you promise to take better care of her then I’ll return your wife to you, ” said the guest, “otherwise I’ll keep her, for I have saved her from Ljummagubben.”

The same farmer who saved the pregnant woman was traveling home from Kristianstad some time after that and was looking for a place to stay the night. When evening came he came across a nice big farm. He drove into the courtyard, made his request, and was warmly received. He put his horses in the stall and went to the bed he was shown. “Thank you!” he said, “I’m just going to say my evening prayer” and so he recited the Lord’s Prayer. But when he finished and looked around for the bed, he saw that he was standing on the shore of Lake Immelen, and the horses stood tethered up in the top of a big spruce. See, the trolls had intended to get revenge on him for saving the pregnant woman from Ljummagubben, and if the man hadn’t said his Our Father, then he would have even more trouble on his hands than he did

On one end of the lake there is a farm called Breanäs. About sixty years ago a mother lay in childbirth there, and in the night she heard an awful lot of noise outside. Her husband wanted to step out to see what was going on, but the women in the house were wise enough to hold him inside. They looked outside themselves, and they saw an old woman on a great grey horse. If she had managed to lure the man out, then she would have had the power to come into the house and steal the newborn baby, replacing it with her own. But now she was revealed and that’s why a moment later they heard her wailing from the nearby Priest Island over her failed attempt.

By the way, Priest Island got its name because the people during the snapphanetiden gathered there to hold worship services. The ruins of the old masonry pulpit are still there.