Chapter 1 - The Nordic Wilderness and its Monstrous Creatures

Summary

Since the early nineteenth century until the present day, Swedish Gothic is set in the Nordic landscape, often in the vast, dark forest, the snow-covered artic fells in the northern part of the country or on a remote wintry island in the archipelago in the Baltic Sea or the west coast of Sweden. The Gothic terror is located in untamed nature and in that kind of environments that Yi-Fu Tuan calls, the landscapes of fear, wild and uncontrollable nature beyond the human domain. From the human perspective of environmental experience, Tuan makes a distinction between place and space, where place refers to a location filled with human meaning, while space is an abstract concept and a site void of social significance. If place embodies enclosure, security and stability, space represents movement as well as freedom and threat. In addition, regional folklore and old local tradition are employed to enhance the Gothic atmosphere, and the protagonist's dark side is often bound to or triggered by untamed nature and the pagan pre-Christian past of the region. Thus, Swedish Gothic is a place-focused, or topofocal, version of Gothic, in which the landscape plays a central role and can be equated with a character in its own right.

An early example of the vital role of the setting is Emilie Flygare-Carlén's The Rose of Tistelön (Rosen på Tistelön, 1842) and Victor Rydberg's Singoalla (Singoalla, 1857) set in the harsh archipelago on the west coast and in the forest land in central Sweden respectively. By the end of the century, Selma Lagerlöf developed this tradition even further in her use of the Nordic wilderness and its local myths in order to explore the characters’ repressed desires by drawing on regional folktales and folkloristic motifs in novels such as Gösta Berling's Saga (Gösta Berlings saga, 1891) and Lord Arne's Silver (Herr Arnes penningar, 1903). Also, in some of Ingmar Bergman's most formative films, for example, The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1957) and Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen, 1968), the scenery – and the characters’ place in it – is crucial to the Gothic imagery and the characteristic metaphorical and explorative qualities of Bergman's films. Since the millennium, untamed nature and its mythical creatures have an even more prominent part in for example Michael Hjorth's film The Unknown (Det okända, 2000), Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund's film Wither (Vittra, 2012) and the Swedish computer game Year Walk (2013).