In 1656, Karin Svensdotter stood trial in the southern Swedish village of Sävsjö on an unusual charge: fornication with supernatural beings. Specifically, the court was investigating the young housemaid’s claims that she had a relationship with the King of the Fairies.
Svensdotter testified that several years before, she had been approached by a handsome man dressed in gold who called himself the Älvakungen, meaning “Elf King.” (Elf can be used generically for all humanlike spirits of nature, similar to the term fairy). He led her into the forest, to a great hall hidden beneath a mountain, where they danced and reveled with other elves in fine clothes. After this, Svensdotter said, her otherworldly lover began to visit regularly. Their relationship resulted in seven children, but each time Svensdotter gave birth, the Elf King appeared and carried the baby off to his own realm, despite her protestations. Witnesses testified that they had seen Svensdotter experience exhausting physical fits, which she described as labor pains, and heard her wandering the forest at night in search of her stolen children. Despite this, there was no evidence that Svensdotter had ever been pregnant.
Svensdotter’s story and the ensuing legal trial were not as unusual as we might think today. Though unique in some of its particulars, it fits into widespread concerns in Early Modern Europe over the dangerous and seductive powers of the spirits of nature, beings that our modern terminology would broadly refer to as “fairies.” In the 1600s, Swedish society was fraught with tension between Christian doctrine, traditional beliefs, and the budding discipline of natural science: Especially after 1608, when the Bible became law in Sweden and sorcery became punishable by death. Conflicting ideas came to a head in legal trials, including many that, like Svensdotter’s, centered on a charge of forbidden love between a mortal and a supernatural being.
“There’s clashing worldviews there in the trials,” says folklore scholar Tommy Kuusela, a research archivist at Uppsala University. “When people are saying, ‘I met and I had sexual intercourse with the forest spirit,’ the clergy would say, ‘Because there is no forest spirit, what you are actually saying is that you have met the Devil taking this form.’ Which could be a capital punishment.” Cases like Svensdotter’s were taken seriously because there was no room for an Elf King in the Christian order of the universe upheld by the clergy and government. But for many people in 17th-century Sweden, spirits were as tangible as animals and plants, and Christianity could coexist with older ideas about the supernatural.
Kuusela points out that “even the ones who were accused in these trials, they saw themselves as Christians.” Especially in places close to what Kuusela calls the “perilous otherworld” of the forest, people still clung to their pre-Christian beliefs in nature spirits, and made offerings to gain their blessing. Folklore reflected daily life and passed on traditional wisdom in ways that the Bible did not. “They have something they hear from the clergy, and they also have their own experiences in living at the farmstead,” says Kuusela. “The Church can’t explain how to plow your fields, what to do when you’re out hunting, and things like that. And that’s things you can get from folklore.” Some folktales attempted to reconcile the two belief systems, identifying spirits as outcast angels beholden to neither Heaven nor Hell.
One name used for such beings was rå (pronounced like “raw”), derived from an Old Swedish word for “ruler.” “This is a nature spirit that rules over a certain area,” says Kuusela, such as the skogsrå, who ruled a forest, the sjörå, who ruled a lake, or the bergrå, who ruled a mountain. Rår were often described as alluring, despite subtle inhuman features like the tail of a horse or cow, or a back that was hollow when seen from behind. They were typically female, and often amorous. “It’s usually men by themselves that meet this sexualized femme fatale of the forest,” says Kuusela. This theme in Swedish folklore may be rooted in the lonely fantasies of hunters and woodsmen, whose work kept them isolated in the wilderness for long periods. Kuusela points out that in traditional tales of the seductive forest nymph, it is she who propositions the man, despite the fact that a woman would have been considered indecent for doing the same. Svensdotter’s carousing with the Fairy King was similarly outside the norms of respectable 17th-century behavior.
When compared with other Swedish trials focusing on supernatural relationships, Svensdotter’s case was unusual both for the specific description of the being, and for the gender of the parties involved. Kuusela explains that, in the few historical cases where a Swedish woman was accused of sex with a male spirit, he was usually a water spirit called a näck. Svensdotter’s description of her king, including his palace beneath a mountain, seems to more closely match tales of the rå, including the male “king of the forest” found in Finnish and some other European folklore.
More typical examples of these supernatural love trials include that of Peder Jönsson in 1640, who was executed in the town of Söderköping for carrying on an affair with a rå in exchange for secret knowledge and good fortune (Jönsson’s wife testified that he refused to have sex with her because he had promised to be faithful to the spirit). Another man named Sven Andersson may have been executed in 1691 after being seduced by the rå of a mountain in the southern province of Västergötland, though it’s unclear whether his sentence was carried out. And in at least two cases, soldiers arrested for desertion blamed their absence on a dalliance with a Lady of the Forest.
On those rare occasions when a woman was brought to trial for a supernatural relationship in Sweden, it was usually because she had given birth to a child with an unusual appearance, raising suspicion about the father’s identity. Kuusela connects this to the belief elsewhere in Europe that such babies were “changelings,” fairies secretly swapped for stolen human children. Parallels to Svensdotter’s case can also be found in contemporary trials from other parts of Europe. In 16th- and 17th-century Sicily, when the island was ruled by Spain, dozens of women testified that they had been visited in dreams by fairy-women called the Doñas de Fuera, Spanish for “Ladies From the Outside,” who led them to opulent parties where male fairies lavished them with attention.
Kuusela notes that Swedish fairy trials “can, in a way, be compared to the witch craze” that gripped much of Europe at the time, which also arose from conflicting systems of belief and fear of Satan’s influence. According to Göran Malmstedt, a cultural historian at the University of Göthenburg, “one of the main thoughts that caused the big trials in Europe” was “the idea that all witches are together in a conspiracy with the Devil.” This went against an older concept of magic as secret knowledge held by individuals, including the spirits themselves. According to Malmstedt, häxa, the Swedish word for “witch,” was borrowed from German and not used widely until the 1670s, when Sweden’s biggest witch trials were held. Before that, Swedish magic-users were called “troll-men” or “troll-women” or simply kloka, meaning “wise.”
Witch-hunts and witch trials were already declining in the rest of Europe by the time they reached Sweden. During the height of Swedish witch trials from 1668 to 1676, about 300 people were executed. Even then, says Malmstedt, “in the central government, I think there were some doubts about those ideas. But on the other hand, you can see on the local level that priests and local judges were taking these ideas very seriously.” In some cases, interrogators used intimidation and torture to get the narrative they wanted from the accused. “Those that didn’t confess, they couldn’t execute,” says Malmstedt, so “most of them were forced to confess by torture.” Peder Jönsson, executed for a supposed relationship with a spirit, was initially only charged with using magic to find lost items, but the court presumed that he must have learned the spell from a demon lover. Jönsson embellished his testimony with each round of questioning, first adding a rå with the traditional foal’s tail, later describing her as more overtly demonic, with the legs and hooves of a goat.
Unlike Jönsson and many others, Karin Svensdotter was not accused of actively using magic. Instead, her physical convulsions and shocking confessions, including her false pregnancies, were rationalized as supernatural in origin. As recently as the 19th century, communities without modern medical knowledge might blame fairies for unexplained illness, writes scholar Richard Sugg in Fairies: A Dangerous History, because “they gave an otherwise frighteningly arbitrary condition a meaning—a known and accepted place within a shared framework of explanation.” In Witch Trials: A Worldwide Chronology, encyclopedist Mary Ellen Snodgrass describes Karin Svensdotter as a fantasist whose invented encounters “enlivened the boredom of domestic farmwork.” But based on her distress at being separated from her alleged children, Svensdotter seemed to believe her own explanation for what had happened to her.
The allure of fantasy as escape, or the perception of dreams or delusions as reality, may have played a role in Svensdotter’s interpretation of events. Malmstedt describes dreams being used as evidence in some of the Swedish trials, where “people thought that they had been in contact with evil powers in their dream.” Even if these dreams and fantasies were accepted as being magical in origin, there was still the question of whether they had actually taken place. “There was a debate among Church people in the 17th century,” says Malmstedt. “Were all these stories really true? … Or was it illusions?” Had people like Svensdotter been sleeping with the Devil? Or had the Devil bewitched them to think that they had?
Kuusela adds that “this is also a time when we were exploring [and] learning more about nature.” Supernatural love trials inspired fascination from scholars and sparked debates like whether spirits were made of flesh and blood, whether humans could produce children with them, and whether sex with a cow-tailed rå should be considered bestiality (which was “a real, actual problem” in Swedish society at the time, says Kuusela, resulting in more executions than witchcraft). Just as early trials sought to explain the spirits in Christian terms, some of the later examples attempted scientific explanations. In a case from 1706, the head of the court reasoned that the horse-legged beauty described by the accused was no immortal spirit, but an actual horse/human hybrid.
As for Karin Svensdotter, the court ruled that her fairy romance had not happened in the literal sense, but that Satan had tormented her with illusions. This meant that she was not guilty of witchcraft, but a victim of it; a noteworthy outcome, given that her trial happened at a time when there was no consensus whether fairies and elves were imaginary, or demons in disguise. The lack of witnesses to supernatural events may have played a role in the verdict. Malmstedt explains that a quorum of reputable witnesses was essential to convict someone of witchcraft.
Svensdotter’s congregation was instructed to pray for her deliverance, and she was sent home with a silver cross for protection; an echo of the “elf cross,” a cross or star symbol used in Sweden to ward off malevolent spirits. The Fairy King apparently ceased to visit Svensdotter following her trial. It’s unknown what happened to her after this, but cases of men and women consorting with forest spirits would continue to be brought to trial for decades.
By the 18th century, a new worldview founded in science had begun to spread, in which people sought rational explanations for unusual events and did not fear the Devil’s malevolent interference to the same extent. This meant that witch trials were increasingly viewed as spurious nonsense. The last execution for witchcraft in Sweden took place in 1704. Accusations of black magic made in the 18th and 19th centuries were liable to be thrown out of court by higher authorities who no longer took them seriously. But as people continued to live alongside and derive their livelihood from nature, belief in nature spirits persisted well into the modern era. Kuusela notes accounts of men claiming to have met a forest spirit recorded in the early 20th century.
In a changing society where the Church sought to enforce its authority, trials prosecuting fairy romance were signs of a power struggle between two very different understandings of the world. Stories of supernatural love affairs forced people to examine their own beliefs and question what was possible, or acceptable, within their own reality. Folktales, says Kuusela, “are actually stories about ourselves.”
