Rootstrek 3: SWEDEN

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Swedish Tomte Christmas Tree Ornament

on November 09, 2020

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Pattern and basic directions can be found by clicking here:

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The Backstuga and Backstugusittare

As discussed in my previous post, a torp was a small house with arable land. A backstuga or back cabin was a small house without arable land. A backstugusittare or back cabin sitter was a man who lived in a backstuga . A backstuga was built on common village land, often on the " fägatan " or cattle path, which was common land set aside for the grazing of cattle. They could also be built on private land with the permission of the land owner. However, unlike a torpare , the backstugisittare was not under contract to perform any work. The space in which a backstuga was built was more or less given as an act of charity to the backstugisittar e. If a backstuga was built on privately owned land it would have been located near the forest or on the extreme outskirts of the estate. Backstuga , literally translated, means "slope cottage", as many were built into the slope of a hill. As time went on, the definition changed to refer to any small house without attached...

The Torp and Torpare

A torp , simply defined, was a small, untaxed farm. A torpare was the man who ran and managed the torp. A " torp " is the Swedish term for "croft", and crofts had been in existence all over Europe for centuries. Owners of large estates would lease small portions of their land to independent farmers. In exchange for the land lease, the crofter or torpare would agree to spend a certain number of days per year working for the estate owner. This insured that the land owner had enough workers to maintain his own fields so he could turn a profit. Relatively speaking, by the 1700s there were not that many torp in Sweden, but as the Swedish population exploded in the 1800s, so did the need for many young Swedes to find a place to call home and create some semblance of job security. More young adults than ever before who had come from poor families were surviving childhood. As many of the young men looked to gain independence and start families of their own, they would a...

The Divine Destiny of the Swedish Peasant - An Editorial

I've already written quite a bit about the peasants in general - their prescribed way of dress, the torpare, the backstugusittare, their daily life, etc. But I want to discuss in a little more detail one way in which they were perceived within 18th and 19th century society. And I want to do it in a way which might allow us, their American descendants, to develop a more complete and empathetic level of understanding of how the systems in which they lived were designed to keep them powerless and repressed. As their American descendants, I'm hopeful we might even learn a little something about ourselves in the process. Please indulge me as I outline a reductive, over-simplification of America's short 200+ year history. Our country, as we know it today, was founded predominantly by White European colonizers and populated by displaced, impoverished White Europeans seeking land, religious freedom, and opportunity. Although American land was already occupied by Brown-skinned nativ...

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Swedish Tomte Christmas Tree Ornament

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