Skogsrå

Also Known As: Swedish, “the forest rå”, from rådare, “ruler”; also skogsfrun, skogsnuvan, råndan, huldran, skogstippan, and by-names such as Talle-Maja, Grankotte-Kari and Ysätters-Kajsa
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Swedish Mythology, Scandinavian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: She rules the forest and everything living in it, decides who finds game and who finds nothing, and can lead a man so far off his path that he never comes back the same.
Role in Mythos: She is the owner and warden of the woods, courted and placated by the men who worked alone in them.
Relation to Humans: Treated with courtesy she woke sleeping charcoal burners when their kilns went wrong, drove lost cattle home and gave hunters luck they had not earned. Treated with contempt she blinded men to the path, took their names and their reason, and in the seventeenth century her attentions could get a man executed.

The charcoal kiln smoulders all night, and the man tending it never really sleeps. He dozes in his hut with one ear open for the wrong kind of crackle, the sound that means the turf covering has broken somewhere and the whole stack will burn away into ash instead of charcoal. Resin and wet smoke. Frost stiffening the spruce beyond the firelight. When a woman’s voice comes out of that darkness and asks him what he is called, he has already started to lose.

She is the skogsrå, and the word says exactly what she is. A rå, from rådare, is a ruler, a being with authority over one particular piece of the world. Sweden recognised one for nearly everything worth having. The sjörå held the lakes, the bergsrå the mountains and the mines, the gruvrå the shafts, and the skogsrå held the forest, the animals in it, and every person who walked in under the trees. She belonged mainly to the south and the middle of the country. Further north her stories run together with those of the vittra, who borrowed her beauty and her ruined back.

She is not a goddess. She is a landlord.

From the front she is a young woman with long unbound hair, handsome enough that men followed her without asking themselves why they were following. Then she turns. The back of her is hollow, like a tree that has stood dead long enough to go soft inside, and often a tail shows beneath the hem of her skirt. Other accounts give her breasts heavy enough to be slung back over her shoulders, or hands as broad as leaf rakes, or replace the girl entirely with an ugly old woman. The variants are not a muddle. They are the point. Whatever she looks like from the front is not the whole of her.

She was not always a woman, either. Wherever hunting was the serious business of life, people imagined something that stood on the animals’ side rather than the hunter’s, and that something was male. It stayed male among the Sami, and Swedish stories about male forest rår survived alongside the others. The female figure grew as the work changed. From the middle of the nineteenth century the forests filled with men who lived in them alone for weeks at a stretch, charcoal burners and tar burners and loggers, camped at the edge of the settled world with a kiln, an axe and no company at all. Loneliness and the dark did the rest.

She kept livestock of her own. In the summer pasture country of Dalarna the herd-girls called her Bästa, and heard her out in the trees calling her cattle by name, Vila and Sommardöva and Sola and Långspena, bells sounding where there was no farm. A girl quick enough to throw a knife or any piece of steel over the passing beasts could keep one. That is what Lisbet did, and she had the cow tied in the byre and was boiling whey butter in the cookhouse when the walls began to bang and a voice called that her pot was boiling over. She woke to find Bästa in the doorway, laughing. If you have taken the cow, you shall have the pail as well. The silver pail broke her leg, and she was lame the rest of her life.

The danger to men was of a different order. She was said to be lovesick and starved of company, and she courted the ones who stayed out in her forest. When she had drawn a man far enough in she laughed out loud and vanished, or simply turned her back so he saw what he had been walking after. Men came home days late, or came home strange, or married her in some fashion and belonged to her afterwards, running for the trees whenever she called. In the sixteen hundreds this was not treated as a charming story. A man believed to have kept love-meetings with the skogsrå could be tried for it, and the sentence could be death.

Which is why so many of the legends are about outwitting her, and why almost all of them turn on a name. A man stood burning tar in the woods when she came out of the trees and asked what he was called. Själv, he said. Myself. Then he threw a scoop of hot tar over her, and she ran into the forest shrieking that Self had burned her, and a voice answered her from somewhere back among the trunks: if you burned yourself, you have only yourself to blame. Other tellers have him answer Ingen, No one, with the same result, and the same flat reply out of the dark. The voice belongs to her husband, called Hulte or Hålte or Hunte, and he is never the slightest use to her. Anyone who has read the Odyssey will recognise the trick, and it is worth noticing that a Swedish tar burner in Bohuslän arrived at it on his own.

She had a stranger habit as well. Meeting two men asleep in the forest, one tall and one short, she decided that everything in her woods ought to be the same length, and set about pulling the short one out. When that failed she promised to fetch her little bright file and make them even. She meant the axe.

Set against all this is the plain fact that she could be generous, and that people relied on it. She could stroke a man’s gun and he would never miss again; she could look down another man’s barrel and he would never hit anything. Wolves were called her dogs. A coin thrown over the left shoulder at the forest edge, or laid on a stump, bought a day’s hunting luck, and the same courtesy could bring a strayed animal home. She banged on the door of a sleeping charcoal burner when his kiln began to burn wrong, and she gave warning of storms and accidents. The jay that Swedes call the lavskrika was reckoned to be her scout, sent ahead to find hunters so that she could put the game on notice, a bird with no fear of people, happy to come into camp for scraps, carrying a Latin name that marks it as an unlucky gossip. A hunter who met one at the start of the day might as well go back to bed. And there is the farmhand who spotted a fine lady at a market with a tail hanging down behind her, and instead of pointing asked politely whether she would care to gather up her train. She thanked him and told him to look on the stable shelf in the morning. He found a lump of gold.

Her limits were the ordinary defences of the northern woods, and they were mostly about refusing to be handled. Never give her your name, because a name is a grip. Steel and iron kept her off, laid across a threshold or carried in a pocket, and reins deliberately cut and rejoined with a strip of leather left her nothing whole to take hold of. A traveller who felt the path start to slide could turn a coat inside out, or reverse a headscarf so its smallest corner pointed forward, or look at the world through a pulled-off dress, and her power over him simply stopped. There was even a cure for a man already taken. A wife in Värmland went to the skogsrå herself and asked, innocently, what to do about a bull that would not stay with his own cows. Tibast and vänderot, said the skogsrå: mezereon and valerian. The wife mixed them into her husband’s food, the hold broke, and the skogsrå was left cursing the day she taught anyone the remedy. Later, when the rails went through, it was said she could not cross a railway line alone at all, and had to ask a human being to lead her over. Those who did it without asking questions were paid for the kindness.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the skogsrå?

The skogsrå is the female ruler of the forest in Swedish folklore, one of a family of guardian spirits called rår whose name comes from rådare, meaning ruler. She owns the woods, the animals in them and everyone who enters, and she decides whether a hunter has luck or not. She is best known from southern and central Sweden, where she was also called skogsfrun, skogsnuvan, råndan and huldran.

What does the skogsrå look like?

From the front she appears as a beautiful young woman with long loose hair, but her back is hollow like a rotting tree trunk, and she often has a tail showing under her skirt. Some accounts describe her instead as an ugly old woman, or give her hands as wide as leaf rakes, or breasts heavy enough to throw back over her shoulders. Turning around is the moment the disguise fails.

How do you protect yourself from the skogsrå?

Never tell her your real name, because a name gives her power over you. Steel or iron, a garment turned inside out or back to front, a headscarf reversed, and reins cut and mended with a leather patch were all held to break her hold. For a man already under her influence, the herbs tibast and vänderot, mezereon and valerian, were said to end it.

Is the skogsrå the same as the huldra?

They belong to the same tradition and the names overlap. Huldran is one of the Swedish names for the skogsrå, and the Norwegian hulder is her close counterpart, a beautiful forest woman betrayed by a tail or a hollow back. The Swedish material puts more weight on her role as the owner of the forest and its animals, and on her dealings with charcoal burners, loggers and hunters.

Was anyone ever punished for meeting the skogsrå?

Yes. In seventeenth-century Sweden a man believed to have had love-meetings with the skogsrå could be brought to court and sentenced to death. Court records from the period are among the earliest firm evidence of what people believed she did, and they show the belief was taken seriously enough to kill for.