Hulder

Jen would know.

The Huldra.

The Huldra.

Yes.

Beautiful and tempting supernatural being from Scandinavian Nordic folklore.

And by the way, like to reinforce Mastodon as a, at least a, a name well-known in contemporary circles.

It wasn't that long ago the last Queens of the Stone Age album made the top 25.

That's true, yep.

Yeah.

...

in the top 40.

I, I totally dig the album, but I, I don't feel, uh, the kinship of them versus a Queens of the Stone Age or a Sleep or an Uncle Acid, uh, you know, or Mastodon.

You know what I mean? Uh, so yeah, and grows- Orchid grows in conformity.

What about you, Chris?

I would want one of the Huldra folk wedding crowns of Scandinavia.

Uh, these are supposedly gotten from the hidden folk as they're trying to abduct a bride to be.

Um, every parish had a wedding crown to be used by its parishioners, so it's a bit of a mystery why some of these crowns have a Huldra story, an origin story attached to them.

Um, I have a theory that perhaps they originally crowned statues of the Virgin, and that's where the, the lore of the Huldra folk came from, but that's just a theory.

I, I don't have anything to back it up.

So if anyone sees a Huldra crown on eBay-

[laughs]

Aeron unleashes Phantasmagoria, briefly confusing both of the Nornhounds, followed by a rank 8 telekinetic bombardment, tearing a chunk from the tree itself, only for it to instantly heal.

Lupin learns the Speaker is a Huldra, weak to fire, and joins Wilhelm against the Hounds.

But by round three, he's taken massive damage and is swallowed whole.

Wilhelm goes after the Speaker, the newly crowned Sorenson Spear, doing massive damage when he can actually hit her.

And then I started digging into other mythologies and just had an absolute ball with that.

So I generally knew quite a bit, but then trying to find the right character for the situation, like, all right, what do I use? So in book one in Norway, you meet Huldra.

I don't know if you know anything about her.

Mm

Vaeson, a broad word for beings and spirits from Scandinavian folklore.

Trolls, forest spirits, the Huldra.

And the little people that soldiers sometimes claim to hear moving around their fighting positions at night.

Small voices, footsteps, gear mysteriously being moved.

We have Vason, like from the TV show Grimm.

And for the most part, nearly every soldier I know has some kind of story about Nordic gnomes, hearing them talking, walking around your post, moving stuff around, basically just being little rascals.

We also have a class or race of Huldra that we here in Sweden know as the Ra.

These things are basically shape-shifting beings that live out in the woods.