Published in the book “Gertrud” by Maja Daniels¹

We were recently asked to write something for our friend Maja Daniels photo-book Gertrud.

The book is a mythical and visual processing of the historical person Kettis Gertrud Svensdotter whose action could be said to have ignited one of the largest mass murders in our country’s history. A mass murder that swept like swidden fire thru the scandinavian speaking culture of the north, that broke what might be called our spiritual autonomy and in many ways laid the ground for the sorrows to come.

The text at hand is available in both Swedish and English. It is a somewhat longer version of the one in Majas book, as we allow ourselves to be a bit more lengthy about the photos and what we think of them. And everything we say concerning these images, could also be said about us.

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XXX The story of Gertrud is the story of our people. She is standing at the entrance of the mountain that is this people’s history. We are on the other side, at the foot of it. We turn and look up, towards the tip of the fjäll. It might blow strong winds up there. It might still be winter. Unmelted glaciers. Frozen memories of when we were others.

It is the mountain of the dead. Inside is the Underworld.

We lean in and listen. We hear the stomping of our foremothers’ feet. Once we were let in, there, to the other time. We knew how to travel, in and out and of our own free will. We knew the recipe for the red ointments, where the grease horns were hidden, how to call for guides at crossroads.

She opened for our lokks and callings.

There is a story of the subterraneans that is spread throughout our land. A foreign man comes to a woman in a desolate cottage. He’s asking for help. It’s his wife. She’s in labour. The woman brings the linen, poultice, bear claw, sacred healing stick – whatever’s needed for a successful childbirth. Then she follows the man to the Underworld and delivers his child.

Because down there too, birth and death happens. There are others besides us that live their lives.

XXX In 1667 the eleven-year-old girl Gertrud, is accused of walking on water of the river next to the village Åsen, north Älvdalen. In front of the priest’s long in privatus for coitus infernalis examining fingers, and the country constable’s sharp Swedish and instruments – she confesses. She did it with the help of sorcery. Unbeknownst of the consequences she names some of the older women as the ones who thought her this, up at the far away summer pastures, called Fäbodar. The old ones have flown with her, and other small children, to a faraway hollow mountain. This, it is said in the interrogation protocols, is done according to tradition.

It is “as is custom among us to do with our young”.

Gertrud’s confession is the starting point of a wildfire of accusations. During the following years, hundreds of women and also some men, in mostly northern part of Sweden and Ostrobothnian Finland are executed and thrown on the pyres. Many thousands more are blamed, interrogated, tortured, threatened, abused and silenced. Villages are torn apart, and kinships broken up, in a tragedy that is soon named The Great Noise.

A lion’s part of the accused are elders; the knowledge keepers within the society. Almost everyone’s blamed for having traveled with children to this mountain that later will be termed Blåkulla – the Blue Hill – and equated with Hell. But in the beginning Blåkulla is only one of two great halls. The other, brighter of the two is called Vitkulla – the White Hill – and they are situated wall to wall so tightly, that the white and black spirit beings that inhabits these places can move freely between their sparse slats. There are meadows and pastures and animal pens. There are nine great cabins. One flies there on bears, tools or cattle. One talks and eat and dance all backwards.

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XXX What is glimpsed here, behind all the misrepresentations and words put in mouths, is something akin to a geography. The outlines of a place with much more in common with old Norse conceptions of a subterranean mirror world, than the inferno of Christianity.

During the questioning, Gertrud also retells the story of the birth in the Underworld. But in her version it takes place in a chamber in one of the nine cabins. The wife of Ljotn – a red bearded, colorful trixter that the interrogators Christianize as the devil - is the one giving birth. The one delivering the child is Gyris Margit Eriksdotter, one of the oldest of those who will later be named by Gertrud and sentenced accordingly. But besides that, the story is pretty much the same. And so is the message: there are bears, there are storms, there are powers above and below – but nowhere are there anyone completely like us.

The world needs us. Our songs, our hands, our work. The dances and the tales. Our reproductive technology.

Before they plowed our land for minerals and metal, before they slaughtered our forests and spirited us away from animals and soil, before they dammed up the waters of our rivers and stole our air and lives with turbines of windmills and of alienated labor – they deprived us of that insight:

We belong.

That is what the Great Noise is about.

XXX The first accusations after the incident by the river, concerns happenings up in the Fäbodar. And the prevalence of the accusations during the succeeding years, follows almost exactly the spread of that pastoral culture. This makes it not “only” one of the worst gynecides the north has ever witnessed, but also a kind of cultural and religious prosecution.

It is the fäbod-culture, with its female-centered power and transhumance, its non-Swedish Scandinavian languages – like the that Dalecarlian toungue that Gertrud spoke an the Elfdalian version of - and its animistic worldview and spirituality, that is under assault.

The great Noise is the first wave of the centuries of violence that will hit the colors of the earth out from us, and make us white. The cross examinations, the torture, the shame and the fire, all is made to burn the knowledge of our belonging out of bodies, memories and lineages. Just like the beatings of church bells drove the giants from the land. Don’t think for a second that something needs you. Winds are not affected by song. Trees don’t listen. Animals won’t heed your call. You cannot direct the powers, only let them in – or not. That is your only choice and if you make the wrong one, you shall be punished. Your life is a life of submission.

That is what they mean by Devil. That is what they mean by God.

The world is dead.

So life goes underground. It is lived there inside the mountain. We know it, we can hear it, but we are no longer allowed in. The ground keeps it a secret.

XXX When the fires waned the myth became silent, but it did not disappear. Secrecy was already a part of the witchcraft. Suppression only makes it stronger. Today, the story of the birth in the Underworld is more seldom told in our land. But in many of our villages² there are another tale, the one of those who still knows the old ways, who yet remember, and practice.

I ain’t telling you which farm / which village / her name – but those who know, they know.

If they are truly out there or not, these things were never sorcery’s concern. We hope. We dream. Come back and take us along, a Thursday night, on the bear, like a mother. And if we ponder for a while, we understand that when something shuts itself off, hides from gazes and creates a surface that is illegible, impenetrable and opaque – an inside is also born. Through secrecy we take part in that. We recreate the hollow mountain. But we also build a clandestine organization.

Like so many of our great waters, the river Gertrud walked on is nowadays sealed up by the hydroelectric industry. It’s rapids are halted, it’s path straightened up. The natural migratory routes of life strangled, like always, by capitalist modernity.

One of the greatest example of that is Trängsletdammen, a couple of miles north of the village of Gertrud. Once a narrow and cascading gorge, it is now dammed up by the Company and converted into one of the Sweden’s largest reserves for what has recently been termed “green energy”.

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XXX But there used to be Fäbodar down there. There were marsh mowing sheds, trails and people who sang their cattle home. There were wild streams where salmons played, shores to swim from and long black boats with floundering treasures of silver and agile, smiling men.

All of that is smothered. All of it exiled to the bottom of a huge, flat lake.

Behind it lies Älvdalens skjutfält – one of Europe’s biggest military training area for NATO. 540 km² of fishing waters, hunting grounds and forest pastures, once managed as a common by the northern villages of Älvdalen, but stolen by the Swedish stated during that big landgrab that’s called “the Great Partition”.

The very same land that also once held Slaingbuðer – the faraway Fäbodar on which many of the initial “crimes” of Gertrud and the others were said to have been committed.

This is visible everywhere in Maja’s photographs. Even though they are flat, they have an interior. Images emerge out of other images, like from an underworld. Humans establishes bonds with each other, and you don’t know what it’s about. Silently they grasp each other’s hands in mutual understanding. Fires burn, but not necessarily to warm you.

You see the dance, but you cannot hear the music.

They turn their faces away from you. This might make them eerie, even hostile. It is because they separate the viewer into insider and outsider. If you come with priest fingers and turbine to extract value, they will push you away.

But if you are one of us – then they have only just turned around the way people do when they want to be followed. You could say that this is how one creates a people.

XXX You could also, like Jarrett Martineau in Creative Combat, say that it is a way to “camouflage internally intelligible Indigenous coded, subversive logics and dissonant dissident rhythms from being coopted and absorbed by colonial power.”

”This is a becoming (for) ourselves, rather than being for power.”³

There is an image of women and cows. They come walking over the water like specters. This picture is not Maja’s, but by the Älvdalian photographer Tenn Lars Persson. It is a double exposure, maybe made with purpose, maybe by mistake.

The lake in the picture look like it is from one of Sweden’s largest water reserves, the hydroelectric dam Trängslet in the north of Älvdalen. But it’s probably from a completely different place, from a time long before the Company strangled the river, dammed up the narrow gorge and made the surroundings into a lake.

There used to be houses down there. There were Fäbodar, marsh mowing sheds and trails. There were wild streams where salmons played, shores to swim from and long black boats with floundering treasures of silver and agile, smiling men.

All of it smothered.

The lake in the picture has probably nothing to do with all of that – but some of us see it, anyway.

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XXX We know it’s that nowadays dammed up river that Gertrud once walked over. We recognize the forest ridge in the background. It’s that military area that spreads like a backdrop to its hydroelectric brother-in-arms. Trängslets skjutfält. 54 000 hectares of common land. Fishing water, hunting grounds and forest pastures that the Swedish state stole under the banner of efficiency, during that big landgrab that’s called “the Great Partition”. Today it’s also one of Europe’s biggest military training areas for NATO. The same land that once held Slaingbuder – the faraway Fäbodar on which many of the initial “crimes” of Gertrud and the others were said to have been committed.

But, we also know who it is striding up out of the water. It is the drowned ones returning, our foremothers with their white cows.

What will they do?

On the page next to that image is a woman with pines from the stolen land tattooed on her arm. She is faceless. She is holding the sacred wooden stick. It is made for giving milk healing properties, but we can tell, by the way she’s holding it, that it is not for the purpose of healing now. It’s a tool for revenge. A weapon.

Gyris Margit died waiting for her execution, in the basement of the court house in a foreign town further south. It is said that she laid for weeks in the cell she shared with her sisters in misfortune – kinsfolk, friends and neighbors who had been accused together with her – before they even made the effort to clean away her rotting corpse.

XXX Naturally, the written protocol of her interrogation is unreliable. But that is of course always the case, with or without the torture. No one ever tells the truth when the State’s in the room.

We also don’t know what her “confession” looked like before the Swedification and Christianization kicked in. But maybe we can at least trust her accounts of who it was that had thought her these things, whatever they were, that she was trying to pass on to Gertrud and the other young. She claims that as a young girl she was tutored by one Bälter Karin up in the Fäbod – in the late 14th century, that is. Karin was old already then, and if she in turned was thought when she was a girl by one of the elders – something that is implied – and if that elder in turn, when she was just a girl…

In 1484 Ragvald Odenskarl (“Man of Odin”) is executed. He is generally considered to be one of the last openly confessing heathens. That’s in Stockholm. In a Swedish speaking context. Just as a comparison.

Gyris Margit, Gertrud and all the others are living in what were then the northern periphery of the Swedish state. They speak exclusively Dalecarlian, spend a major part of their lives in faraway grazing forest pastures and mountains – in reality a kind of parallel system to the more settled, village oriented. Gertrud has, according to accounts in the protocol, almost never attended mass. She has no churchgoing clothes. She doesn’t even know the Lord’s Prayer.

But she also never got the opportunity to fully learn the orally transmitted knowledge. That geography of the Underworld.

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XXX It is very possible that that knowledge was around for hundreds of years after Gertrud’s death in childbirth – or if it was the plague – some ten years after the accusations. The struggle against our way of life has been a long and hard one, and is in no way over yet. But it was in many ways initiated with her, and with that massacre that followed.

Capital is born, as Marx so famously stated, “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt”.

As soon as the pyre cools of, the hunt for noaidis commences. First the women burn, then the drums. After that comes great public investments in schools, churches and bible education. The northern land shall be disciplined, rationalized and alphabetized.

Soon after we have the beginning of the Great Partition – “skriftersreformerna”. A process of land reforms that takes centuries to implement, but that slowly crushes the autonomy of the traditional Scandinavian and Finnish village commune and the Sami Sita. The common consuetudes are put under state control. Law rules over custom. Grazing forests, hunting ground, outskirts and meadows – all that was initially governed as commons is stolen and put in the hands of private owners and the state.

Not only the military areas to-be see the light of day, but also the great forest corporations that ravages and pillages our earth today. Svea Skog, Stora Skog, Holmen. All of them build their capital on plundered land. All are criminals.

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XXX All the while humans and animals are dislodged from their homes and driven into factories, and nature in our absence is turned into a “resource”. The Fäbod-culture, the slash-and-burn agriculture and the Sami way of life that previously ruled the land is pushed away and almost completely crushed. Slowly but surely the human and ecological catastrophes start piling up.

Gertrud’s story is the first of the disasters. Just like she’s standing at the gate of the hollow mountain, she’s at the entrance to our time. Between her and us lies an epoque. And again, we are on the other side. Behind us is the modern age. In front of us: planetary disaster.

It’s Thursday night over the pine ridges. The march sky, blue as eyes. Freezing, snowclad, winterspring. We gaze up at it. Afar the rumble of artillery.

Only the old ones can save us now.

   Mismar
   – a hollow mountain and a clandestine organization, based in Norrland
   The Night before Sheer Thursday, 2024

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Notes

Maja Daniels, Gertrud, Void, Reykjavik
The villages in question refers especially to the northern part of Mora and Älvdalen, but that does not mean that similar stories is told elsewhere where the great noise hit hard.
Martineau, Jarrett, CREATIVE COMBAT: Indigenous Art, Resurgence, and Decolonization, p. 86

Introduction to Gertrud

Jun 19, 2024