PIGGING OUT AT CHRISTMAS - IT'S GRIM WITH THE GLOSO

Chased by the gloso! (© Richard Svensson)

Welcome to a seasonal ShukerNature post, featuring a little-known but greatly-feared preternatural creature long associated with Swedish Yuletide.

In Britain, the animals most closely linked to Christmastime via folklore and other traditions include such familiar and generally friendly species as the robin, the reindeer, and the turkey. In Skåne and Blekinge, the two southernmost provinces of Sweden, conversely, a very different, and far more daunting, creature pervades the Season of Goodwill, and its presence is anything but good. Scarcely known outside its Scandinavian provenance, outwardly it resembles a pig, but no ordinary one, for this preternatural entity is in many ways the porcine equivalent of Britain's phantasmal Black Dogs, and is just as dangerous!

Most commonly referred to as the gloso (other names for it include the galoppso and the gluppso, all translating as 'galloping sow'), this dire beast is grim in every sense of the word. This is because the gloso is a church grim (or kyrkogrim in Sweden), i.e. a supernatural creature derived from the spirit of an animal or person supposedly sacrificed when the foundation of a church was built, and which now protects the church and its grounds for all eternity, and cannot be killed by any normal weapon. Generally, the gloso lives either within the cemetery of the church to which it is bound, or within a mound in a field directly adjacent to that church.

A stop-motion puppet of the gloso from a film by Richard Svensson (© Richard Svensson)

Those unfortunate enough to have encountered this terrifying entity liken it in basic appearance to an enormous female domestic pig, usually jet-black in colour (though sometimes ghostly white), but with a ridge of razor-sharp spines or bristles running down the centre of its back, a pair of huge tusks curving out from its jaws, eyes that glow a fiery red, and the fearful yet very real ability to breathe fire. Other tangible, physical abilities attributed to the gloso, and which thereby distinguish it from insubstantial ghosts or spectres, include its predilection for devouring fresh corpses in the churchyard and for sharpening its tusks upon gravestones. It also leaves visible tracks in its wake.

The gloso can be encountered at any time during the year, but it is said to be at its most malign during the week linking Christmas and the New Year. And yet it is during this same week when it can also be its most beneficial – provided a certain magical rite associated with it is performed correctly. If this rite is not, however, the person performing it will not live to see in the New Year!

According to Swedish legend, on the evening of Christmas Day (and also on New Year's Eve) anyone can discover everything that will happen to them during the incoming New Year if they are brave enough to withstand an assault by the gloso. The ritual stipulates that after the sun has set, you must visit four different churches in four different parishes, walk around each church in an anti-clockwise direction, and then blow through the keyhole of each church's door. After blowing through the keyhole of the fourth church's door, if you then peer through it you will witness all of the most notable events that await you in the New Year, rushing before your eyes in a rapid stream of images like a speeded-up movie film.

Another view of the stop-motion gloso puppet from a film by Richard Svensson (© Richard Svensson)

But for such precious insights, you must pay a steep price – the wrath of the gloso. For it will abruptly appear and chase after you, spurting hot blasts of fire at your rear end and striving to run between your legs so that its ridge of razor-sharp bristles can rip you apart. Happily, however, if you are brave enough to attempt the feat, there is one way in which this dread beast can be pacified – by turning around and facing it, with an arm outstretched, offering it a loaf of bread. If the gloso allows you to feed it the bread, you are safe. If not...

In some variations upon this legend, the same gift of New Year foresight can be obtained by confronting the gloso at a crossroads instead. As a teenager, the maternal grandmother of Swedish artist and cryptozoologist Richard Svensson once visited a crossroads in Blekinge on New Year's Eve for the express purpose of conjuring forth the gloso – though merely to see it rather than to witness what the New Year held in store for her. (Un)fortunately, however, the gloso failed to materialise.

The gloso, from a bestiary by Richard Svensson (© Richard Svensson)

The gloso is also part of a much lengthier, more complex magical ritual in which the person taking part is hoping to gain psychic talents, and this multi-stage ritual has to be performed on several different magically-potent dates, including Christmas night once again. Here is how Swedish folklorist Håkan Lindh described it to me:

"The ritual was a kind of vision-quest that a person who wanted to gain psychic gifts undertook several years in a row. After a bit of fasting he went out, under absolute silence, on a night-time walk to powerful places, a graveyard, a stream running towards north, a holy well, etc, and during these walks he was given trials. One of these was Gloso, and he avoided danger by just keeping his legs together and refusing to show fear. If he did, he came to no harm and gained a bit of magic power. Next year he met something else, a dragon turned into a chicken, for example, Odin on a horse, a band of aggressive Vättar [Norse nature spirits], and so on and on. While the ceremony went on, he got visions about who would die in the different homes he passed by, who would get ill, and what he could do to cure those illnesses. He also gained material magic tools too during these walks, like bones from dead people etc.

"This ritual continued to be performed until c.150 years ago, and I personally know a few who have tried it recently."

In some Swedish traditions, moreover, the gloso haunts lonely roads where murders have occurred. Håkan has mentioned to me that just a few miles north of his home village in Halland, Skåne, is one such locality (where a murder took place during a botched robbery), and that alleged sightings of the gloso have been reported there and in the woods nearby.

It is possible that the gloso is a remnant of earlier Nordic legends appertaining to Gullinburste ('Golden Hair'). Named after its golden bristles, and also known as Slidrugtanne ('Horrible Tusks'), this was the great boar that pulled the chariot of the Norse deity Frey, god of fertility and pleasure. Moreover, in Blekinge there is even a local myth neatly combining Norse tradition with Christianity, in which every year St Thomas, armed with a mighty sword, rides a tamed gloso during the Christmas week to rid the land of fatally-alluring troll-maidens and other malevolent pagan beings - especially during the evening of 21 December, known as Thomas's Eve. Presumably, his saintly status affords him immunity from being torn in two by his gloso's lethal back-bristles while riding it!

The Norse god Frey with the great boar Gullinburste (Johannes Gehrts, 1901)

In light of such a horror as the gloso, suddenly even our own Black Dogs, Owlmen, and other British zooform entities seem positively tame by comparison. So I very sincerely hope that every ShukerNature reader's Yuletide celebrations this year will be blessed by a notable absence of fire-breathing pigs!

My most grateful thanks to Richard Svensson and Håkan Lindh for generously providing me with plentiful information concerning the gloso, and also to Richard for so kindly permitting me to include his superb illustrations in this ShukerNature post.

Chased by the gloso! (second version) (© Richard Svensson)

CHRISTMAS CREATURES

As the Christmas season draws nearer, here is a survey of some of the many fascinating animal associations with this very special time of year that occur in Yuletide legend and tradition.

 

 

THE NIGHT WHEN ANIMALS SPEAK

 

In many lands, there is an age-old folk belief that from midnight on Christmas Eve until dawn breaks on Christmas Day morning, animals are blessed with the gift of human speech, in memory of the lowly stable creatures that surrounded the Holy Family in the manger. During that magical period, they are able to converse with one another, enabling them to voice their adoration of the newborn Jesus, and also to discuss how well (or otherwise) they are cared for by their human masters.

 

This belief formed the basis of a wonderful Gamma Films cartoon special entitled 'The Night The Animals Talked' (1970), which was regularly shown on television at Christmas in the UK when I was a child, but which, sadly, has not made an appearance now for many years. Bring it back, please!! (Happily, it can be viewed on YouTube.)

 

A still from 'The Night The Animals Talked'

 

Moreover, according to the same folk belief the farmyard cattle and horses kneel in prayer, turning to the east as they recall how they knelt in humble homage before the divine infant on that first Christmas of all, in a stable far away at Bethlehem. After being converted to Christianity by European missionaries, many native American Indians adopted a similar tradition to their Old World teachers, claiming that the wild deer kneel in the forests at midnight on Christmas Eve, in respect for the Great Spirit.

 

Even today, according to rural superstition in parts of Britain it is said to be extremely unlucky to observe farm animals in their stables and stalls during the early hours of Christmas morning. Not only will the animals not carry out their homage, but misfortune will plague those whose prying behaviour has prevented the creatures from doing so. By the same token, because farm animals were present at the birth of Jesus, it is a longstanding farming tradition to give their livestock extra food at Christmas - a gift in recognition of their ancestors' sacred status as witnesses during that first Christmas. Of course, in modern times this custom has been extended to pet animals too, especially dogs.

 

 

THE BEES AND THE BIRDS

 

According to a very charming folk tradition, bees awaken from sleep in Missouri at midnight on Christmas Eve and, in loud buzzing resonance, hum the Old Hundredth Psalm. In Eastern Europe, birds are said to sing throughout the night before Christmas, and even the least musical species are temporarily blessed with dulcet voices as sweet as those of the melodious nightingale, so that they can offer their own paean of praise and thanks for the birth of Jesus. Similarly, cockerels crow joyfully all night, to announce the Holy Child's arrival.

 

 

CALLING BIRDS, OR COLLY BIRDS?

Speaking of singing birds: one of the most familiar Christmas songs is 'The Twelve Days of Christmas'. Everyone has sung it, but how many people can confidently identify the species to which the four birds given on the fourth day of Christmas belong? In some modern-day versions, they are referred to, very vaguely, as calling birds. In the more popular, original version, however, they are described as colly birds - but what are colly birds?

In fact, 'colly' (also spelled 'colley') is a rural name, particularly prevalent in Somerset and Gloucestershire, for the blackbird, and translates literally as coal-black.

 

Incidentally, this should not be confused with the real colly birds or colies, which constitute an exclusively-African taxonomic order of birds also known as mousebirds, on account of their rodent-like scurrying movements and predominantly grey plumage.

 

An African colly bird, wholly unrelated to its Christmastime namesake.

 

 

THE CHRISTMAS ROBIN

 

Closely related to the blackbird is the robin, whose small, cheery, red-breasted form is nowadays synonymous with Christmas and appears on millions of Christmas cards each year. Its links with Christmas, however, like so many other current Yuletide symbols and customs, actually stem from beliefs dating back to cultures prevalent long before Christianity.

 

The robin's fiery-plumaged breast readily inspires images of flames. Accordingly, in ancient times it was deemed to be responsible for bringing fire to mankind. In Norse mythology, it was also associated with Thor, god of thunder and lightning. This symbolism was perpetuated but subtly transformed in an early Christian fable, which tells of how the small fire warming the Holy Family in the stable began to die out, until a flock of robins succeeded in rekindling it by fanning its embers with their wings. In so doing, however, their breast feathers were scorched black, but in thanks for their act of kindness the Virgin Mary rewarded them by bestowing upon their singed feathers a bright scarlet hue that would be perpetuated by their descendants forever. 

 

NOT FROM TURKEY, BUT FROM MEXICO 

Another bird closely associated with Christmas, but for a very different reason, is the turkey. As this species is native to the New World, however, it only became known in Europe following the first great Western voyages to the Americas, particularly the expedition to Mexico led by Cortes. Until then, the most popular bird consumed at Christmas in Europe was the goose, plus, for those wealthy enough to afford them, the swan and the peacock - but the turkey's succulent flesh helped it to usurp all of these as the favourite bird for Christmas feasting. Although today's domestic version is popularly believed to derive from the wild turkeys of North America, in reality it is descended from counterparts that had already been domesticated by the Aztecs in Mexico, as discovered by Cortes.

 

The reason why it is called the turkey seems to stem from an unfortunate confusion of names. When the first turkeys reached Europe, they were mistaken by some for the African guineafowl, which at that time was known as the turkey (because it was exported from Turkey). Consequently, they acquired this same name - to the extent that, today, most people have long forgotten that the 'original' turkey was actually a species of guineafowl.

 

HOW SANTA CLAUS GAINED HIS REINDEER - AND HIS KANGAROOS! 

Perhaps the most popular of all animals in Christmas tradition are the reindeer that draw the presents-loaded sleigh of Father Christmas, alias Santa Claus. In fact, this is quite a recent addition to Yuletide lore, stemming for the most part from the fertile imagination of a languages professor from New York called Clement Moore - best-remembered today, however, for his delightful poem 'A Visit From St Nicholas'. Penned in 1822, its opening lines famously read: "'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;"

 

It was here that Santa's eight trusty reindeer, each with its own name, made their debut, but just as Santa supposedly derives from Lapland, so too, most probably, did Moore's inspiration for his antlered steeds. For according to Lapp mythology, the snow and freezing cold weather typical of northern Finland at this time of year is brought down from the mountains to the plains each winter by a herd of reindeer, driven by a suitably chilly figure known as Old Man Winter. Prior to Moore's poem, Santa was normally depicted as riding a white horse, and sometimes even a goat!

 

Last, but certainly not least, in our zoological Christmas is its most unlikely member - the kangaroo! However, in modern times it has indeed gained Yuletide associations, at least in Australia, where modern fables tell of how Santa's sleigh is drawn through the sky here not by reindeer but instead by a team of burly bull kangaroos, or boomers.

Have a great Christmas! See you next year.

 

A Christmas robin snapped just a mile or so from where I live! ((c) Tony Hisgett/Wikipedia - CC BY 2.0 licence)