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042 – Burial Traditions

Content Warning

This comic contains conversations about death and burial rites!

Content Warning: Casual conversations about death and burial rites. Please skip if this subject makes you uncomfortable! Greetings, children! Today you're in for a morbid history lesson, as requested by... Madame Mystery: If you'd ever want to overshare about 17th century burial traditions like you say in your bio... please gimme gimme those good history facts. This may shock you because I’m very good at hiding it, but... I’m a huge history nerd.  One of my many favorite subjects is Swedish folklore and a big, BIG part of that is burials and death rites.  We Swedes are farmers at heart. Practical, salt of the earth, resourceful. And that shines through in our old burial traditions. Most of these traditions died out in the early 1900s, but luckily a lot of them were documented in the Big National Memory Collection. We owe a lot to a woman named Louise Hagberg* *I have plans to make a whole comic about her. Back in the old days, people lived much closer to death than we do now. Dying in your own home was considered a Good and Proper Death. And in the home you would stay until the funeral, your body washed and dressed by the women in your community.  Then, on the big day, your coffin would be sealed and you would be brought to the church by your family and neighbours. The bells, ringing. And then the party, overflowing with cakes and brännvin, to send you off. Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself! The funeral preparations start long before the big day, after all! In fact, for a lot of people it starts on your wedding day. That fancy dress? That beautiful white shirt? Those are the clothes you are one day going to be buried in. After the wedding they were carefully stored for the next time you got to dress up. In the grave. But what if you never got married? No problem. You could just pick out your nicest clothes, or if you had money, have something custom made! King Christina for example took great pleasure in trying out her funereal garb, about eight months before she died.  Speaking of grave, you can’t just be chucked in a hole and be done with it! You need a suitable forever home! And when it comes to coffins, there are a lot of superstitions!  If the coffin was too tight, there was a good chance you’d wake up again as a gengångare. An again-walker. The undead.  And if it was too big... well, there’s room for more then, isn’t there? Another death was sure to follow very closely. Of course, the best way to ensure you got a coffin that fit you just so was to have it made while you were still alive, so you could give it a test run. If you’re good at carpentry, you could even make your own! DIY is all the rage, after all! Once you had your coffin... well, it’d be a shame not to put it to use while you waited for the big day. You can fit so much stuff in there! Like grains and potatoes!  This is just a small taste of all the interesting burial rites we had in this country back in the day. This comic would be 700 pages long if I talked about all of them.  That said, if you’re interested in this kind of stuff and want to hear more about Swedish history and folklore... keep an eye out. I’ve been working on something for awhile, and my goal for next year is to actually start making it. Until then... Happy Halloween, my dearest children of the night.  Don't let the vampires bite! Or do, I don't know your life. I love you!
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