>>64370531
Depends on the context and part of the continent i suppose. Up in the north here there's not much that salt and a cross will do. Iron might help with some things, but so will steel or lead.
Nissar, vätter, brownies, etc are akin to fey spirits than something more physical like a troll or giant or werewolf or whatever else, and iron won't help then. Keeping your pacts and promises is vital, but more than that is respect and a degree of deference. The whole thing with leaving milk and cookies out for santa comes from old tradition here, where you're supposed to leave a meal (some good porridge or the like) outside where vätten lives, like by the crawlspace entrance. Keeps you on acceptable grounds. If you don't, you might be seen as unfriendly and it'l want you and your stuff gone.
Things they do range from small things like stealing things like socks or leaving a paddock gate open, to breaking windows and gashing marks into wood. Hopefully just wood, anyway. Elves are similar in that they don't much care about being 'real' or not.
>>64370357
Or they lure you out into the swamps with music that wrenches at your soul and drown you, or you vanish as the forest isn't the same forest you entered, or they steal your children and replace them with soulless, abhorrent mimics, or grind you into paste with a boulder against bedrock leaving a big cauldron and round stone behind...
The biggest reasons why european folklore and creatures are 'tame' is because the stories are so old and ubiquitous to media. People know the dragon, the lindorm, basilisk, troll and wisp from stories their grandparents got told by their grandparents in turn. A good deal of them are even older than christianity's influence on the continent. Meanwhile, american ones are almost all either indigenous or under 500 years old, and the former option wasn't exactly a unified culture.
They're still fresh concepts, relatively speaking.
