Why Swedish & Finnish Children Celebrate Easter by Dressing Up as Witches
Each year in Sweden and Finland, young children continue a centuries-old tradition marking the night that witches celebrated Sabbath with the devil before Jesus’s resurrection.
By Emma Cieslik
March 29, 2024 – As children in Värmland, Sweden, Fredrik Skott and his sister used to dress up as witches and travel from door-to-door to give letters filled with candy to their neighbors and friends. But the occasion wasn’t Halloween: It was Easter Eve.
Unlike the bunnies and egg baskets that many people associate with Easter, each year in Sweden and Finland, young children continue a centuries-old tradition marking the night that witches celebrated Sabbath with the devil before Jesus’s resurrection.
Dressed as Easter witches (påskkärringar)—and Easter trolls (påsktroll)—they go door-to-door wishing families “Glad Påsk.” The tradition varies slightly by region: While some communities celebrate on Easter Eve, others dress up on Maundy Thursday. Some children sing in exchange for candy while others give their neighbors letters filled with candy.
Skott, now a docent in Nordic folklore at the Institute for Language and Folklore in Gothenburg, has spent years studying the Swedish mumming tradition, which sheds light on the link between witchcraft and Easter as well as how beliefs about witches changed over time in Sweden.
The origins of Easter witches
There’s still some debate about exactly when the tradition began but scholars agree that it derives from Sweden’s spate of witch trials that spanned from 1668 to 1678—as well as a robust folklore around witches that had already taken root as early as the 1400s.
One of these ideas was the belief that witches flew to a fictitious location called Mount Blåkulla to celebrate the Black Sabbaths or Witches’ Sabbaths. In Mount Blåkulla, everything was upside down and backwards: old people grew young and people danced with their backs turned against each other. Folk stories held that the chaos of Blåkulla blurred into our world during the period between Maundy Thursday and Holy Saturday.
According to folklorist Per-Anders Östling, Sweden’s most famous witch trials began in 1668 after children spread rumors that they were taken by witches to Mount Blåkulla. Hundreds of women were accused and sentenced to death—and that fear of witches persisted well into the next century. Communities in southwest Sweden held huge bonfires and shuttered their doors before Easter to protect themselves and their children from witches.
(Behind the witch panics that killed thousands throughout history.)
Even though most scholars believe that the tradition of dressing as Easter witches didn’t begin until the early 20th century, after belief in witches waned in large cities, Skott’s research suggests that the practice began right around this time in the 18th century.
Skott points to the court records of Husby parish in Uppland, Sweden, where a farmhand accused a young woman named Anna Olofsdotter of witchcraft on October 3, 1747. One year earlier, three children in her parish had discovered “troll butter,” a slimy fungus associated with witches. They believed that by burning the troll butter, the witch who owned it would reveal herself.
According to the court records, Olofsdotter decided to play a joke on the children and farmhand, wearing an apron over her shoulders and draping her hair over her face. As the farmhand threw the fungus into the fire, she ran out screaming “it burns, it burns.” The farmhand began circulating rumors that Olofdotter was a witch, and she was brought to court on the charge of defamation. The court concluded she was not a witch.
– Who are Sweden’s Easter witches? (nationalgeographic.com)
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