Two stories from Just Qvigstad’s Contes de Laponie continue the idea of the Stallo as killers of men. One story, “La jeune fille rusee,” tells of a Stallo who kidnapped a girl and took her to his forest home. Men searched for her for a long time. One man noticed marks on the birch trees, left by the girl, which led him to her. The Christmas tale described the Stallo as a sort of vampire who sucked blood from the heads of humans, but teeth were never mentioned. This story gives us more detail in the form of an iron pipe that the Stallo used to suck the life from humans. The man and the young girl outwit this particular Stallo by heating the iron pipe the girl had stolen from him in his sleep and stuffing it into the Stallo’s mouth to kill him. Another tale, “Le Stallo tueur d’hommes,” describes a Stallo who killed and skinned a man. It is too graphic for me to describe here.
It is clear from both stories that the Stallo are quite dumb and fairly easy to outwit and manipulate. The girl managed to steal the Stallo’s silver before she escaped his forest gamma, a Sami dwelling consisting of a wooden frame covered with earth and peat. I have a hypothesis in the back of my mind which took shape years ago when I read the Nobel-prize-winning trilogy by Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter, that the Norway of the Middle Ages through the early eighteenth century, the northern region in particular, was a very frightening place to live. If the weather and scarcity of food didn’t get you, the creatures in the forests and the seas would. The worldview in rural areas likely shifted from fear to folklore in the early eighteenth century, earlier in the cities, but I am still researching.
Source: J.K. Qvigstad, Contes de Laponie, adaptation en français par Jacques Privat, Editions Esprit Ouvert, 2008, pp. 121-124.