Swedish Legends and Folktales

Swedish Legends and Folktales by John Lindow explores how storytelling reflected and shaped everyday life in rural Sweden during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It situates tales within the social fabric of self-sufficient farm households, itinerant soldiers and peddlers, and a Lutheran parish order, and shows how provincial identities, settlement patterns, and Swedish-speaking communities in Finland inflect motifs, plot structures, and performance styles. The collections introductions illuminate the life-cycle and calendar rhythms that animated belief, and the rigorously contextual approach turns these stories into cultural documents.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 242 pages
Publication date: 25 February 2022
Publisher: University of California Press

Swedish Legends and Folktales by John Lindow presents nineteenth- and twentieth-century oral narratives from rural Sweden, exploring how storytelling reflected and shaped everyday life. Lindow situates tales within the social fabric of self-sufficient farm households, itinerant soldiers and peddlers, and a Lutheran parish order, revealing how provincial identities, settlement patterns, and Swedish-speaking communities in Finland influenced motifs, plot structures, and performance styles. The collections introductions illuminate the life-cycle and calendar rhythms that animated belief, such as protective rites against changelings, youths' perilous encounters with the skogsra, and the stern materiality of the living dead. 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 rigorous contextual approach turns these stories into cultural documents, mapping Swedens forests and fields, 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.

Weight: 328g
Dimension: 148 x 211 x 17 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520317765