Eva Wigström

Born on December 24, 1832, in Råga Hörstad near Landskrona, Eva Wigström was home-educated and later became part of the bourgeois world through her marriage to Claes Wigström, the general manager of Ramlösa springs. Even so, she often felt caught between social worlds, and that outsider perspective seems to have sharpened her eye for the lives and speech of ordinary people.

In 1879, when she was already in her forties, she began traveling across the Scanian countryside to collect folklore. She visited much of Skåne and also parts of Blekinge, recording folk beliefs, stories, sayings, and other oral traditions. Her major publications include Folkdiktning, Skånska visor, sagor och sägner, Sagor och äfventyr upptecknade i Skåne, and the posthumous Fågeln med guldskrinet.

She is remembered as one of Sweden’s first female folklore collectors and an important figure in Swedish folklore studies. Her own comments suggest that being both a woman and the daughter of a farming family helped her gain the trust of people who might not have opened up to the more typical university-trained collectors of her time.