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Historisk tidskrift 131:3 • 2011

Innehåll (Contents) 2011:3

Näckens dödliga dop. Manliga vattenväsen, död och förbjuden sexualitet i det tidigmoderna Sverige

Mikael Häll

Fulltext (pdf)

Summary

The deadly touch of the Waterman: Male water spirits and forbidden sexuality in early modern Sweden

In early modern Sweden, the male water spirit had a number of names, the most prominent being näcken (the Neck/Nix), strömkarlen (the Man of the Stream), älven (the River) and vattenmannen (the Waterman). He was conceived of as a dangerous and powerful being, in many ways more closely associated with death than any other of the supernatural beings in Swedish popular culture. The Waterman was an ominous portent who drowned people – a supernatural source of mysterious diseases, possession and madness. As a shape-shifting seducer, he could have sexual intercourse with women, seeking to abduct both the women and their occasional offspring into his realm. Still, he could sometimes also be conceived by cunning men and women as a magical tutelary or familiar spirit.

During most of the early modern period, the religious and secular authorities of the official culture also regarded him as a reality in the sense that he was a manifestation of the Devil capable of acting in and upon the world of humans. In his most obvious capacity, the male water spirit was a personification of the dangerous yet ambivalent qualities of his natural element. He functioned as a thought figure embodying the perilous power of water, i.e. of thinking about, warning against, explaining or even magically making use of its properties. On a deeper level of meaning, the water spirit operated as a form of liminal gatekeeper, occupying the borderland between culture and nature, land and water, order and chaos, human and inhuman, known and unknown, sacred and profane, life and death. His ambiguous nature and power were often linked to hardships and transitional states in the lives of humans. This liminality made him a potent thought construct for interpreting and dealing with certain events and experiences – especially those related to sexuality, childbirth, marginalization, magic, disease and death.

Keywords

early modern, water spirit, death, disease, magic, sexuality, childbirth, popular culture, liminal