Today is actually the real midsummer but they’ve made sure that it always is celebrated on the first Friday after summer solstice. Midsummer eve isn’t a holiday (Midsummers day is though) but most people working in factories and offices still have the day off and it’s also a payed free day. This is the last holiday we have before Christmas. I would say that it is as big or perhaps even a bigger holiday here than Christmas. The bad traffic started already today because everyone wants to be where ever they are supposed to be already today.
I’ll write more about the celebrations and folklore the coming days. Today I’ll tell You about Vättar (Väettir). They are usually small beings dressed in grey clothes but they can easily change to something else like toads or little mice. Like all beings they can be rather grumpy but we rarely know that we have them around us since they can change what they look like. There are several different kinds of Väettir, it all depends on where they live, like lake väettir, mountain väettir and forest väettir. It isn’t unusual that they live just beneath our cottages and if there are unusually many toads hanging around in our gardens it might be because they actually are Väettirs 🙂
So if one lives a calm and orderly life and don’t disturb them they might become Your friend and then help you with the animals or perhaps give you and unusual amount of good luck. They really don’t like warm water so if one would toss out some from the home one should always warn them before one does. If one would meet a Väettir that needs help and help with what ever it is they usually give you a gift. It might look like an old pine cone or a stone, always take it and thank for it because they day after it can have turned in to gold or gemstones. If you don’t help them or disturbs them in any way they then instead might give You some terrible disease.
Väettirs are guardians of the area so I wonder if they live where gnomes doesn’t. Normally gnomes lives at farms while Väettirs seems to be more adaptable and live even close to poor people. They are my favorite beings to be honest just because they more often are kind than evil. Have I mentioned that there lives an unusual amount of toads in my garden? 🙂 🙂 🙂
Have a great day!
The Cottage by the crane lake. 
Beautiful photos, thank you Christer. Thank you too for the bumblebee beetle photo, I’ve not seen one of those before.
Was reading an article earlier, on CNN, about the toad dance in Sweden. I’d love to see this!
I first read about Plantago/Plantain in Culpepper’s Herbal many years ago.
🙏 https://www.complete-herbal.com/culpepper/plantain.htm
It certainly sounds like a powerful cure-all….good to have growing nearby if one accidentally upsets a disease-gifting toad! Be careful with all of them in your garden 😊
Nice to see a photo of the variegated version, also new to me.
Thank you again and have a happy day.
B
LikeLike
Hi blythedunbar!
They are my favorite beetles 🙂
I’ll see if I can find a video of the dance but it’s the little frogs dance 🙂
Yes that plant can be used for a lot of things but no need to have them in our gardens because they grow everywhere (including our gardens even if we don’t want to have them there 🙂 ) and they are really hard to get rid of because of its roots. Usually if we get a small cut we use the leafs as plasters, amazing how fast we stop to bleed then! I am however not sure they work towards the magic diseases 🙂 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
You do make me smile with your lovely photos and great sense of humour 😃. Good tip to have re cuts, thank you I’ve always used yarrow but I’ll be on lookout for plantago next time! Ah, a frog dance, of course…sorry, still have covid fog. Let me know if they read! Hope to visit Sweden in the next 3 years but don’t want to go if I have offended them 😃
LikeLike
Hi blythedunbar!
I’m glad You like it 🙂
Yarrow can be used to lots of things as well, my personal favorite is to put some in tea if I have stomach problems, usually calms down a lot. Then again take too much or too often and the problems can become worse 🙂 🙂
I doubt that they can read, I think they don’t need to but if they do it would only be texts written in Norse runes and we don’t write much in runes these days even though people seems to have used them well in to the 18 hundreds.
LikeLiked by 1 person