How could we have forgotten the troll museum???

The newest museum in Bergen, the troll museum, was fantastic — everything you ever wanted to know about trolls, hulders, neisse and other critters in folklore. You learn that trolls are huge guys, with tails and 1-3 or 4 heads (think I already told you some of this) — they are definitely meat eaters, including sheep, cows and…humans. They particularly like young women, but that is a tale that can get ickky pretty quickly. They only come out at night because the sun makes them explode and turn into rock — so just think about what I had to say about all the rocks in Norway…. In one room, an oldfashioned living room with a TV from the early 50s, there is a troll outside the picture window looking for a way in — very noisy about his frustration. There are different types of Neisse (I think that is the spelling), there are house ones and barn ones and whatever else. They are very helpful to their owners who are kind to them and they look forward to their christmas present they get each year. One story has a very eager barn neisse that takes care of the horses, and does all the work of feeding, watering, unhitching them from the buggies back from trips to town and putting them up for the night. He was so good and so eager to please that come christmas time, the farmer got him a present of leather pants, which he gave him with much fanfare. The neisse was ecstatic with his new pants! He put them on and didn’t take them off. The farmer and his family went to church on christmas day and when they got back, the farmer just dropped the reins and everyone went into the house as usual. Much, much later, the farmer looked out and saw the horses still standing there in the dooryard, still hitched to the buggy. Out the farmer came, stomping angrily towards the barn, yelling for the neisse, who was standing in the door in lhis new leather pants, smiling up at the moon. “Why have you not put up the horses?! Cried the farmer. The neisse just stood there with his fingers in the belt loops of his new leather pants, smiling. “What”, he replied, “and ruin my new pants?”

Oh, but the hulders. They sing like Loralei, enticing people who are never seen again. We actually saw a hulder on the train trip to Voss — first the beautiful singing and then the hulder dancing behind the boulders, long blonde hair and red cape streaming in the breeze, with the haunting music enthalling us. We could not look away. Luckily, the train kept on and no one tried to jump off. In the troll musuem, one story has it that the hulders are the children of Lilith — if you don’t know the ancient story of Lilith, get my book, Cruisin’ Passion Boulevard (on Amazon) and read A Hell of a Woman (shameless plug, I know). But here in the north, the tale is different, much influenced by christianity so that her children were hulders and very evil — they had not been evil in the earlier northern stories. Interesting, huh?

So now we are going to try to post pictures. Wish us luck.