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The Merry Nisse
By Brad Steiger
FATE :: March 2000

The night that I encountered "him" proved to be a life-altering event. The presence of this entity provided me with my personal proof of the reality of other dimensions of being, and set me on the quest that has dominated my life path. That night, when I was a child of nearly five, I saw what is commonly referred to as an elf, a brownie-or, in the Scandinavian culture that is my heritage, a nisse. There are probably no cultures that do not have their own version of this often ancestral household spirit.

Traditionally, Scandinavian families left a small portion of food out at night for the nisse to enjoy. I remember discussing the nisse with a friend in the Mesquaki (Fox) tribe, who said that they never forgot to leave an offering of food for their household spirit’s evening nourishment.

In the Scandinavian tradition, the nisse look after hearth and home, a kind of guardian entity-but one with an attitude. Nisse can be extremely volatile if provoked, and they are very often mischievous little tricksters. I have spoken to many folks who remember as children having their hair pulled, their toys hidden, their cat’s tail pulled by the nisse. Although few of my friends admit to having seen nisse, a good many have strongly sensed their presence.

On that long-ago evening when I caught a nisse watching my parents, I believe that I suprised him as much as he did me, but he quickly regained his composure and gave me a strange kind of smile that was as benevolent as it was puckish. At the same time, I sensed that it was a conspiratorial kind of smile, as if we would forever share a secret that was profound in its simplicity ...

Read the rest of this article in the March 2000 issue of FATE

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