One of the most underappreciated monsters of all is the hulder.
Coming from the folklore of northern Europe, hulders are female woodland spirits concerned with the lot of the charcoal burners. Much as tommyknockers kept miners safe from imminent cave-ins by knocking on the sides of cave walls to signal danger, a hulder would keep watch over the kilns of charcoal burners so that the men could sleep. In return the charcoal burners would leave gifts of food and drink for the hulders.
This continued contact between the lonely miners and the hulders led to gifts of flowers and chocolates, and even to sensible clothes with pockets. Eventually the men would invite the hulders to dances and social functions, and when romance bloomed, marriage soon followed and then, children.
And that’s when a hulder would get really serious.
“You’ve been working the charcoal kiln for three weeks straight now, Arn,” she would say. “It’s getting so Calder doesn’t know his own father anymore. Do you think that’s right, for a boy not to know his own father?”
“It’s all very good for Lord Gudbrand to talk about market shares, competitive prices and how quarterly profits are down, but it’s not him who’s been working nights and weekends to burn the charcoal that he sells across his Europe to make his fortune,” the holder would say at clandestine woodland meetings of the charcoal burners. “It seems to me if he’s going to ask his men to spend their lives making charcoal for him to sell, then he ought to pay them enough for them actually to live their lives, instead of fattening himself like a pig for the slaughter, on the money other people have labored for.”
Yes, the hulders were central to the labor movement among Scandinavian charcoal burners in the 1920s and 1930s. Charcoal barons soon called in police and the army to break up the labor unions, imprisoning thousands on ginned-up charges of sedition, and turning their families out into the cold.
Well, I guess we all know who the real monsters are here.
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