Friend of the Toast (and of self) Sara Cantor just got back from a weeklong vacation in Iceland, and, as is my custom, I engaged her in conversation about her trip.
SELF: Sara! How was Iceland?
SARA: Look at this: 
SELF: WHAT
is
THAT
SARA: It’s a Tilberi. We went to the museum of icelandic sorcery and witchcraft and saw a replica of the necropants and also this.
“To create a tilberi, the woman steals a rib from a recently buried body early on Whitsunday, twists around it grey wool which she must steal for the purpose (it is sometimes specified that the wool must be plucked from between the shoulders of a widow’s sheep soon after its wool has been plucked) and keeps it between her breasts. The next three Sundays at communion she spits the sanctified wine on the bundle, which will come more alive each time. She then lets it suckle on the inside of her thigh, which creates a tell-tale wartlike growth.
The woman can now send the tilberi to suck milk from others’ cows and ewes. It will return to the window of her dairy and call out “Full belly, Mummy!” or “Churn lid off, Mummy!” and vomit the stolen milk into her butter churn. To suck the milk from the animal’s udder, it jumps on her back and lengthens itself to reach down; in some versions it is said to be able to reach down on both sides to suck from two teats at once. Inflammatory hardening of the udder was traditionally ascribed to the tilberi, and as late as the 19th century, animals were protected by making the sign of the cross under the udder and over the rump and laying a Psalter on the spine. Butter churned from milk stolen by a tilberi will clump together as if curdled, or even melt away into foam, if the sign of the cross is made over it or the smjörhnútur (butterknot) magical sign drawn in it.
The tilberi also occasionally steals wool which has been put out to dry after shearing and washing; it rolls it around itself to form a giant moving ball.
If the woman has a child and the tilberi manages to reach her own milk-filled breast, she is at risk of being sucked to death.”
WELP
WELP
welp
welp
Tags: iceland, sara cantor, witches
Nothing says “Happy Thursday!” like obscure and horrifying Icelandic folklore.
wait
is it the sanctified wine that makes it come alive
or the suckling on the thigh
it is the wine! the suckling just sustains it
Does it suckle blood or milk why don’t I have thigh nipples am I a defective witch?
If you really cared about your tilberi, you’d do everything you could to induce lactation. Especially fenugreek.
brb, constructing a nontoxic enchanted tilberi nursery by the light of the full moon
It can be both. Is it food or is it air that keeps you alive? Or is it water?
I mean how recent is recent enough for burial? Two months until Pentecost!!
This is my favorite lore yet.
I particularly enjoy this piece coming so close on the heels of the breastfeeding piece.
Everything is about sucking lately.
“Well, I’ve decided to exclusively formula-feed, because I don’t want the tilberi to suck me to death.”
“But have you tried fenugreek?”
Thankfully there are staves to protect against this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_magical_st…
another photo:
One … one was enough. So enough.
But this way you get to see the different stages of growth!
SWEET MOTHER OF-
WHY
Oh uh…..thanks?
Augh! It’s showing up as a broken image for me and NGL, I’m pretty disappointed.
do not fret: https://imgur.com/Pbm6f0q
Thank you! I’m fascinated by these. What are the faces made from? Dried apples? Or…what?
um they are definitely made from the souls of the undead, I do not see what is confusing here
(no but actually I think it was plastic)
… from bone and wool, where does it get such a horrible face? Such horrible faces…
Ugh I was eating and NOW I AM NOT
brb, gotta go find a way to erase my short-term memory and maybe gouge out my eyes.
nope
I yearn for the time in my life before I saw that. It was only moments ago but seems like forever. I was so carefree.
Oh god, they’re like impacted hairballs.
What a handy illustration of the tilberi growth cycle!
So the “tell-tale wartlike growth” that originates from “inside the thighs” is a clitoris, yes?
Chub rub?
Ah, folklore. The discipline of the wholesomely quaint. Not.
unless you spell it “queynt”!
Hey gurl heeeeeeeeeeey.
I see what you did there.
How on earth has there never been an X-Files or Supernatural episode about this?! El Chupacabra steals all the other suckers’ thunder.
Too many aliens, not enough Icelandic horror
.
D:
“This was not on the brochure.”
Speaking of Iceland, but in a less horrific* vein: I am reading a book about Vikings and in the chapter on Viking settlements on Iceland I came across the following tidbit:
“The right of an owner to kill his slave was sometimes used to sacrifice someone to accompany a dead master into the grave. This was too much familiarity for some: the ghost of a settler buried with his slave was graceless enough to complain so bitterly about the company that the burial mound was opened and the slave removed.”
*I guess this is actually much more horrific since it’s about the sacrifice of unwilling people who were considered to be subhuman but when I scroll back up and look at the pictures I can’t imagine anything worse than a Tilberi, so
Oh my god, the slave murder is obviously horrific, but the idea that whiny ghosts were just, like, a part of life Vikings had to put up with is wonderful.
“Who was that at the door?” “Oh, just stupid Halldor’s stupid ghost again. That guy’s done nothing but complain since the day we buried him!”
“And after we went through the trouble of doing all those ritual sacrifices so he wouldn’t be lonely in the afterlife!”
Judging by the anecdotes in Eyrbyggja Saga, they were. The story is basically a string of pissed off ghosts haunting the neighborhood in various and creative ways. I had forgotten about the naked female ghost who is seen making dinner and setting the table until I looked it up in Wikipedia just now. (Unless Wikipedia is just trolling. There are trolls in Eyrbyggja, too.)
Oooh thanks for that reference. Totally going to download an epub and read it.
They sound like Sims 3 ghosts, except for the naked part.
Some of them are whiny, some of them are just dicks. Yeah, great, thanks guy, for sitting on my roof banging pots and pans together. Hate you, hope you die, oh wait.
I feel like there are easier ways to steal milk? Or better yet, just steal the butter, no churning involved?
I have no sense of fun, I know.
“Hey, mom, I brought you some extra work to do!”
“Excellent, thanks, Tilberi. Just puke it right into the churn.”
“Just FYI, if someone makes the sign of the cross over the butter, it’ll go bad instantly, so don’t make the sign of the cross over this.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Or if someone doodles an arcane symbol into it, so don’t do that, either.”
“Great. Got any more stolen dairy puke for me?”
It’s like hiring a crappy intern.
Life in Iceland was HARD. You’d take any help you could get, including uncanny milk suckers from the depths of hell.
I love Iceland.
The funny thing is that these are basically land-based lutefisk.
Seeing as I am dealing with a mysterious bug bite problem, this was not the Icelandic lore I needed in my life today.
THIS IS FASCINATING AND YET I AM TERRIFIED. Call me deranged, but this is the best. THE BEST.
CANNOT. STOP. LAUGHING.
That made me laugh so hard I had to walk away from my desk.
stopped laughing for a moment, came back to this, laughed some more
I am laughing and screaming at the same time.
oh god oh god oh god oh god
what’s the emoji for “helpless with laughter”
I’m imagining this sounds something like a cross between the mandrake screams in Harry Potter and, maybe, Ludo from Labyrinth?
Also, weeping and shaking with silent laughter.
Yeah I figure the one on the right doesn’t really know all the words, he is just kind of faking it and praying nobody will notice.
The one on the left is really into it, though. He’s totally on stage in his mind. I reckon he’s the one who makes the plans, the other one is more of an amiable follower. They probably have kind of a Ren and Stimpy dynamic going on. They should have their own kids’ show.
I am deceased. Deceased.
BEST THING EVER
oh my god they do resemble the gallaghers
Liam in particular never really got over his witch-teat fixation.
HAHAHAHA. best comment
t rolls it around itself to form a giant moving ball.
…It plays Katamari Damacy with itself?
Katamari Damonstrosity
It looks like two of my least favorite things in the world have been combined: hagfish and white man dreads
such an accurate description
Show’s me. In my time in Iceland I went to the penis museum three times (out of social convention!!!), the ghost museum, the salt factory, and the taxidermy museum (double whammy, they’re both in Stokkseyri, which in Icelandic means ‘nowhere within the middle of nowhere’, but never to the museum of sorcery and witchcraft! I’ll have to go when I come back to visit, I’m sure it’s full of incredible shit like this!!
It is so good!! but it’s in the westfjords, so I would definitely recommend going in the summer – we had a very tough and snowy drive up and were stranded at the gas station grocery store for an hour bc of high winds.
also, fun fact: the museum’s proprieter is a very nice and certainly immortal man named Sigurður who wears a little felt hat and grows tomatoes indoors in the icy tundra. A++ experience all around.
I SUPER wish I had gone to the ghost museum – was it great??
It WAS great they were chock full of things popping out of random places and automated creepy bridge noises. I did get a weird allergic reaction that day though, had to go to the ER when we took the bus back to selfoss because my hands and feet and face were swelling. still haven’t found a cause, like 83% sure it was ’cause ghosts.
the westfjords are fab! I visited in the middle of a snowstorm but I just loved how uncomfortably vast and cold it was. completely worth it for the Aldrei fer ég súður music festival, which is free just ’cause if you can make it up there and survive, you deserve to go.
Oh, where’s the ghost museum? I am hoping to go back this autumn and want things to do!
Stokkseyri! 🙂 You can take the stræto to selfoss from Hlemmur in Reykjavik, and then a connecting small bus (one of the blue ones) to Stokkseyri.
Why am I not vacationing in Iceland more often?
Seems legit.
as sara’s iceland visitee, i hereby invite all toast readers to come hang out with me. i can promise you SO MUCH MORE WEIRD STUFF.
10/10 would stay with again
I have never met anyone who hasn’t been to Iceland and come back sying ‘OMG I need to go there for every holiday until the end of time’. I am working on a friend to come with me in autumn as I have been in that state since I went in 2005!
I really need to go – easyjet flies from my city now and it’s not actually very expensive.
I agree, unfortunately. As someone who lived there from September to early June, you can bet your boots I’m not coming back unless it’s the middle of summer!
I’m in Holland & trying to figure out how I can go visit Iceland again, I think I’ve promised my friends in Stockholm that I’ll go there this summer but really I want to go back to Reykjavik.
I am visiting in mid-June and am down to see ALL THE WEIRD STUFF. 😀
I’m crying
My favorite thing about Icelandic literature is how perfunctorily they inserted Christian themes. You see it in the sagas, too; Njal goes about his business for a hundred pages, and then right at the climax they scribble in “something something sign of the cross.”
Oh, and I want one of these.
I cried at that scene. I dare anyone to read That Scene and not curl up in a ball of blubbering Feelings.
The Allthing section where they debate the pros and cons of conversion is fascinating.
It’s so loyal…does it, does it love you?
In the only way it is capable, which is not a way that you or I could understand.
Dang there’s a thing like this in Pacific Northwest culture that now I can’t remember the name of, only it’s a figure that’s carved from bone or wood and has this mouth with HUGE TEETH. it’s less distressingly horrific than these guys, but sort of a little more menacing by virtue of how sleek it was.
what the hell was that thing called, dangit
clearly its A Man
You know how sometimes when you think of people from the past, you forget that they were, like, normal and had senses of humor similar to, ya know, us? I feel like this is a possible reminder that somewhere in old timey Iceland there were some old bags that really liked to fuck with the youngsters and got this thing started. (More power to them.)
SLOWLY PUTS DOWN COFFEE
BACKS AWAY FROM DESK
PEACE Y’ALL
THANKS GUYS I have lost an entire work morning by falling through the Icelandic folklore/sorcery rabbit hole. Also I am completely in love with the Icelandic Sorcery Museum website, which proudly declares itself “THE HOME OF THE NECROPANTS!” http://www.galdrasyning.is/index.php?lang=en
Toastie holiday to Iceland this summer, anyone? 😀
I’m disappointed that the giftshop doesn’t sell necropant leggings with a built-in coin purse in the scrotum.
Welp
welp
…
WHELP
I am so glad I am taking my parents to Iceland in September. (In fact, the reason we are going there is that my mother loves the mythology.)
I am so glad I am taking my parents to Iceland in September. (In fact, the reason we are going there is that my mother loves the mythology.)
hail Mawrtyr well met?
omg choking and dying at my desk and not very subtly either
Finnish folklore has same types of creatures too! They are called “para”, but they usually looked like birch bark rolls or animals. They too vomit cream and butter for the lucky owner lady.
Wow, milk must be really expensive in Iceland. I think if I were gonna go to the trouble of desecrating a dead body I’d want the ensuing black magic to produce weed, or single malt Japanese whiskey (I don’t really do dairy much anymore).
Wow, milk must be really expensive in Iceland. I think if I were gonna go to the trouble of desecrating a dead body I'd want the ensuing black magic to produce weed, or single malt Japanese whiskey (I don't really do dairy much anymore).