11/16/21

Vallåtar från Gammelboning

Kulning is the old northern Swedish way of herding livestock and of communication between young girl herders on mountains, and between them and the home places down in the valley. This was also a way of calling for help, telling the family that an animal had gone missing, or crying for the herding women to come home. This is an arrangement of some of these calls by folksinger Susanne Rosenberg and fiddler Sven Ahlbäck. Along with the kulning calls, the arrangement includes a nonsensical folk song about goats, suggesting that these calls were originally intended to call goats from the forest:

My goats walk in the forest, gnawing the bark from trees.

Our maids and our servants sit knees against knees.

My goats walk in the forest, sitting knees against knees.

Our maids and our servants gnaw the bark from trees.