On the unreliability of folklore

“Kungar, krig och katastrofer” (Kings, wars and disasters) is a book by Swedish folklorist Ebbe Schön. As behooves an expert on folklore, yes, Ebbe Schön really does look like a cross between Santa Claus and a gnome! His book, only available in Swedish, deals with how Swedish history (principally kings and wars) is reflected in peasant folklore. Schön makes several interesting points. Thus, in most cases this kind of lore can only be traced back to the early 16^th century. That is, to the Reformation and the time of Gustav Vasa, the first king of “modern” Sweden. Little or no contemporary lore about Catholic or Viking kings seem to exist. The lore dealing with kings is often influenced by, or completely based on, written sources produced at government level. In other words, it reflects the diffusion of royal propaganda among the peasantry. While there is local lore about mythological kings (a kind of “pre-Viking” petty rulers), I wonder how ancient it really is? Perhaps it simply reflects the spread of national romanticism (17^th to 19^th century) among peasants?

It´s also interesting to note that the telling and retelling of folkloric stories was officially encouraged by the Swedish officer brass, being one of the few forms of entertainment available to soldiers at war. Since soldiers lucky enough to return home presumably shared the stories they heard in the military with their kin, this ensured the speedy diffusion of folklore between various parts of Sweden. I wonder whether it may also have made the folklore more uniform and standardized? How do we even know if a motif is truly local, or simply imported from outside? Homecoming soldiers were often employed as teachers…

It´s also interesting to note how selective folk memory is. Schön mentions several examples of military battles which have been completely forgotten in the local tradition, despite creating havoc in the immediate neighborhood, while “everyone” knows that of course a certain stone slab in a certain field is connected to a purely mythological battle taking place thousands of years ago! This raises a lot of awkward questions about the general reliability of folk tradition. Folk etymologies are another example of how recent much folklore must be – if it had been very ancient, it would have remembered the true etymology of various peculiar place-names.

After these methodological remarks, Schön plunges into a treasure-trove of more or less believable stories about heroic kings, brave soldiers, evil Danes and Russians, ordinary peasants who outsmart the enemy, and even “ancient” Swedish Amazons and giants. Magic is often part of the picture, more or less black in nature. Several famous generals were said to posses the ability to conjure up soldiers by magical means, and the good luck of enemy troops were often attributed to literal witches in their midst. Unsurprisingly, warrior-king Karl XII (Charles XII) is depicted as a virtual Übermensch with an almost paranormal strength. Also unsurprisingly, given the sexist prejudices at the time, Queen Kristina is said to have been an extremely loose woman with a sexual appetite above the usual (ironically, some historians suspect that she was lesbian – something completely missed in the folklore, which paints her as heterosexual). The most well-known stories are about Gustav Vasa´s daring escape from the clutches of Danish king Christian “the Tyrant”, and how he was hiding among the common folk in rural Dalecarlia. As already pointed out, these tales (or perhaps tall tales) are really literary fictions created by government propagandists. Yet, they seem to have been traduced as “local tradition” by many peasants in Dalecarlia and elsewhere. An interesting fact mentioned by Schön is that most lore about the Snapphanar in Scania are fiercely negative, despite the fact that Snapphanarna were a resistance movement against Swedish occupation (Scania was originally a Danish province). His interpretation is that Swedish nationalist indoctrination apparently succeeded, but also that peasants don´t like armed bands hiding in the forest regardless of their political persuasion, since such bands invariably demand food and shelter (and womenfolk?) from the locals. The last chapter of “Kungar, krig och katastrofer” deals with Gothicism, the idea that Sweden is the oldest kingdom in the world and that all Germanic peoples, most notably the Goths, come from its distant shores. Funny, I thought that was a true story…cough cough, Scandza, cough cough…

Schön´s book is well worth reading (if you understand Swedish, at least) and could almost be seen as an entertaining introduction to the actual history of Sweden.