Noitien asianajaja

English: The Witches’ Advocate

Language: Finnish — this book is written in Finnish.

Jan Guillou

ISBN: 951-0-27747-9

Swedish writer Jan Guillou, known for challenging conventional ideas, describes Sweden’s seventeenth-century witch hunts, beginning with a little girl’s testimony in eastern Dalarna and ending in Stockholm. The book follows a spiral of madness that led to the execution of many innocent women. The back cover says the reader will not know whether to laugh or cry, and that is true: the precarious lives of women, especially peasant women, are heartbreaking, while the flimsy and absurd accusations are astonishing to anyone familiar with modern standards of evidence. Child witnesses play a central part, spinning elaborate tales of neighbours taking children to Blåkulla—Sweden’s counterpart of Kyöpelinvuori—where Satan supposedly lived and behaved indecently with witches and children. As in many witch trials, suspicion alone was enough. Particularly interesting is the status gained by children who accused a “witch”: a pursuit of fame and attention almost like that of modern talent-show hopefuls. When their tales were not sensational enough, priests and officials could coax more out of them at night-time gatherings where the children shared their Blåkulla stories. Anyone who stayed up telling ghost stories as a child knows how convincing they feel at midnight. Add the wish for attention and power in an adult world, and the result is explosive. Written in a direct, absorbing style, the book is accessible even to readers who usually prefer fiction.

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