H ” “ Pale her cheeks they ought to be, it was only yesterday that she had been a tree.

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H ISTORISKA INSTITUTIONEN

“Pale her cheeks they ought to be, it was only yesterday that she had been a tree.”

Gender, Power, and Hybridity in the Swedish Medieval Supernatural Ballads

Form of Thesis: Master Thesis (45), Spring 2020 Author’s Name: Rachel Bott

Name of Supervisor: Christine Ekholst Seminar Chair: Louise Berglund Defence Date: 26 May 2020

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Abstract

This thesis analyzes eight specific Swedish medieval ballads that contain supernatural transformation and hybridity for how they depict gender in late medieval and early modern contexts. Using literature as a historical resource and a micro-historical approach, this thesis applies gender theory, intersectional approaches, and monster theory to its reading of these ballads.

Through this analysis, this thesis has found that transformation in these ballads highlights what it meant to be human in the late medieval and early modern periods, by contrasting and defining humanness through the tension of being a hybrid. And inevitably, discussions of the body during these periods involved having a gendered body. While these stories define what was human and what was not, they discuss and negotiate late medieval and early modern conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Additionally, the conflicts in these stories introduce real-life issues such as power, violence, and social roles. Characters in these ballads negotiate gender and social roles by subverting and upholding societal power structures. A woman acts independently and marries a snake against her family’s wishes. Wives use magic to upend the social hierarchy usurp their husbands’ authority.

Father’s roles as protectors are both questioned and underlined in stories of their failures. This thesis concludes that late medieval and early modern audiences had many different understandings of gender, and these audiences used supernatural transformation ballads as a means of communicating complex and contradictory elements of identity and gender during this period.

Keywords: Sveriges medeltida ballader, Early modern, Late medieval, Gender, Power, Transformation, Hybridity

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Introduction

A young woman strolls through a meadow, smiling at the sun’s warm promises of summer and the openness of the pale blue sky. A brisk gust whistles through the reeds and dances through the trees.

That is when the woman notices a tree that stands out from all the rest. Its leaves shine as if they are pure gold. Its branches are delicate as if made of lace. The woman wonders how a tree could be so beautiful, yet so strange. She stands before it, and without thinking asks:

“Why do you stand here with your golden leaves, which are so beautiful, and so rare?”¹ There is no answer, but suddenly, the tree no longer looks like a glimmering, golden beacon. Its delicate branches are gnarled. Its golden leaves are sickly and brittle. There is a crack and a groan. From somewhere within the linden tree, a familiar voice emanates. It sounds muffled, as if it is coming from inside of a heavy box, “Happiness is far greater for you, than it is for me.”² The young woman, in her shock, can only think: Has my stepsister become… a tree?

The Swedish medieval supernatural ballads hold rich, strange, and terrifying stories. Some of the most fascinating of these stories are tales of supernatural transformation. Stepmothers turn stepchildren into wolves or trees, a snake struggles to find a wife, a girl drowns her sister so her sister comes back as a harp to exact revenge: while these stories may seem strange and fantastic, they can inform researchers on core aspects of late medieval and early modern culture. These stories can reveal how minds from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries imagined and negotiated gender, power, and human relationships. Tales of transformation are of special interest because they explore changing and hybrid bodies. Because these hybrids are neither fully part of nature nor fully human, they violate God’s intended image of mankind: they are monstrous.³ According to Jeffery Jerome Cohen, monsters are “an embodiment of a certain cultural moment”, that “must be examined within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural, and literary-historical) that generate them.”⁴ Tales of transformation explore not just humanness in changing bodies, but also power, conflicts, relationships, and complex social codes. Monstrosity, hybridity, and the social ramifications of inhumanness illustrate aspects of humanness that writers and singers of a cultural moment have impressed upon their work. Furthermore, transformation allowed people to behave in otherwise prohibited ways which allowed them to question or even confirm and uphold social boundaries, depending on how the ballad ended.

1 “Hvi står du här med dina förgyllande blad./Som äro på dig både sköna och rar.” Bengt R. Jonsson et al., Sveriges medeltida ballader: Bd 1 Naturmytiska visor: (nr 1–36) (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1983), 89. Translations of Swedish quotes into English in this thesis are by the author.

2 “Ty lyckan är väl större för dig än för mig” Jonsson et al., 89.

3 Lena Liepe, Den medeltida kroppen: kroppens och könets ikonografi i nordisk medeltid (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2003), 76–77.

4 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4–5.

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The purpose of this thesis is to explore how certain ballads about supernatural transformation depict gender. In order to examine how the ballads depicted gender, this thesis will focus on three main themes: humans in hybrid and liminal states, violence, and social roles and relationships between closely tied people. Within these themes, this thesis will analyze how characters in the ballads uphold, subvert, or negotiate late medieval and early modern conceptions of gender and power. These themes are present in all the ballads selected for this thesis and provide underlying discussions of gender in late medieval and early modern context. By exploring these themes, this thesis aims to highlight the many different and simultaneous ways in which late medieval and early modern minds interpreted what it meant to be a man or a woman, and the ultimately polyphonic nature of gender and power in these ballads.

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Previous Research

This thesis explores the medieval ballads, a complex but interesting source material for historians.

The “medieval ballads” are early modern records, written in medieval style.⁵ The material for this thesis, printed ballads from the collection Sveriges medeltida ballader, was likely written and recorded during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So, this thesis will focus roughly on the period 1500—1650 in Sweden, when the content of these ballads was still culturally relevant.⁶ Furthermore, this selected period predates the peak of dramatic ideological and cultural shifts of the late seventeenth century, such as the witch trials and the enlightenment, which scholars have suggested resulted in distancing audiences from the cultural environment the ballads were created.

This thesis will refer to this period as “early modern” or “late medieval”, though it is not quite one or the other.

Studies on the Ballad Genre

Structural analysis and musicology dominated much of Swedish and Scandinavian ballad scholarship from the latter half of the twentieth century.⁷ These studies sought to solidify the concept of the “ballad genre” as separate from other types of narrative songs and establish the

“medieval ballad” as late medieval texts rooted in medieval style conventions and thematic discussions.⁸ They also sought to further establish the ballads as a historical resource, by contextualizing both the different ballad genres and the numerous historical and cultural processes that influenced scholars and enthusiasts who collected ballads during the early modern and modern periods.⁹ For instance, Bengt R. Jonsson’s well-known doctoral dissertation Svensk balladtradition: 1, Balladkällor och balladtyper surveys the Swedish ballad corpus, and materials spanning from the early

5 David William Colbert, The Birth of the Ballad: The Scandinavian Medieval Genre, vol. 10, Skrifter Utgivna Av Svenskt Visarkiv (Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv, 1989), 13; Lars Elleström, ed., Intermediala perspektiv på medeltida ballader (Möklinta: Gidlund, 2011), 16–17.

6 Elleström, Intermediala perspektiv på medeltida ballader, 16–17.

7 Jan Ling, “Levin Christian Wiedes vissamling: en studie i 1800-talets folkliga vissång” (Uppsala, Univ., 1965);

Bengt R. Jonsson, “Svensk balladtradition: 1, Balladkällor och balladtyper” (Stockholm, Svenskt visarkiv, 1967); Margareta Jersild, “Skillingtryck: studier i svensk folklig vissång före 1800” (Stockholm, 1975); Otto Holzapfel, Det Balladeske: Fortællemåden i Den Ældre Episke Folkevise (Odense: Univ.-forl, 1980); Karl-Ivar Hildeman, Tillbaka till Balladen: Uppsatser Och Essäer, vol. 9 (Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv, 1985); Colbert, The Birth of the Ballad: The Scandinavian Medieval Genre; Joseph Harris, ed., The Ballad and Oral Literature, vol. 17, Havard English Studies (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991); Owe Ronström and Gunnar Ternhag, eds., Texter om svensk folkmusik: från Haeffner till Ling, Kungl. Musikaliska akademiens skriftserie 81 (Stockholm: Kungl. Musikaliska akad, 1994); Sigurd Kværndrup, Den østnordiske ballade - oral teori og tekstanalyse: studier i Danmarks gamle folkeviser (København: Museum Tusculanums forlag, 2006).

This list is by no means exhaustive, and mainly includes Swedish sources.

8 Holzapfel, Det Balladeske: Fortællemåden i Den Ældre Episke Folkevise; Colbert, The Birth of the Ballad: The Scandinavian Medieval Genre; Harris, The Ballad and Oral Literature.

9 Ling, “Levin Christian Wiedes vissamling: en studie i 1800-talets folkliga vissång”; Jonsson, “Svensk balladtradition: 1, Balladkällor och balladtyper.”

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medieval period to the modern period.¹⁰ At the time, his work aimed to address the lack of analysis on Swedish ballad collections in contemporary scholarship.¹¹ His work has been important to many scholars in defining and analyzing the Swedish medieval ballad. Sven-Bertil Jansson also surveys the Swedish ballad corpus and focuses on the thematic and stylistic conventions of the Swedish ballad.¹² He points out that the supernatural ballads focus on meetings between humans and supernatural creatures, and the ramifications these meetings have on human lives.¹³ Jansson also notes that the Swedish supernatural ballads often include themes such as motherhood, marriage, and forbidden love.¹⁴

This earlier ballad scholarship is important to understand the context in which the Swedish medieval ballads were collected. However, many recent scholars have criticized the focus of earlier ballad research. While these wide-ranging research projects have been important to the discipline, many cultural and theoretical questions remained unanswered. Scholars of the last few decades have thus narrowed their focus and motivated more multidisciplinary and qualitative approaches to study of the ballads. For instance, scholars of Scandinavian ballads have sought to examine cross-genre communication of the ballad through art historical, literary, musical, and linguistic approaches.¹⁵ Other Scandinavian ballad scholars have also connected the ballads to cultural conceptions of folklore and the supernatural.¹⁶

Studies most relevant to this thesis are studies exploring questions of gender, power, and violence in the Scandinavian medieval ballads.¹⁷ This thesis does not cover all research on the

10 Jonsson, “Svensk balladtradition: 1, Balladkällor och balladtyper.”

11 Jonsson et al., Sveriges medeltida ballader, 4.

12 Sven-Bertil Jansson, Den levande balladen: medeltida ballad i svensk tradition (Stockholm: Prisma, 1999).

13 S. Jansson, 37.

14 S. Jansson, 166.

15 Gunilla Byrman, En värld för sig själv: nya studier i medeltida ballader, vol. 1 (Växjö: Växjö University Press, 2008); Elleström, Intermediala perspektiv på medeltida ballader; Sigurd Kvaerndrup and Tommy Olofsson, Medeltiden i Ord Och Bild: Folkligt Och Groteskt i Nordiska Kyrkmålningar Och Ballader (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2013); Tommy Olofsson, “The Lost Shoe: A Symbol in Scandinavian Medieval Ballads and Church Paintings,” 2015; Lynda Taylor, “The Agnete Ballad of Denmark Cultural Tool or Protest Song?,”

in Ballads of the North, Medieval to Modern (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019), 159–73;

Sandra Ballif Straubhaar, “Hervör, Hervard, Hervik: The Metamorphosis of a Shieldmaiden,” in Ballads of the North, Medieval to Modern (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019), 55–70.

16 Mikael Häll, “Den övernaturliga älskarinnan: Erotiska naturväsen och äktenskapet i 1600-talets Sverige,” in Dygder och laster: förmoderna perspektiv på tillvaron (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2010), 143–44; Nadja Sand, “Gränser och gränstillstånd: Möten med det övernaturliga i den naturmytiska balladen” (Bachelor Thesis, Uppsala University, 2011); Ella Odstedt, Varulven i svensk folktradition (Täby: Malört, 2012), 42–59.

17 Lise Praestgaard Andersen, “Kvindeskildringen i de Danske Ridderviser - to Tenderser,” Sumlen, 1978, 9;

Michèle Simonsen, “Gender and Power in Danish Traditional Ballads,” in Ballads and Diversity: Perspectives on Gender, Ethos, Power, and Play (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT), 2004), 242; Gunilla Byrman and Tommy Olofsson, Om kvinnligt och manligt och annat konstigt i medeltida skämtballader (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2011); Ingrid Åkesson, “Mord och hor i medeltidsballaderna – en fråga om könsmakt och familjevåld.,” Noterat 21 (2014); Ingrid Åkesson, “Talande harpa och betvingande sång: Musicerande, makt och genus i några

medeltidsballader,” in Lekstugan: Festskrift till Magnus Gustafsson (Smålands musikarkiv, 2015), 131–43;

Elisabet Ryd, “Moody Men and Malicious Maidens: Gender in the Swedish Medieval Ballad” (Master Thesis, Stockholm, Stockholm University, 2017); Karin Strand, En botfärdig synderskas svanesång: barnamord i

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Scandinavian ballads but includes much recent research examining gender in medieval Scandinavian ballads. Ingrid Åkesson connects violence against women in the ballads with honor culture in medieval Sweden.¹⁸ Using gender theory and intersectional perspectives, Åkesson emphasizes the multidimensionality of family, violence, gender, and struggles for power in ballad narratives.¹⁹ She claims that violence in the family, and violence against women, was culturally embedded within expressions of masculinity and authority.²⁰ Elizabeth Ryd’s master’s thesis also discusses gender and violence in the Swedish medieval ballads.²¹ She concludes the ballads both contested and upheld medieval gender norms and showed a complex and negotiated image of masculinity and femininity. Michèle Simonsen gives an overview of the ways the Danish ballads negotiate gender and power.²² She suggests that women could negotiate masculine images of gender more freely than male characters could negotiate feminine images of gender.²³ More recently, Karin Strand published a book comparing depictions of infanticide crimes in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Swedish broadside ballads to the realities women faced when standing trial for these crimes.²⁴ Strand concludes that these ballads were more concerned with the moral questions of infanticide, rather than accurately depicting the events surrounding the crime.²⁵ Strand states that broadside ballads about infanticide crimes were part of a larger early modern Swedish discourse on male hegemony over women’s bodies and reproductive rights.²⁶

These studies positing more theoretical and cultural-historical questions have opened new avenues of research on medieval and early modern popular culture. They continue to prove that the ballads often do not depict a single image of gender and power, but rather negotiate and debate normative structures. Following these approaches would provide a fruitful study of the supernatural transformation ballads. These ballads have largely been neglected in systematic studies of gender and power and implementing new approaches could help bring light to the supernatural transformation ballads as a rich representation of late medieval and early modern culture.

skillingtryck mellan visa och verklighet, Skrifter utgivna av Svenskt visarkiv 47 (Möklinta: Gidlunds förlag, 2019).

18 Åkesson, “Mord och hor i medeltidsballaderna – en fråga om könsmakt och familjevåld.”

19 Åkesson.

20 Åkesson.

21 Ryd, “Moody Men and Malicious Maidens.”

22 Simonsen, “Gender and Power in Danish Traditional Ballads.”

23 Simonsen, 246–47.

24 Strand, En botfärdig synderskas svanesång.

25 Strand, 257.

26 Strand, 257.

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Transformation and the Body in Literature

In order to understand the complexities of hybridity and transformation, understanding how medieval and early modern minds imagined both the human body and the changing human body is very important. Many have studied transformation through the cross-cultural image of the werewolf.²⁷ These studies have provided a foundation for understanding conceptions of changing bodies in late medieval literature, and show that transformation holds influences from folklore, popular culture, pre-Christian literature, medieval courtly literature, and theology. Scholars such as Caroline Bynum Walker have argued that modern conceptions of transformation are very different from medieval and early modern ideas.²⁸ While modern thinkers examine the self within the framework of the soul and the body, medieval thinkers examined this within the framework of distinctions of the soul.²⁹ While modern thinkers would ask Are we the same, in a different body?, to medieval thinkers this question would be inconceivable.³⁰ The soul could only inhabit one body, and this body could not be separated from the soul.³¹ Medieval eschatology considered the soul and the body as one, thus reliquaries held so much power: they held the power of a person’s soul.³² Transformation and hybridity was, therefore, a highly controversial subject in medieval discourse.

There were many different opinions on how creatures such as werewolves could exist—a human that could occupy both a human and a non-human body.

There are also many works on shapeshifting and alterity on Nordic pre-Christian literature.³³ Some of these studies discuss the distinct processes that shaped alterity in literature from this

27 Caroline Walker Bynum, “Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf,” Speculum 73, no. 4 (1998): 987–

1013; Chantal Bourgault du Coudray, The Curse of the Werewolf: Fantasy, Horror and the Beast Within (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006); Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, “The Werewolf in Medieval Icelandic Literature,”

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106, no. 3 (2007): 277–303; Willem de Blécourt, “A Journey to Hell: Reconsidering the Livonian ‘Werewolf,’” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 2, no. 1 (2007): 49–67; Leslie A.

Sconduto, Metamorphoses of the Werewolf: A Literary Study from Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2008); Phillip A. Bernhardt-House, Werewolves, Magical Hounds, and Dog-Headed Men in Celtic Literature: A Typological Study of Shape-Shifting (New York:

The Edwin Mellen Press, 2010); E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCraken, eds., “Hybridity, Ethics, and Gender in Two Old French Werewolf Tales,” in From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 157–84; Willem de Blécourt, Werewolf Histories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Peter Bystrický, “The Image of the Werewolf in Medieval Literature,”

Historický Časopis 63, no. 5 (2015): 787–812.

28 Caroline Bynum, “Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 1 (1995): 1–33; Bynum, “Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf”; Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001).

29 Bynum, “Why All the Fuss about the Body?,” 13.

30 Bynum, 10–14.

31 Bynum, 14.

32 Bynum, 22–23.

33 K. E. E. Olsen et al., “Introduction: On the Embodiment of Monstrosity in Northwest Medieval Europe,” in Monsters and the Monstrous in Medieval Northwest Europe, Book, Section vols. (Peeters, 2001), 1–22;

Catharina Raudvere, “Trolldómr in Early Medieval Scandinavia,” in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Vol. 3:

The Middle Ages, vol. 3, The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe (London: Athlone, 2002), 73–

172; Julie1 Passanante, “Oedipus Borealis: The Aberrant Body in Old Icelandic Myth and Saga,” Disability Studies Quarterly 25, no. 2 (Spring 2005); Guðmundsdóttir, “The Werewolf in Medieval Icelandic Literature”;

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period. For example, Rebecca Merkelbach argues that a character’s transgressive behavior towards society defines their monstrosity and alterity, rather than their physical state or geographical placement in a story.³⁴ Many of these scholars also discuss how pre-Christian ideologies permeated into literature from Christian Scandinavia and how writers and audiences grappled with these contradictory eschatologies and conceptions of the body. For instance, Catherine Raudvere discusses how in pre-Christian Scandinavian thought, the soul could occupy other bodies without having transformed its human body.³⁵ This belief clashed with Christian notions that there was no way to separate the body and the soul.³⁶ While these notions of the body clashed with each other, these themes of transformation remained in Scandinavian folklore, including ballads, even into the latter part of the early modern period.³⁷ Late medieval writers and performers retold stories with pre-Christian themes, within a Christian context.³⁸ The blending of pre-Christian and Christian themes provides an even more complicated picture of mutability and hybridity in late medieval and early modern thought. For example, the werewolf complicates this image because it was a concoction of folklore, international literary traditions, and pre-Christian Scandinavian storytelling traditions.³⁹ Understanding this blending of discourses helps put the Swedish medieval ballads into context. Researchers examining transformation in these ballads must consider that these stories are a blend of many discourses and beliefs, which were not always compatible with each other. Early modern Swedish popular culture still held on to certain medieval and pre-Christian themes in the ballad tradition, and therefore we should not read transformation in the ballads as completely part of one belief system or another.

There are also studies on early modern Swedish conceptions of changing bodies.⁴⁰ Most notably, Mikael Häll discusses the liminal nature of certain supernatural creatures, especially those involved

Michael P. McGlynn, “Bears, Boars, and Other Socially Constructed Bodies in Hrólfs Saga Kraka,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 4, no. 2 (2009): 152–75; Marek Oziewicz, “Christian, Norse, and Celtic: Metaphysical Belief Structures in Nancy Farmer’s The Saxon Saga,” Mythlore 30, no. 115/116 (2011): 107; Christa Agnes Tuczay, “Into the Wild— Old Norse Stories of Animal Men,” in Werewolf Histories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 61–81; Santiago Francisco Barreiro and Luciana Mabel Cordo Russo, Shapeshifters in Medieval North Atlantic Literature (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018); Rebecca Merkelbach, Monsters in Society: Alterity, Transgression, and the Use of the Past in Medieval Iceland, The Northern Medieval World: On the Margins of Europe (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2019).

34 Merkelbach, Monsters in Society: Alterity, Transgression, and the Use of the Past in Medieval Iceland.

35 Raudvere, “Trolldómr in Early Medieval Scandinavia,” 102.

36 Raudvere, 102; Bynum, “Why All the Fuss about the Body?”

37 Raudvere, “Trolldómr in Early Medieval Scandinavia,” 116.

38 Raudvere, 77.

39 Guðmundsdóttir, “The Werewolf in Medieval Icelandic Literature”; Odstedt, Varulven i svensk folktradition;

Michèle Simonsen, “The Werewolf in Nineteenth-Century Denmark,” in Werewolf Histories (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 228–37; de Blécourt, Werewolf Histories.

40 Häll, “Den övernaturliga älskarinnan: Erotiska naturväsen och äktenskapet i 1600-talets Sverige”; Odstedt, Varulven i svensk folktradition; Mikael Häll, Skogsrået, näcken och djävulen: erotiska naturväsen och demonisk sexualitet i 1600- och 1700-talens Sverige (Stockholm: Malört, 2013); Mikael Häll, “Havsfruns hamn och satans famn: demonisk sexualitet, liminal kroppslighet och förtrollade naturlandskap i det tidigmoderna Sverige,” in Rig., vol. 2014:3 (Rig, 2014), 129–44.

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in erotic encounters with humans. Tales of these encounters challenged early modern conceptions of the human body.⁴¹ Häll states that eighteenth-century thought often placed supernatural creatures in liminal categories based on both “body and behaviour”.⁴² Non-human creatures that could speak, reason, and exhibit human behavior, caused people to question how they should interact with them. This “body and behaviour” put supernatural creatures “in the intersection of the categories human, animal, monster, and demon or spirit”.⁴³ Liminality and intersections of humanity, animality, and monstrosity are relevant questions to the supernatural transformation ballads. Examining hybridity in the supernatural transformation ballads on a framework of liminality instead of on a binary of human/inhuman opens the analysis to more complex cultural questions such as negotiation of gender and power.

Other scholars have pointed out that transformation and hybridity also had metaphorical and symbolic functions.⁴⁴ These scholars have shown that examining transformation this way can provide insights into how people imagined alterity and discussed social codes. A recent historical study in this vein of research is Gwendolyne Knight’s doctoral dissertation.⁴⁵ Knight examines medieval English and Irish literature and textual sources to explore the use of transformation and shapeshifting as a social metaphor. In these materials, shapeshifters were used as a “tool” or an

“illustrative aid” to discuss social and societal changes that may not otherwise be perceptible to the audience.⁴⁶ Knight concludes that the alterity of shapeshifters and hybrids can illustrate social values and be used for “both demonstrating and reifying group adherence.”⁴⁷ While transformation seemingly goes against social and religious order, breaking this order is what ultimately “reveal[s]

the divine power of God, and thus reaffirm[s] the divine order.” Knight’s interpretation of transformation in Irish and English literature is interesting to consider in the context of the Swedish medieval ballads. In some of these ballads, while transformation may seem to be against the social order, examining transformation in the context of gender tends to reaffirm or negotiate social codes as opposed to subverting them. Knight’s methodologies are also important to consider when using literature as a historical resource. Knight states that writers could use metamorphosis in literature to “emphasize or engage with particular social, political, or cultural concerns within the world created by that particular text.”⁴⁸ That is to say, literature is a representation of culture, and can be used to illuminate certain discussions prevalent in culture at a given time.

41 Häll, Skogsrået, näcken och djävulen; Häll, “Havsfruns hamn och satans famn.”

42 Häll, Skogsrået, näcken och djävulen, 561.

43 Häll, 561.

44 Camilla With Pedersen, “Metamorphoses: A Comparative Study of Representations of Shape-Shifting in Old Norse and Medieval Irish Narrative Literature” (2015); Gwendolyne Knight, Broken Order: Shapeshifting as Social Metaphor in Early Medieval England and Ireland (Stockholm: Department of History, Stockholm University, 2019).

45 Knight, Broken Order.

46 Knight, 175–76.

47 Knight, 176.

48 Knight, 14.

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Historical Background

This section will give a basic historical background to the late medieval and early modern context of the ballads. Firstly, it will discuss the ballads as an aspect of popular culture. It is important to consider how the ballads have become printed sources, what the ballads meant to people, and how they were transmitted. Without this context, it can be difficult to interpret the ballads in general, let alone depictions of gender in the ballads. This section will then discuss magic in the ideological environment of the late medieval and early modern periods. Magic was a very real, contentious, and complex part of people’s lives in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁴⁹ However, magic was also a controversial and complex subject in late medieval and early modern discourses, of which the supernatural ballads form part. There was often no specific definition of magic among late medieval and early modern people, as its definition could change based on social status, education, location, and ethnicity. Furthermore, mentalities on magic were changing during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, departing from longstanding medieval conceptions of magic.

Because of these changes, elite audiences may have viewed magic in the ballads negatively, but popular audiences may have not had shared these views. The discrepancies between popular and elite views of magic are important to consider when examining material that specifically involves early modern conceptions of magic and the supernatural.

During the renaissance, elite audiences became more interested in the popular culture of common people, and some began recording oral ballads through text.⁵⁰ Swedish elites compiled these ballads in visböcker (“songbooks”), many of which provide source material for Sveriges medeltida ballader.⁵¹ For Sweden, interest in recording the oral ballad tradition declined after the seventeenth century.⁵² Peter Burke argues that during the medieval period elites would participate in both elite and popular culture, but began to withdraw from popular culture during the first half of the early modern period.⁵³ By the end of the early modern period, elites began to “rediscover” popular culture, but as something “exotic”.⁵⁴ In Sweden, this phenomenon could relate to the renewed interest in ballad and folksong collecting during the romantic period of the nineteenth century.⁵⁵

49 Linda Oja, Varken Gud eller natur: synen på magi i 1600- och 1700-talets Sverige (Eslöv: B. Östlings bokförl.

Symposion, 1999); Raisa Maria Toivo, Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society: Finland and the Wider European Experience, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Aldershot, Hampshire, England;

Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008); Stephen A. Mitchell, Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Göran Malmstedt, En förtrollad värld: förmoderna föreställningar och bohuslänska trolldomsprocesser 1669—1672 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2018).

50 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009), 52; Elleström, Intermediala perspektiv på medeltida ballader, 16–17.

51 Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 52.

52 Jonsson, “Svensk balladtradition: 1, Balladkällor och balladtyper,” 64.

53 Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 366–86.

54 Burke, 381.

55 Jonsson, “Svensk balladtradition: 1, Balladkällor och balladtyper,” 100.

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Scholars agree that the “Swedish medieval ballads” are early modern recordings of a medieval oral tradition.⁵⁶ Printed versions of ballads from before the eighteenth century are quite rare in Sweden.⁵⁷ While most of the existing sources of Swedish medieval ballads are from the late medieval and early modern periods, they are referred to as “medieval” because they are composed in the medieval style.⁵⁸ Scholars have concluded that in the beginning, the ballads were a part of medieval oral tradition.⁵⁹ They likely contained influences from Icelandic, Danish, and Norwegian medieval courtly literature.⁶⁰ By the sixteenth century, creating anthologies of poetry and lyric had become very popular among the elite.⁶¹ That is to say, creating a collection of an oral tradition adapted to text.⁶² These early modern textual records retained medieval style and motifs.⁶³ However, they contain impressions of late medieval and early modern culture and ideologies.⁶⁴ They reflect the values, attitudes, and thoughts of their writers, and are a window into the culture of these periods. They are both a representation of culture at that point, but also a product of gradual changes spanning over a larger span of space and time.⁶⁵ The Swedish medieval ballads, in a sense, are temporal and cultural hybrids. They thus must be interpreted as multivocal and dynamic, rather than a static, unified representation of all mentalities at a single given point in time.

The natural hybridity of the ballad materials also made them accessible to all social strata of late medieval and early modern Sweden. People from all social backgrounds participated in the ballad tradition, albeit at different levels.⁶⁶ According to Peter Burke, there were “tradition-bearers”:

performers, writers, and prolific ballad singers, as well as passive participants: listeners, recorders, and singers with smaller repertoires.⁶⁷ Early modern song culture was social, performative, and associated with building group identities.⁶⁸ Musical performances in the early modern period were a part of the “performance of early music in general”.⁶⁹ We can think of the ballads as tradition, entertainment, and art form. And while people during the early modern period could modify ballads or create new performances altogether, they still operated “within a traditional framework”.⁷⁰ It

56 Colbert, The Birth of the Ballad: The Scandinavian Medieval Genre, 10:13; Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 52; Elleström, Intermediala perspektiv på medeltida ballader, 16–17.

58 Colbert, The Birth of the Ballad: The Scandinavian Medieval Genre, 10:13.

59 Elleström, Intermediala perspektiv på medeltida ballader, 17.

60 Elleström, 17; M. J. Driscoll, “Arthurian Ballads, Rímur, Chapbooks and Folktales,” in The Arthur of the North: The Arthurian Legend in the Norse and Rus’ Realms (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), 168–95.

62 Elleström, 16.

63 S. Jansson, Den levande balladen; Colbert, The Birth of the Ballad: The Scandinavian Medieval Genre.

65 Merkelbach, Monsters in Society: Alterity, Transgression, and the Use of the Past in Medieval Iceland.

Merkelback makes a similar argument about the temporality and change found in the Icelandic sagas.

66 S. Jansson, Den levande balladen, 22; Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 52–56.

68 D. E. van der Poel, Louis Peter Grijp, and W. van Anrooij, Identity, Intertextuality, and Performance in Early Modern Song Culture, Intersections (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 4.

69 Poel, Grijp, and Anrooij, 24.

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was in this way the ballad tradition did not become something else over time, but rather a self- contained blending of cultural influences. The Swedish medieval ballads are part of a stable tradition and have not changed drastically throughout their centuries’ long presence in popular culture.⁷¹

The ballads were transmitted in a variety of ways. In some cases, traveling performers transmitted ballads, though they visited urban areas more often than rural areas.⁷² In urban areas, there were also broadside singers, who would perform in markets or streets to sell their printed songs.⁷³ Those who purchased the broadside would sometimes sing with the seller.⁷⁴ The earliest surviving Swedish broadside ballads were from the sixteenth century, but many more survive from the eighteenth century and after.⁷⁵ In Sveriges medeltida ballader, many of the ballad singers were working-class people, often soldiers’ and farmers’ wives.⁷⁶ The supernatural ballads were more popular amongst women, especially ballads about the Näcken: an erotically-charged supernatural creature that lived in the water.⁷⁷

Because this thesis examines the supernatural ballads in particular, it is important to explain how late medieval and early modern people would have perceived magical creatures, witchcraft, and transformation. Beliefs on magic and superstition changed a great deal from the middle ages to the early modern period. During the medieval period, the church considered the practice of magic to be simply “superstition”.⁷⁸ The church defined “superstition” as a harmless misunderstanding or misuse of Christian teachings.⁷⁹ By the early modern period, the church saw superstition and the practice of magic as a serious threat: a “diabolical cult” of Satan.⁸⁰ Practicing magic had become a threat to the very fabric of early modern society and social hierarchy. The early modern period saw a rise in witchcraft accusations, and Sweden’s witch-hunts spanned from 1668—1676. However, there were important distinctions between developments in legal rhetoric and magic in popular practice.⁸¹ Common people often practiced magic in everyday life, despite growing legal opposition.⁸² Both men and women practiced beneficial magic and were tried for practicing magic.⁸³ Many faced trials unaware they had even broken any laws.⁸⁴ However, courts punished women

71 S. Jansson, Den levande balladen, 33–34.

73 Poel, Grijp, and Anrooij, Identity, Intertextuality, and Performance in Early Modern Song Culture, 22.

74 Poel, Grijp, and Anrooij, 22.

75 Jonsson, “Svensk balladtradition: 1, Balladkällor och balladtyper,” 63–64.

76 S. Jansson, Den levande balladen, 43.

77 S. Jansson, 155.

78 Mitchell, Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages, 3.

79 Mitchell, 3.

80 Mitchell, 3.

81 Oja, Varken Gud eller natur, 29–30.

82 Oja, 299.

83 Raisa Maria Toivo, “Male Witches and Masculinity in Early Modern Finnish Witchcraft Trials,” in Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, vol. 14 (London: Routledge, 2013), 137–52.

84 Oja, Varken Gud eller natur, 285.

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more often than men for harmful magic and magic connected to the devil.⁸⁵ This was contrary to legal rhetoric, which had grown less slanted towards women towards the early modern period.⁸⁶

Trials against witchcraft were complex entities in and of themselves and could have been both ideological struggles as well as struggles for power within a community.⁸⁷ On one hand, witchcraft trials perpetuated misogynistic beliefs that women were “weaker-minded”, thus more susceptible to committing witchcraft.⁸⁸ They were also a means for women to negotiate power and socially maneuver in their community.⁸⁹ Men could also gain status by successfully defending their wives against the defamation of a witchcraft accusation.⁹⁰ Raisa Maria Toivo states that witchcraft cases were multifaceted and displayed many layers of how social hierarchies and networks functioned in early modern rural Sweden and Finland.⁹¹ She explains that:

Being convicted of witchcraft or similar crimes obviously damaged one’s social capital and general trustworthiness, even though it did not usually lead to a total deprivation of social existence in the form of execution, deportment or confiscation of property. However, witchcraft also had a symbolic meaning, which may have given people the images and vocabulary with which they could talk about unexpected and unwelcome surprises in inheritances. Witchcraft had this potential partly because it lacked the concrete precision of some other crimes: although suspicions of witchcraft were presented relating the practical details of something the alleged witch has said or done, witchcraft was still continuously present and everyone was its potential target or victim.⁹²

In this sense, magic and witchcraft in the early modern mind were both literal and metaphorical.

They became a literal means of wielding and negotiating power: both in the courts, and people’s everyday lives. Witchcraft trials and accusations were literal means for women, men, and households to negotiate power in a community. Being accused of witchcraft could destroy or build a person’s and household’s reputation. Magic and witchcraft were metaphorical in the sense that they could represent evil and subversion of social norms and hierarchy. They provided a

“vocabulary” for expressing situations of uncertainty and upside-down worlds, just like the instability and uncertainty depicted in the supernatural transformation ballads.⁹³Conflicts involving witchcraft in these ballads both demonized the women who caused them, but also depicted them as powerful: power with the potential to rend the fabric of society.

85 Oja, 165.

86 Mitchell, Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages, 197; Christine Ekholst, A Punishment for Each Criminal: Gender and Crime in Swedish Medieval Law (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 145.

87 Maria Wallenberg Bondesson, Religiösa konflikter i norra Hälsingland 1630—1800, Stockholm studies in history 67 (Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2003); Toivo, Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society.

89 Toivo, Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society, 77.

90 Toivo, 165.

91 Toivo, 101–5.

92 Toivo, 111.

93 Toivo, 105. This vocabulary and uncertainty in witchcraft trials is also discussed here.

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These concerns with the potential dangers of witchcraft to society peaked in Sweden during the seventeenth century, but then slowly declined. At the peak of Swedish witchcraft hysteria, many accusations involved witches flying to the sabbath, kidnapping children, copulating with Satan, and stealing milk with the aid of horrific rabbit-creatures.⁹⁴ However, this period also gradually began to see a departure from fears of Satan and diabolic cults. Linda Oja describes this departure as a

“secularization” on views of magic, or a fundamental change in how people thought the world worked.⁹⁵ She concludes that while fear of witchcraft and superstition was quite strong in the sixteenth century, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries people slowly became more skeptical of the power of evil magic and witches’ sabbath. What was once explained as a supernatural phenomenon became more often a natural, or scientific phenomenon. This process was slow and did not evolve evenly between popular and elite cultures.⁹⁶ Stephen Mitchell, an expert on Nordic medieval magic, agrees with Oja.⁹⁷ He states that in comparison to the middle ages, persecutions against practicing magic were more frequent and harsher in the early parts of the early modern period, but this fear of magic evolved to a more detached fascination with the dawn of the enlightenment. While the ballads were a part of a relatively old and stable tradition, peoples’ worldviews were shifting around them. Magic in the ballads depicted older worldviews, in a changing ideological environment: they embody both stability and change.

As people’s worldviews shifted, the supernatural ballads were able to remain a relevant part of early modern culture because they depicted real-life contradictions and conflicts. Many people used magic to cure diseases, ensure success on their farm, catch fish, or catch thieves: magic was a part of people’s everyday lives.⁹⁸ These strange and otherworldly stories embodied the debates and anxieties that were a part of shifting worldviews. The contradictive values, improbable scenarios, subverted hierarchies, and reinforced gender norms of the ballads were all a part of the dialectics of the individual experience in a larger, changing society. Supernatural ballads became both stories of change, but also remnants of ideological constancy.

94 Many have written on the Swedish witch-hunts, including works that discuss folklore present in these trials.

Here are just a few: Jan-Inge Wall, Tjuvmjölkande väsen: 1, Äldre nordisk tradition, Studia ethnologica Upsaliensia (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1977); Linda Oja, ed., Vägen till Blåkulla: nya perspektiv på de stora svenska häxprocesserna, vol. 18, Opuscula historica Upsaliensia (Uppsala: Historiska institutionen, Univ., 1997); Oja; Per-Anders Östling, Blåkulla, Magi Och Trolldomsprocesser: En Folkloristisk Studie Av Folkliga Trosföreställningar Och Av Trolldomsprocesserna Inom Svea Hovrätts Jurisdiktion 1597–1720, Etnolore 25 (Uppsala: Etnologiska avdelningen, 2002).

96 Oja, 29–30.

97 Mitchell, Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages, 4.

98 Toivo, Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society, 40–42; Mitchell, Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages, 51.

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Primary Sources

Sveriges medeltida ballader: Sweden’s Medieval Ballads

The source material for this thesis comprises entirely of printed work from Sveriges medeltida ballader.

Sveriges medeltida ballader is a completed project led by Svenska visarkivet (the Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research) to print and catalog nearly every medieval ballad in Swedish. Although there were many printed ballad collections before Sveriges medeltida ballader, the Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research sought to close the gaps in these existing collections by creating a definitive collection of Swedish language ballads across Sweden and Swedish-speaking parts of Finland.⁹⁹ They used both published sources and the entirety of the collections at the Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research.¹⁰⁰ The following sections will introduce how ballads in Sveriges medeltida ballader are organized, provide information on their provenance, and describe how they were selected for print.

The ballads for this thesis come from only volume one of Sveriges medeltida ballader, Naturmytiska visor (Supernatural Ballads).¹⁰¹ Ballads in Sveriges medeltida ballader can come from a variety of sources, but the ballads in this thesis come mainly from historical textual sources or interviews with performers. Ballads from before the eighteenth century are more often texts from visböcker. Other text sources could be skillingtryck, or “broadside ballads”. However, the most common source of

100 Jonsson et al., 6. Because of the limited space printing space for Sveriges medeltida ballader, they limited the number of sources they printed. All unprinted sources are cited at the end of the section for the ballad. For ballads with many sources, they chose to print a maximum of 25 versions. In Jonsson et al., 5. they state that they chose 25 because it was an easier number to work with, and works with the internationally recognized (A- Z) labeling system. Furthermore, they state that most of the ballads could be narrowed down to 25 printed versions, and only 60 ballads (of 260) exceeded this amount. Because this thesis has selected a limited number of ballads and versions, this has not been an issue to examining the sources.

101 In Scandinavian ballad research, the medieval ballads typically fall into six different categories: Ballads of the Supernatural, Legendary Ballads, Historical Ballads, Ballads of Chivalry, Heroic Ballads, Jocular Ballads.

(Translation from: Types of the Scandinavian Ballad) The ballads of Sveriges medeltida ballader fall into five volumes: Naturmytiska ballader, Legendvisor och historiska visor, Riddarvisor I, Riddarvisor II, Kämpvisor och skämtvisor. (See: Sveriges medeltida ballader band 1-5:2) In Sveriges medeltida ballader, ballads are

differentiated by name and number, and versions are labeled by letter. Versions differ enough that they are distinguishable, but not so much that they are no longer the same story. When examining the different ballads, some scholars in English have opted to use the term “ballad type”. (See: Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad). Compare to Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index of “tale types”. Referring to ballads as “ballad types” allows scholars to examine ballads with the same story, that are from different ballad traditions. For example, the ballad type “The Two Sisters” could refer to the Danish (DgF 95), Faroese (CCF 136), Icelandic (IFkv 13), Norwegian (NMB 18), or Swedish versions (SMB 13). “The Two Sisters” would also be the same type as the English ballad

“The Cruel Sister” or “The Twa Sisters” (Child 10). For this thesis, I will refer to “ballad types” as simply

“ballads”. For more information about these collections and how they are organized, see: Jonsson, “Svensk balladtradition: 1, Balladkällor och balladtyper”; Bengt R. Jonsson, Svale Solheim, and Eva Danielson, eds., The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad: A Descriptive Catalogue (Oslo: Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning, 1978); Jonsson et al., Sveriges medeltida ballader, 1–15, 493–95; James Massengale, “Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers,” in Ballads of the North, Medieval to Modern (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019), 3–28.

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ballads in Sveriges medeltida ballader are ballads collected by an interviewer listening to a singer.¹⁰² Interviewers’ expertise ranged from folksong interested amateurs to musical professionals.¹⁰³ The interviewer would listen to a singer’s performance, then record the ballad text and sometimes melody.¹⁰⁴ Most ballads in Sveriges medeltida ballader have information on where and when the source or singer was from.¹⁰⁵

Of the ballads that the Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research decided to print, there are three main points that they kept in mind when making their selection: temporality, geography, and the contents of the ballad itself.¹⁰⁶ Because people have carried on the ballad tradition for centuries, the date the ballad was recorded is not a precise marker of how old the ballad is.¹⁰⁷ Content and style of ballads became more important criteria, rather than the dating of the materials.

They did not include ballads composed in styles clearly after 1520.¹⁰⁸ The “Swedish medieval ballad” had to align with the medieval style. Furthermore, materials from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries that fit the criteria were almost invariably chosen for print, as they are so difficult to find.¹⁰⁹ Secondly, the Centre sought to provide material from an equal geographic distribution across Sweden and Swedish-speaking parts of Finland.¹¹⁰ The last major rule regarded the contents of the ballads themselves. Ballads had to follow the Swedish medieval style. They have cohesive narratives, settings, and characters.¹¹¹ Additionally, while not entirely universal, many follow a similar structure. They have an end rhyme with either two-line or four-line verses.¹¹² While the songs may have the same story or characters, anything that did not follow the style conventions of the Swedish medieval ballad was not chosen for print.

Methodologies

The ballads for this thesis meet two general criteria. Firstly, they contain “supernatural transformation”. Secondly, they are the oldest versions of each ballad or come from the oldest singers. These chosen versions have enough variation that they are not identical, but not so much

102 Ling, “Levin Christian Wiedes vissamling: en studie i 1800-talets folkliga vissång,” 20.

103 Ling, 20.

104 Ling, 20.

105 This is usually the type of source the ballad was from, where this source was printed, and when it was printed.

In the cases where the song was performed, information on singers could include name, birth and death dates, where they lived and where they were from, when they performed the ballad, and their occupation. Interestingly, a woman’s occupation was often listed as her husband’s wife. For example, “soldier’s wife” or “sailor’s wife”.

106 Jonsson et al., Sveriges medeltida ballader, 6–8.

107 Jonsson et al., 6.

110 Jonsson et al., 6–7. Sveriges medeltida ballader labels geographic origin of a ballad through landskap (province).

111 S. Jansson, Den levande balladen. p. 21

112 Jansson, 22.

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that the narrative is completely different.¹¹³ This method narrows down the materials to a more reasonable volume for a master’s thesis, while also allowing enough material to analyze for this thesis. The supernatural within the realm of the ballads is anything that exceeds natural human ability. While people’s conceptions of magic and the supernatural in the late medieval and early modern periods were more complex than this simple rule, in the fictional world of the ballads, abilities stemming from supernatural powers are clear to the audience. Humans turn into wolves, talking snakes ride horses, castles materialize out of thin air: audiences were aware of magic because it had to alter reality in some way.

While there are various types of transformation in the Swedish medieval ballads, this thesis only includes ballads that describe humans with inhuman bodies.¹¹⁴ People could transform into things found in nature, or even into objects. But to gain information on humanness and gender, the ballad must discuss how some facet of how the person’s identity conflicts with the transformed state. The most common indication of a “facet of humanity” is the transformed creature’s ability to communicate with humans through speech. However, retaining a human identity in a transformed state does not mean a hybrid will behave within human social codes. This thesis includes a small sample of the ballads that contain supernatural transformation and interesting discussions of gender, hybridity, and power.¹¹⁵

It is important to acknowledge some of the drawbacks to working with ballads from Sveriges medeltida ballader, and some of the issues with working with ballads in general. Firstly, a ballad could change based on its performer. While these ballads are part of a widespread Scandinavian tradition, they are also part of individual experiences. The ballad was not just a song and a story, but also a performance. The performativity of a medieval ballad created dynamic relationships between performer, audience, and ballad, which changed from person to person. Performers could change their medium based on their relationship to their audience, or their relationship to the ballad.¹¹⁶ Singers may have built repertoires around what resonated with them or what interested them.¹¹⁷ This performativity is what gives ballads variation, richness, and cultural significance, but it also makes it a challenging material to study.¹¹⁸ There is no one “true” or “original” version of a ballad,

113 For example, while version H of Jungfrun förvandlad till lind is within the ballad type SMB 12, the story is about a tree talking to a girl. It is made clear that the tree, was simply a talking tree. The performer stated that it was a “story from a time when all things could talk.” Jonsson et al., Sveriges medeltida ballader, 92. De två systrarna version C is similar because the younger sister survives and returns to her parents, unlike all the other printed versions.

114 Knight, Broken Order, 88. Transformation in this thesis does not include resurrection or aging. I take inspiration from Knight’s framework of defining transformation.

115 For a complete list of the ballads and versions in this thesis, with short plot summaries, see the appendix.

118 In a discussion I had with Svenska visarkivet, they said that at times singers would not pay close attention to the meaning of lyrics, so there were times when ballads were difficult to understand. Singers could add or take out parts of a ballad with every new performance. The performativity and adaptability of a ballad made it a dynamic, multilayered piece of culture. Ballads meant different things to different people, which makes them a

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no means to trace where and when a ballad is from, or what exactly people thought of them.¹¹⁹ Furthermore, variation did not end with the performer. The ballads in this thesis were also collected by humans, who likely brought their own impressions, even when recording a performance. There are likely inaccuracies in the process of converting a song to text. For instance, Jan Ling found that among people who recorded ballad performances during the nineteenth century, those who were musically trained were more likely to alter or “correct” the melody of a ballad they recorded.¹²⁰ The distribution of the materials is also an issue, both geographically and among groups of people. The ballad collections that Sveriges medeltida ballader relies upon are often more concentrated in certain geographic areas than others.¹²¹ Furthermore, the ballad collections feature far more women performers than male performers.¹²²

Questions of variability and representation bring a few issues to a qualitative study of the ballads.

We can safely assume the variation and individual impressions found in the ballads were not anything outside of an established medieval and early modern “traditional framework”.¹²³ Because artists functioned within this framework, researchers can better estimate the cultural environment that produced the ballads. This cultural environment is not precise, but rather a farrago of ideological artifacts and gradual changes in mentalities over time and space. That is why this thesis is a study of mentalities, culture, and an artistic medium, which are thought to reflect individual experiences of people living in a larger society. This is a study of how the ballads depict people, conflicts, and relationships, and how these depictions relate to late medieval and early modern historical context.

With these issues in mind, this thesis takes careful consideration of how to read and analyze these materials. While ballads are a literary source, a historical analysis through the lens of late medieval and early modern popular culture can provide information on the social norms of that time. Focusing on the supernatural transformation ballads can provide a new and unique view of how gender was depicted in popular culture, through the lens of hybridity, liminality, and alterity.

As Gwendolyne Knight states in her doctoral thesis, historical documents as well as literary texts

“are all representations of cultural moments that construct meaning, reinforce norms, and fulfill social functions.”¹²⁴ The ballads both represent individual elements of popular culture in late

unique representation of popular culture. Furthermore, these many different meanings and understandings could be left open to the audience to interpret.

119 See also: Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 173.

120 Ling, “Levin Christian Wiedes vissamling: en studie i 1800-talets folkliga vissång,” 84.

122 S. Jansson, 46–47.

124 Knight, Broken Order. pp. 12-13