Before Google, before pharmacies, before you could just ask your aunt on Facebook — there were the cunning folk.
Gotland’s forests and fields once whispered with the work of the klok gumma (wise woman) and klok gubbe (wise man) — people who knew which root eased childbirth, which tea softened grief, and which charm might keep the cow from falling ill.
These weren’t witches in the Hollywood sense.
They were listeners. Observers. Healers.
They learned from the land and passed it down in stories, in soil-stained hands, in silence.
They didn’t ask for much — a loaf of bread, maybe some wool — and in return, they offered survival. Long before the clinic. Long before the state.
Sometimes the church disapproved.
Other times, it quietly looked the other way — especially when that poultice worked better than prayer.
And isn’t that magic too?
Not just the spell, but the generosity of knowledge.
The refusal to gatekeep healing.
The act of seeing someone hurting and saying, “Here, try this.”
I don’t know if I’ll meet a klok gumma in Visby this August.
But I’ll be listening for her.
Because some things — like wisdom — don’t disappear.
They just go quiet until someone remembers to ask.
And honestly?
If one of them could show up right now with a birch-leaf tincture or a spell for cramps and moving boxes — I’d owe her more than bread.
Swedish Word of the Day: klok (adj) – wise
(I en värld full av svar, lyssna efter frågorna de kloka ställde först.
– In a world full of answers, listen for the questions the wise asked first.)
Swedish Wanderlust 