SWEDISH FOLKTALE NACKEN

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to myths, legends, and folk tales, connecting the stories
of the past to the life and the present. Today
we're gonna be talking about necan Necon is a Swedish
folk lored tale. Here's a little bit about it. Neckin

(00:24):
is often naked. He plays the violin in beautiful tones
to lure people to the stream where they would drown. Now,
when we've talked to some people from Sweden, what they
said is the legend of the folk tales created to
keep people away, especially children, away from these lakes so
they wouldn't drown. So it was a story of caution.

(00:46):
But there's some psychology here that I wanted to highlight.
He's an old man and a shape shifter. We see
shape shifters in a lot of these legends, stories and
folk tales, and shape shifting is sometimes looked at, at
least from my opinion, is something we don't understand and
where they can transform from human to some other supernatural
type of creature. And this type of narrative we've seen

(01:06):
for centuries. We've seen it with superheroes today, not necessarily
shape shifting, but we have seen their appearance shift. Superman
changing from the average looking person to a superhero Batman.
So we see this kind of shifting and it reminds
me a lot of us as human beings. Right, we
have our persona, as youngin analysis would say, right where

(01:27):
we show out our image to people, but we have
actually variations of our persona. What I mean by that
is we have a persona that we show or display
to our family, to our workers, to our friends and
significant others, everybody, to our students, to our teachers. We
have different personas that are portrayed. And the other thing

(01:50):
that makes me think about shape shifters a lot is
this shadow side of us that we've talked about in
several different podcasts and I'm doing a lot of bit
of study right now. Is the shadow truly evil? Is
it a different compilation of things? Is it some things
that we just don't like about ourselves? And what is evil?
And this is another discussion for another day. We won't

(02:11):
be focusing on that here, but I wanted to give
you kind of a little bit of a background psychologically
and philosophically. So again, he is a shape sister that
could take the form of a young man, someone's loved one,
or even an animal. So you can see here's something enticing.
You see how the legend goes, or they're folk tales,
something enticing about that water, and they're warning people not

(02:33):
to be enticed, especially as children. They see something new,
something novel, they want to experience it, but it may
be too dangerous for them in some capacity if they
don't have guidance there. So what it says is, if
you see a dog walking by this dream, it could
be neck and tricking you. He often can play the violin,
but can also play other instruments in the accordion. Again

(02:54):
music and the lure of music and attracting us. Some
say that he can teach you to play if you
give him a black cat or three drops of your blood,
so you can see the story starts morphing for different reasons.
You could play to force people to dance. They couldn't
stop dancing. In some cases it said that people would
dance till their death. There's also stories of a horse.
In some stories there's Nick's horse, or one of the

(03:15):
many forms Nickon can take. Is it possible? Of course,
anything can be possible. If these could be also alluding
to substance use, maybe some kind of hallucinogenics. That are used,
and they couldn't describe people's behaviors. One of the things
you have to do to protect yourself and naked to
stay away from bigger streams, waterfalls and rivers by sunset

(03:36):
and night. And here you have the separation of day
and night, of good and bad again, the shadow and
the self, if you think about this, or the psyche right,
the good and the ban of our internal world. But
they also use in the storyline when they go through
the forest to this lake or this waterfall of this river,
depending on where you're at. And that again we talked

(03:59):
about the forest kind of going into this unknown to
our unconscious and there's something there and if we're not
prepared for it, we could be swept away in this river.
This is a lot of times I see this with
individuals with trauma, if they're not ready, if they don't
have the proper guide to tap into those traumatic events,
and I'm talking serious traumatic events, child abuse, whatnot. A

(04:22):
lot of times their system isn't it capable of handling it.
It'll trigger like a circuit breaker and shut them down.
And this could be viewed as the niken, right, and
those untouched waters. So you need to have a guide. Again,
the children needs to have a supervisor with them to
watch them if they go into these more dangerous areas.
So that's another take on this whole folk tale. But

(04:43):
I thought it was interesting because we did see some
parallels that we've seen in other folk tales and legends
with just the forest again, going into this dark, unknown,
unconscious during the day and the night, how different things are.
It could be a representation of our two sides of
our personality, the yang and the yang. You see, every
culture has got some version of it. But you look
at it walking through the culture of this journey through

(05:05):
the forest through the unconscious, and you have to be
careful because there is danger there and you have to
be Sometimes it's alluring, sometimes it's not, and it could
be dangerous. That's it for now, But you know what
I want. Why don't you write down your comments? Give
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to us on spreaker. Tell us what you think about

(05:27):
this folk tale. What's your favorite folk tale? Let me
know