Swedish Snakebite Charms from a Gender Perspective

Abstract

For some time now, I have been engaged in research on magical medicine and charming in Sweden and Swedish-speaking Finland. Part of this research, a survey of a wide variety sources, including folklore archives, museum archives and published materials, succeeded in locating over 500 Swedish snake charms. The bulk of the charms were recorded at the turn of the century, between 1880 and 1930. More than half of the corpus contain the Virgin Mary as a meaningful gestalt. Analysing the motifs in these charms, reveals the following broad groups: Virgin Mary cures snakebites, Snake on a tuft ofgrass, Jesus meets a snake, Adam and Eve meet a snake, Snakes and roots, and finally, a group of miscellaneous charms. Here I will focus on the users and informants of the first of these types, Virgin Mary cures snakebite type Swedish snake charms from a gender perspective. The analysed charm-type consists of a total of 246 records from folklore archives in Sweden and Finland.