December Blog

Sweden is one of the few places in the world where a real (dressed up) walking talking Santa comes to your home on Christmas Eve to drop off a sack of gifts (as you can read in the LastWord). Tomte myths still persist and folklorist Bengt af Klintberg (interviewed in the current Scandinavian Press) told me the true story of a relative of his who always put out a bowl of porridge for the farm's tomte each Christmas Eve. One year the porridge was left untouched and shortly after that the farm burnt down.

The basis of all the myths about the tomte will once again be vigorously discussed in Swedish media in the days leading up to Christmas. I don’t have a favourite theory myself. But it is a different matter when it comes to trolls. After seeing the film Beowulf and Grendel a few years back, I believe that they were Neanderthals. The Icelandic Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson does not portray Grendel as an evil monster, but rather as someone "that has spawned off the same evolutionary tree who happens to be a little bit bigger and who lives down the valley". In North America Neanderthals tie in with the Sasquatch myth and they are a perfect fit for the trolls in Scandinavia.

In Swedish folklore trolls have cattle and make a living from farming so, although they are culturally and physically different from us, they live a similar life to ours but in a parallel dimension. In some early fairy tales by Elsa Beskow (who we write about on page 17), trolls are depicted as an aboriginal race of hunters and gatherers who are fleeing the encroaching human civilization.

The Neanderthal theory is not completely new. Although some folklorists argue that the troll is entirely a figment of our imagination, there are others who believe that trolls emanate from tales from the time of the Neanderthals (that overlapped with Homo Sapiens for 30 000 to 50 000 years). Researchers at Uppsala university have recently proved that there was much more interaction and also sexual interaction between humans and Neanderthals than previously thought. There are genetic similarities and we may even have inherited some of our immune system genes from them.

Could the tomte fit in with the troll theory? In Iceland it is not a tomte but the 13 yule lads who bring gifts at Christmas time. Both scary and kind, they are clearly descendants of trolls and have not adopted the persona of Santa Claus, something that the tomte in Sweden has gradually morphed into during the last century.

May you get a visit from the tomte and may he be generous this year.

Anders