Fröja's Apples
Fröja's Apples: Plants, gods, & other beings in Swedish folklore
By Sara Bonadea George
“If you call me Mugwort, I will cure neither wife nor cow…”
In the countryside of 19th and early 20th century Sweden, folklorists traveled the land recording a wide variety of folk beliefs and practices. Some of these recordings demonstrate a belief in ancient gods, supernatural beings, and personified plants helping or hindering humanity. For example, the goddess Fröja visits on a winter night to shake apple trees, beneath an evergreen oak lives a white serpent that grants wisdom when consumed, and an offering of braided straw should be made to a field god to ensure a bountiful harvest. Translated and discussed by Swedish folklorist Sara Bonadea George and introduced by legendary folklorist John Lindow, this beautiful and fully illustrated window into a world now gone is unlike anything before it.
Fröja's Apples: Plants, gods, & other beings in Swedish folklore
By Sara Bonadea George
“If you call me Mugwort, I will cure neither wife nor cow…”
In the countryside of 19th and early 20th century Sweden, folklorists traveled the land recording a wide variety of folk beliefs and practices. Some of these recordings demonstrate a belief in ancient gods, supernatural beings, and personified plants helping or hindering humanity. For example, the goddess Fröja visits on a winter night to shake apple trees, beneath an evergreen oak lives a white serpent that grants wisdom when consumed, and an offering of braided straw should be made to a field god to ensure a bountiful harvest. Translated and discussed by Swedish folklorist Sara Bonadea George and introduced by legendary folklorist John Lindow, this beautiful and fully illustrated window into a world now gone is unlike anything before it.
Fröja's Apples: Plants, gods, & other beings in Swedish folklore
By Sara Bonadea George
“If you call me Mugwort, I will cure neither wife nor cow…”
In the countryside of 19th and early 20th century Sweden, folklorists traveled the land recording a wide variety of folk beliefs and practices. Some of these recordings demonstrate a belief in ancient gods, supernatural beings, and personified plants helping or hindering humanity. For example, the goddess Fröja visits on a winter night to shake apple trees, beneath an evergreen oak lives a white serpent that grants wisdom when consumed, and an offering of braided straw should be made to a field god to ensure a bountiful harvest. Translated and discussed by Swedish folklorist Sara Bonadea George and introduced by legendary folklorist John Lindow, this beautiful and fully illustrated window into a world now gone is unlike anything before it.
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Hyldyr
214 pages. 5x7. Perfect binding. Printed in the USA and/or Canada.
From the publisher:
"Hyldyr is an independent and experimental publishing house based in Olympia, Washington state, USA. We combine the efforts of academics and artists to produce unique, beautiful, and scholarship-grounded publications.
There’s nothing else like us—by design. Founded in late 2021 with our first publications arriving the summer of 2023, we designed Hyldyr to produce high-quality and extremely unique editions built to withstand scholastic scrutiny, to function as art objects, and to provide our readers with keys to hidden worlds.
We are heavily inspired by the works of English polymath William Morris, do-it-yourself movements, and our evergreen mountainous surroundings. We place a particular emphasis on historical linguistics and folklore studies and all of our publications in some way or another fall within the triangle of art, ecology, and folklore. We believe the world is a vast place full of wonders.
While we design our publications to be as approachable as possible, Hyldyr’s roots are academic: Hyldyr developed out of the web-based resource project Mimisbrunnr.info, itself an evolution of a student-led reading circle originally sponsored by the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Georgia for several years in the 2010s.
Quality and humanity come first at Hyldyr: We never use print-on-demand services, we explicitly forbid the use of generative AI in our publications, we sell our books only to independent bookstores and educational institutions (like museums), and we always aim to go a step beyond traditional publishing houses in everything we do."
