Food and drink - part 1

As mentioned in Novum's additions and amendments video, The Hårgas try to make Dani eat a whole salted herring with the tail first “for good luck”. Salted herring is sometimes used for superstitious purposes relating to romantic love.

Similar to the flowers under the pillow custom, eating something very salty, like salt herring or special heavily salted "dream porridge" and going to bed without having anything to drink would allegedly lead to your future spouse appearing in your dream and offering you something to drink - what kind of drink you're offered is supposed to be indicative on whether your life together would be rich or poor.

Schön (1989 p. 79) mentions the method of sitting backwards on a chair and eating a whole salt herring with the tail first, because again, everything done in reverse is more magically effective. Wall (2009 p. 48) discusses similar rituals. So the fact that Dani fails to eat the herring (after Pelle has kissed her and before Christian cheats on her) is likely a conscious move from Ari Aster’s part, possibly alluding to Dani’s lack of foresight and control in regards to her love life.

On a personal level, I loved seeing the woodland strawberries on grass stalks being handed out to the guests when the group first arrives, because that was constant during the summer when I was little, especially around midsummer. When Christian tries to half-heartedly make up for the fact that he forgot the birthday of his girlfriend of four years, he does so with a piece of sockerkaka, a popular type of sponge cake.

References

Schön, E. (1989) Folktrons år : gammalt skrock kring årsfester, märkesdagar och fruktbarhet. Stockholm: Raben & Sjögren.

Wall, T. (2009) "Sommarfesten hyllar ljuset" Populär historia (nr. 6). p. 46-49

The dance competition - part 1

From what I can tell the actual choreography of the dance around the maypole comes mostly from the mind of choreographer Anna Vnuk, but the mythology around it has authentic cultural roots.

The story Irma tells before the competition is a real folk tale about the Dance of Hårga that takes place during midsummer’s eve, but it’s a Christian story traced back to 1785, with “den mörke” (the dark one) being the devil. (Novum elaborates further how the notion of the dark one is intertwined in the Hårga mythology and the movie at large) The tale is commonly associated with the dance Hambo, and there are several regional dance contests directly inspired by or based on the tale, such as Hälsingehambon.

"Väva Vadmal" or “Weaving Wadmal'', mentioned during the competition, is the name of another Swedish folk dance. Generally the choreography is inspired by the way a warp-weighted loom is worked when producing the woolen fabric wadmal, which was used as a type of currency in Scandinavia back in the day.

I don’t know enough about weaving to be able to tell if Vnuk’s “väva vadmal” choreography also replicates this somehow, but this particular part felt to me like Vnuk was invoking the themes of Dani’s descending into the Hårga as a collective. The way the camera follows Dani, slowly panning up to a bird’s eye view as she becomes harder and harder to distinguish from the other women, seems reminiscent of tiny cogs in a giant machinery or bees in a beehive, or Dani disappearing into just a tiny thread in a large tapestry.

The dance we see in the movie does include the running around in a ring that is commonplace during midsummer, and the occasional bowing to and worshiping the ritual tree (that I have never seen in real life but certainly fits the Hårga lore).

The love spell

Let's get this one out of the way. As Novum mentions in his complete guide, the love spell depicted in the film is very much based on real traditions.

Midsummer is by all accounts a fertility holiday, related to crops and life and rebirth, and young women calling on the mystic powers to find them a man is certainly part of it. As Schön (1989) puts it - “Midsummer was the holiday of erotics before all else” (p. 78)

Bodily fluids have been used in various magical and spiritual rituals for thousands of years, and a recurring phenomenon in Scandinavian folklore, not least in Hälsingland, is women putting their pubic hair, genital sweat, discharge or menstrual blood in food and drinks to serve to the man they’re hoping will fall in love with them (Kuusela 2017 p. 19-20)

This could be a stranger or a girl’s actual husband who has been growing distant lately. Fun variations include making waffles with pubic hair or dripping some menstrual blood into a cut apple. Just remember, if you try this at home - make sure the right dude eats the apple! If the wrong man eats it, he’s gonna be the one who falls madly in love with you. (Schön 1996 p. 17-21)

The first half of the love spell tapestry brought back memories of what I learned as a child - on Midsummer’s night, a girl should pick a certain number of different flowers and put them under her pillow, and her future husband will appear in her dream. There are a lot of regional variations to this one, from the number of flowers to how they should be picked. In some versions the girl has to jump over a new roundpole fence for every flower she picks, a practice mentioned in the script as part of the May queen competition. Other recurring things include picking them backwards, in the nude and in silence - these are all hallmarks of magic and rituals in Scandinavian peasantry, somehow reversing or deviating from the way you normally do things. (Kuusela 2017 p. 12, Schön 1989 p. 75, 80)

Silence is something Schön particularly emphasizes when talking about the love spells, so the fact that Maja doesn’t utter a word in the movie until after the deed is done serves not only to mystify her character but to illustrate that she takes this ritual very seriously. In the director’s cut she’s approached by Christian but is reluctant to talk to him and Ulla swoops in to speak for her.

The number of flowers to pick is usually one of the magic numbers - 3, 7 or 9. Raised in rural Västmanland, I was personally taught it was nine flowers, and that is also the number shown on the love spell tapestry and the recurring magic number in the movie.

References

Kuusela, T. (2017), ”Kärlek i Hälsingland. Folklig spådom och magi för att finna och binda kärleken”. I: Hälsingerunor 2017

Schön, E. (1989) Folktrons år : gammalt skrock kring årsfester, märkesdagar och fruktbarhet. Stockholm: Raben & Sjögren.

Schön, E. (1996) (B) Älskogens magi. Folktro om kärlek och lusta, Stockholm. pp. 17-21

Maypoles, the Rotvälta and other sacred trees

I wanted my first post to touch on a subject matter close to my heart, and few things in this project are as personal to me as the spiritual and cultural implications behind different Swedish trees.

May day in midsummer
Let’s touch on this real quick. Why are Swedish midsummer traditions that take place at the height of summer crammed with things with the word “may” in their name? A commonly presented explanation is that Scandinavia adopted phenomena elsewhere in Europe associated with May Day, but since our climate isn’t apt for things like maypoles by that time of year, we started doing them around the warmer summer solstice instead. Another is that one of the many meanings of the word " “maj” means “adorned with flowers/leaves” (Gunnarsson 1988 p. 39, Schön 1989 p. 82) and the word “maja” is the verb of “adorning/dressing with leaves”.

The Maypole
Our favorite giant flower phallus, the maypole is by no means monopolized by the Swedish midsummer celebration. It was likely introduced in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, before that leaf trees were used for similar purposes during summer solstice. Scholars are to this day uncertain of what it was originally meant to represent. Was it Axis Mundi? Yggdrasil? Germanic tree worshiping adjacent to Christmas trees? 
The popular hypothesis of phallic symbolism has only been circulating for a couple of centuries. The Nordic Museum rejects this hypothesis and acknowledges that although midsummer is a fertility holiday, nothing in their extensive archives supports the idea of the maypole as an intentionally phallic symbol. Schön (1989 p.82) also points out that there is no reliable evidence for this, and Engman of the Nordic Museum attributes the emergence and spread of this idea to the influence of psychoanalysis and Freudian theories in the early 20th century.

The Rotvälta and other trees
Before cemeteries and tombstones came along the go-to means of burial in Sweden seems to have been fields called ättehögar. (Experts on pre-Christian burials are welcome to chime in here) I haven’t found any indications that a rotvälta (windthrow) would be used to mark a mass grave, nor the use of grave trees. But trees as symbols of life and death are almost constant in Scandinavian culture and mythology, even post-Christianity (Gunnarsson p. 31). Healing and magical trees (Novum mentions “vårdträd”), sacred trees, life trees, world trees (Yggdrasil has entered the chat). “Death trees” seems to mainly refer to trees with bodies hanging from their branches. (Oden has left the chat)

The role of trees in Scandinavian mythology would probably be an essay in and of itself and it’s challenging to keep this brief. The parallels between the biological structure of trees and that of the human body are too many to count, so suffice to say it would make sense that the Hårgas with their circle of life naturism place their dead bodies under a dead tree.
In the script, the Hårgas each have a personal tree that’s planted at their birth, and the health and vitality of the tree reflects that of its associated Hårga member. The disrespect that gets Mark killed isn’t that he urinates on a grave tree, but that he climbs and damages Ulfs personal tree. This is in line with a tradition that has been observed, amongst other places, in Northern Sweden. The script also shows us a healing ritual involving an infant and a tree that tracks with the superstitious practices around “healing trees” (p. 30-35) Schön (1989) points out that calling upon magical cures from nature likely comes from a kind of collective coping mechanism in societies where you’re dozens of miles from the nearest doctor or vet (Schön 1989 p. 75)

References
Gunnarsson, A. and Gunnarsson, L. (1988) Träden och människan. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren.
Schön, E. (1989) Folktrons år : gammalt skrock kring årsfester, märkesdagar och fruktbarhet. Stockholm: Raben & Sjögren.

Välkommen till Midsommar Unraveled!

Welcome to Midsommar Unraveled, where we analyze the 2019 Ari Aster film Midsommar through the lens of the Swedish cultural, mythological and magical context.
Most of the posts are brief comments on details in the film and fall under one of these categories - nature, traditions and aesthetics.

My name is Minna and I'm a Swedish journalist with some background in ethnology and sociology, and a soft spot for botany. I grew up in rural Västmanland, in a tiny village around a 3 hour car ride from the real life Hårga, and was raised with a lot of rigorous traditions around midsummer. So apologies in advance for broken English or grammatical errors. I'm not an anthropologist or ethnologist, and this is purely a leisurely project where I analyze the traditions behind the film based on the litterature I've found and my personal experiences of rural midsummer traditions.

Needless to say, I welcome corrections and additions with open arms. I'm especially interested in the perspectives of people in the know about Norse mythology, folk costumes, Hungarian cultural influences and pre-Christian burial customs. In the future, I hope to interview experts on certain niche topics and Swedish people who worked on the film for this blog.

In some rare cases I will be linking Wikipedia articles when I haven't found satisfactory sources in English and want to briefly mention somethng that I encourage you to read more about, even if it isn't relevant to elaborate on here.

For an extensive guide to Midsommar, including a wide range of ethnological explanations, check out Novum's Midsommar - The Complete Guide and the accompanying Additions & Amendments video. This blog will elaborate on a lot of things mentioned in both videos. For more deep dives of details the film, check out the amazing Midsommary blog.