“Pale her cheeks they ought to be, it was only yesterday that she had been a tree.” : Gender, Power, and Hybridity in the Swedish Medieval Supernatural Ballads

This thesis analyzes eight specific Swedish medieval ballads that contain supernatural transformation and hybridity for how they depict gender in late medieval and early modern contexts. Using literature as a historical resource and a micro-historical approach, this thesis applies gender theory, intersectional approaches, and monster theory to its reading of these ballads. Through this analysis, this thesis has found that transformation in these ballads highlights what it meant to be human in the late medieval and early modern periods, by contrasting and defining humanness through the tension of being a hybrid. And inevitably, discussions of the body during these periods involved having a gendered body. While these stories define what was human and what was not, they discuss and negotiate late medieval and early modern conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Additionally, the conflicts in these stories introduce real-life issues such as power, violence, and social roles. Characters in these ballads negotiate gender and social roles by subverting and upholding societal power structures. A woman acts independently and marries a snake against her family’s wishes. Wives use magic to upend the social hierarchy usurp their husbands’ authority. Father’s roles as protectors are both questioned and underlined in stories of their failures. This thesis concludes that late medieval and early modern audiences had many different understandings of gender, and these audiences used supernatural transformation ballads as a means of communicating complex and contradictory elements of identity and gender during this period