Tiderman-Österberg decided to reconnect with her culture’s musical roots during a turning point in her life. Goats and sheep have different sounds often shorter, more rhythmical, and more guttural,” she said, adding that the “magic” that makes kulning work is a combination of controlling how one’s voice travels across natural landscapes and a knowledge of animal calls. “The long, ornamented and melismatic calls are often directed towards cows.

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Unlike many herding cultures, Scandinavia’s shepherds were mostly women that employed high-pitched animal mimicry. Farmers here are migratory and herd their animals to fäbods during the summer months to graze on fresh grass. Norway, of course, but also historically in eastern Finland,” she told me on the drive from the train station to the farm, explaining that the musical tradition started in the stubborn soil of Scandinavia’s frozen farmlands that made kulning more necessity than art. It happens across several regions in the Nordic countries. “Kulning is a vocal technique born out of function. She would be my guide for the day to Skallskog and the surrounding area, where she often practices kulning and researches the disappearing fäbod farming lifestyle.

After taking a three-hour train from Stockholm to Borlänge, I was met by Jennie Tiderman-Österberg, a trained opera singer and former punk rocker. I visited Skallskog in late September as part of my search for a summer farm where kulning was once routinely practiced.

Yet, just as Swedes have become increasingly detached from the farm, the origins of kulning have come close to being forgotten. This form of herd-calling connects hyper-digital Sweden to its pastoral past. However, while kulning might be undergoing a pop-culture revival, the average Swede would be hard-pressed to identify where the tradition comes from. And outdoor concerts and folk music festivals featuring trained kulning singers are continuing to popularise this spellbinding art of communicating with nature. In 2016, YouTuber Jonna Jinton posted a video of her kulning to cows that racked up more than eight million views. In recent decades, as women’s place in society has shifted, these sounds have transformed from farmland pragmatism to operatic elegance.Ī kind of Nordic yodelling-meets-Dr Doolittle superpower, modern kulning has a bewitching quality that inspired Disney to include its entrancing melodies in Frozen 2.

This mystical ability originates from centuries-old fäbods (summer farms) like Skallskog, where farmwomen would traditionally call their meandering animals back home as they grazed freely during the few warm months in these frigid lands. Kulning is a vocalisation tradition that dates back to the Middle Ages, where singers corral farm animals with hypnotic melodies, luring cows, goats, sheep and ducks towards them as if each note was charged with its own gravity. But this is where you’ll find the disappearing roots of an ancient Swedish singing tradition so intimately connected to nature that it can only be described as magic. Hidden deep in the Nordic wilderness, this humble collection of cattle barns and russet-red farmhouses may seem like a place of little importance. Skallskog is a secluded farm without running water or electricity that most Swedes have never heard of.

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