[Collected in Christiania, Norway, in 1845 (Asbjörnsen)]
At a farm in Hallingdal, I think it was, there was a girl who was going to take cream porridge out to the nisse. Now whether it was on a Thursday evening or a Christmas Eve, I can’t remember, but I think it was a Christmas Eve. Now she thought it was a pity to give the nisse all that good food, so she ate the cream porridge herself, drank the drippings into the bargain, and went out to the barn with oatmeal porridge and sour milk in a pig trough.
“Here’s your trough, you nasty old thing!” she said. But scarcely had she uttered these words before the nisse rushed out and grabbed her and started to dance with her. He kept it up until she lay on the ground gasping for breath, and when the people came out to the barn in the morning, she was more dead than alive.
All the while he danced, he sang:
Oh, the nisse’s porridge you did steal!
So dance with the nisse until you reel!