Bergsrå

The herd boy at Taberg had lain down somewhere warm with the mine at his back and gone to sleep. Something woke him. A woman was standing over him, and what she said was three words long: take the mountain. A Värmland man born in 1882 told it that way in 1938, offering it as the reason the place is called Taberg, and place names almost never come by so tidily. The shape of the encounter is right, though. The bergsrå does not haunt anybody. She gives instructions.

Swedish folk belief filled the landscape with rå, a word attested since about 1600 and built on råda, to rule. Every kind of place had one. The forest had its skogsrå, the lake its sjörå, the sea its havsrå, the farmyard and the mill each their own. The rå was not a ghost and not a god. It was the resident owner of a particular patch of the world, and the only sensible policy toward an owner is to stay on good terms. The bergsrå held the rock and everything valuable inside it, which in Sweden meant iron and copper and silver, and her stories cluster thickest in Bergslagen, where the mining was.

She came up out of the dark looking like money. Where the skogsrå appeared as a young woman whose back was hollow like a rotten trunk, and who dragged a cow’s tail behind her, the bergsrå had neither. The collectors’ notebooks give a stately herrskapsdam in good clothes, and several accounts hang a heavy ring of keys at her waist, the way the mistress of a large house carried hers. She went by dozens of names depending on the parish: gruvfrun and gruvmora, malmfröken and gruvjungfru, bergkäring, bergrånda, and affectionate ones like Gamla Mormor and Gruv-Maja. In Dalarna she was Rådande or Gods-gumman. In Gästrikland, Bergrån. Local mines had their own local ladies, Lövbergsfrun, Stormoss-Kari, Höråsajungfrun, each one bound to her own hole in the ground.

She kept animals, or she became them. Anything alive that turned up in a drift might be one of her creatures or might be her, so killing it was out of the question. If a beast was underfoot and in danger of being hurt, the men were expected to carry it up and let it go outside, in daylight, unharmed.

The etiquette went further than that, and it was not decorative. In some mines the crew lifted their hats at the mouth of the shaft and said good morning to the dark before they started. Whistling was forbidden. So was swearing, shouting, and throwing stones. Food scraps were not to be left lying about, and a man cleaned up after himself because she liked order and because the alternative was unthinkable. She owned the ore. The men only borrowed it.

Kept sweet, she paid well. She would point out where the veins ran. Stina i Finnmossen, walking home from work one evening, heard something coming up fast behind her and found it was the bergsrå, who wanted to borrow her cooking pot and named the spot where it should be left and collected. When Stina went back for it the pot was heavy with two-krona coins. Another man, called over one night and offered gruel, told her that if she had more than she could eat she ought to save it until morning. She thanked him and said she had never thought of that. At dawn he found the moss scraped off a slab of rock, and the slab was solid ore, and that was the first strike of a great mine.

Crossed, she simply took the ore away. A woman born in 1848 in Färnebo remembered the old people saying that if a crew did not knock off at the proper hour, or was not decent in the rock, they got nothing: the face would look full of ore when they began picking at it, and after a while there would be none there at all. She could twist a man’s sight so that a lode he had found with his own hands could never be found again. Worse stories exist. Crews who would not mind her were sealed in and died there. One man refused her food and shortly afterwards fell and broke himself on the stone.

Most of the time, though, she was the reason anybody came home. She woke sleepers. She called out. Men heard a full shift’s work going on in galleries where nobody was working, and heard the mountain sigh, and the sigh meant get out now; some swore they heard her say it aloud, in words. If she showed herself at all it was a warning of an accident coming, and the colour of her dress told them how bad. Black meant someone would die. White meant they would probably survive it. At Taberg black birds were seen before a disaster, and a laugh went round the workings afterwards, a real one. The manager did not believe a word of it until the day he was down there and heard it himself.

Where she came from is a question of industrial history as much as of myth. Sweden’s mines opened in the thirteenth century and ran on charcoal, which meant miners lived alongside colliers and woodcutters and heard their stories, and the skogsrå is reckoned the older figure. The bergsrå looks like her cousin who moved indoors. What did not transfer was the eroticism. The skogsrå haunted men who spent months alone in the forest and behaved accordingly; mining men lived in villages with their wives and children, and their rå is nobody’s lover. She is a landlady. A male counterpart existed too, the gruvgubbe or berggubbe, called gruvbisse in Värmland, a fine gentleman or an old fellow with drills over his shoulder, but he never crowded her out.

Her one real limitation is that she is only as rich as her own rock, and she knew it. A whole family of legends has her confiding to a miner that a sister or a brother somewhere else owns a far better mine, the brother’s share being the larger because that was how inheritance worked. The gruvmora of the Sala silver mine said her sister up in Norrland was wealthier by far, and that the sister’s silver would be found one day by a particular route: an old woman’s cow would bear twin calves, white with black ears and identical, and if they were raised until midsummer night and walked to the mountain they would go straight to the seam. The ore always runs out somewhere. The stories she tells are about the next mountain over.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a bergsrå?

A bergsrå is the guardian spirit of a mountain and its mine in Swedish folklore, one of the rå, the beings who own and rule particular places. She controls the ore inside her rock and decides whether miners find it. She is also called gruvrå, gruvfrun or gruvmora, especially in the Bergslagen mining district.

What did the bergsrå look like?

Swedish accounts describe her as a stately, well-dressed gentlewoman, with several records giving her a large ring of keys at her side like the mistress of a great household. She could also appear as an animal, or as one of the black birds seen in a mine before an accident. Unlike the skogsrå of the forest, she had no tail and no hollow back.

What rules did miners follow to stay on good terms with the bergsrå?

Miners were expected to be polite, tidy and quiet. Whistling, swearing, shouting and throwing stones were forbidden underground, food scraps were not to be left lying about, and in some mines the crew lifted their hats and said good morning before starting work. Animals encountered in the mine were never to be killed, since they might be hers or might be her.

How did the bergsrå warn miners of danger?

She warned by sound and by appearance. A sigh heard in the mine meant the men should leave at once, and some claimed to have heard her tell them so in words; she also woke miners who had fallen asleep. If she showed herself, it meant an accident was coming, and a black dress meant a death while a white dress meant something less serious.

How is the bergsrå different from the skogsrå?

Both are rå, guardians of a specific place, but the bergsrå rules rock and ore while the skogsrå rules the forest. The bergsrå lacks the skogsrå’s tail and rotted-trunk back, and she is not a seductress. The difference is usually explained by the lives of the men who told the stories: miners lived with their families, while forest workers spent months alone.

Related Entries

Rå, Skogsrå, Sjörå, Havsrå, Rådande, Vittra, Troll, Tomte, Askafroa, Ysätters-Kajsa, Hulder, Knocker, Coblynau, Bluecap, Kobold