Swedish Legends and Folktales

Swedish Legends and Folktales by John Lindow gathers nineteenth- and twentieth-century oral narratives—legends, folktales, and first-person memorates—from across rural Sweden to reveal how storytelling reflected and shaped everyday life. Moving from Skåne’s market villages to the mountain shielings of the north, Lindow situates tales within the social fabric that produced them: self-sufficient farm households, itinerant soldiers and peddlers who ferried stories between parishes, and a Lutheran parish order where the pulpit’s devil tales and the sexton’s authority colored local imaginations. With clear definitions (including the memorate as a personal experience narrative) and careful regional framing, he shows how provincial identities, settlement patterns, and even Sweden’s Swedish-speaking communities in Finland inflect motifs, plot structures, and performance styles.

The collection’s introductions illuminate the life-cycle and calendar rhythms that animated belief—protective rites against changelings, youths’ perilous encounters with the skogsra, and the stern materiality of the living dead (spöken and gastar). Readers see how agrarian work, inheritance practices, tithe economics, and church seating hierarchies forged narrative themes, while markets, conscription, and seasonal labor sustained their transmission. Lindow’s rigorously contextual approach turns these stories into cultural documents: a map of Sweden’s forests and fields, its parish clocks and unheated churches, and the oral aesthetics that kept plot “clusters” stable even as wording shifted in the telling. The result is a landmark portrait of Scandinavian tradition—scholarly in method, vivid in detail, and indispensable for anyone interested in folklore, religion, and the historical anthropology of storytelling.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.