Critical DMs: Tomte at the American Swedish Institute
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Critical DMs are lightly edited Slack conversations by members of the MPR News arts team about Minnesota art and culture.
This week, Arts Editor Max Sparber and Senior Arts Reporter Alex V. Cipolle discuss ”Tomte: the Gnome, the Myth, the Legend” at the American Swedish Institute.
Alex Cipolle: Good Dag! I'm here to discuss the tomte, the mythical guardian of Scandinavian homesteads. Can anyone help me with this?
Max Sparber: Let's put out some porridge and a tomte will arrive to help. Unless —
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Cipolle: Hide your cows!
Sparber: If we forget the butter, the cows will be gone.
Cipolle: Oh tomte, you rascal, you.
Sparber: Tell me how we learned about tomtes.
Cipolle: We went to the American Swedish Institute's Turnblad Mansion, which is positively haunted with tomtes, a proto-Santa gnome. The exhibition is "Tomte: the Gnome, the Myth, the Legend."
Sparber: Tomtes are, the exhibition is adamant, NOT GNOMES, even though they look exactly like gnomes.
They are more like irritable farmhands.
Cipolle: But it's in the name of the exhibition?
Sparber: I think they couldn't figure out what to say instead of "The man, the myth the etc."
Cipolle: All right, so right off the bat, Tomte is upset. Which we learned, doesn't take much.
Sparber: Irascible little Scandivanians.
Cipolle: So who is tomte and how do we keep him happy?
Sparber: He seems like he's pretty easy to placate. The exhibit has a Swedish farm table set out with all sorts of Swedish farm foods, and underneath there is a little tomte, happily dozing, as he has just eaten some porridge.
Cipolle: He's usually with a sleepy cat or an alert fox. As some of the beautiful illustrations we saw indicate, sometimes a pair of foxes pull his sled.
Sparber: Yeah, the Swedish artistic imagination regarding tomtes is dazzling.
Cipolle: It was really interesting to see all the illustrations of tomte through the years. Either for children's books or advertisements.
Which makes you realize how advertising was such a machine for illustration back in the day. Sadly no longer.
And his slow evolution into Santa. According to Director of Exhibitions Erin Stromgren, this was partly in thanks to Swedish-American illustrator Haddon Sundblom who worked for Coca-Cola.
Sparber: They make Christmas exciting in a way that we don't really see anymore. Weird little creatures showing up at your door, led by foxes or riding between the horns of a stag.
The Coca-Cola Santa doesn't have that sort of rizz.
Cipolle: All fizz. No mischief.
Too jolly.
Almost vacant.
Sparber: I would say this show has three themes: Tomte as a sort of a subterranean influence on our Santa ideas, bowls of porridge and Minnesotans somehow gave Santa his reindeer. Let's take these in order.
Cipolle: 🎅🥣🦌
Sparber: There are a lot of illustrations by Jenny Nyström, a Swedish illustrator, and her tomtes definitely look like itty bitty, slightly mean Santas.
Cipolle: Yes. Very much a fairy tale quality to her work. And fairy tales are known for their dark sides.
Sparber: For sure. There's even a Krampus in the exhibit, the wild-man anti-Santa in Scandinavia who, instead of rewarding good kids, kidnaps bad kids. He's appropriately terrifying.
Cipolle: As well as the goat man, Julbock, made of straw. Essentially Sweden's Christmas wicker man.
Sparber: I am going to link to the most famous of these, the Gävle goat, who people try to burn down every year. You can watch a webcam to see if he is still standing.
Cipolle: Julbock is a pre-Christian invention. So a nice pagan touch, too.
Sparber: And he's in a room with a bunch of Yule Goats, who watch you prepare for Christmas, silently judging you.
Cipolle: All of these, including tomte, are sort of ancient versions of Elf on a Shelf
Let's get real though. This exhibition is really about tomte's blood lust for porridge with slabs of butter. Which brings me to one of my favorite pieces in the exhibition. The GIANT bowl of porridge with a pad of butter the size of a birthday cake on top.
Sparber: It's like a bathtub of porridge. It fills a kitchen.
Cipolle: I hope next year they make a porridge ball pit. I want to swim in it like Scrouge McDuck in his money.
That set piece, like many in the show, was made by a local artist, Suzanne Casler of Studio Moss.
Cipolle: As the tradition goes, you leave porridge out for tomte, like cookies for Santa. But if you forget butter, he might end your cows.
Sparber: Yeah, no coal for misbehavior, like Santa. He just slaughters your cattle.
Which, if you think about it, is probably a dramatic but effective labor tactic. Keep those farmhands happy!
Cipolle: Workers of the world unite and eat porridge.
Sparber: So this exhibit started in Stockholm, but they Minnesota-ized it, and that part fried my brain.
Because it's about a secret connection between the Sámi people of Scandinavia and the state of Alaska, and how a Minnesota businessman gave Santa his reindeer.
Cipolle: Ooh yes. Let's talk reindeer and the Sámi people!
Sparber: I literally can't believe I never knew this story before last week.
What can you tell me about the Sámi?
Cipolle: The Sámi are the Sámi-speaking Indigenous peoples of a region that spans parts of Norway to Russia.
Sparber: They are also featured in the 2014 film "Big Game," in which Samuel L. Jackson, president of the United States, is shot down over Scandinavia and rescued by a child Sámi hunter. I will include a trailer for this amazing film that I am the only person ever to have seen.
Cipolle: Erin Stromgren told us that the Sámi Cultural Center of North America, which is based in Duluth, helped with this part of the exhibition. Many of the Sámi that came to North America were reindeer herding families.
According to the Sámi Cultural Center: "Reindeer herding families were hired by the United States government in 1894 and 1898 to teach reindeer husbandry to the Alaska Native Inupiaq and Yup’ik Peoples, who were facing starvation because of the systematic slaughtering of whales, walrus, and seals by the whaling industries in the Bering Sea and Chukchi Sea."
Sparber: So this is where we meet Minnesotan Carl Lomen, who decided to capitalize on the sudden presence of reindeer in Alaska by creating a reindeer meat empire.
And how did he promote his reindeer meat?
Cipolle: Here we gooooooo.
Sparber: He partnered with Christmas parades to have Santa led by reindeer.
Seems weird to me. Like, what was the promotion? You know what's delicious — Rudolph!
Cipolle: The advertisement illustration for canned Alaskan Reindeer boasts, "Ideal for quick lunches."
Sparber: When Santa gets peckish traveling around the world, he just sticks a fork in Dasher.
Cipolle: More like With a Dash-er of Salt.
Sparber: Vixen in the porridge.
Cipolle: It's an odd strategy. Make the reindeer sentimental holiday symbols and then encourage us to eat them. It's like advertising rabbit stew for Easter.
Sparber: I can't tell whether it worked or not. It sounds like he was shut down by the cattle lobby.
Must have been effective to freak out big beef, I guess.
Cipolle: Maybe the reindeer didn't want to draw the attention of tomte. We all know what happens to those cows now.
Overall, this was a magical exhibition with all its coziness and impishness.
Sparber: Yes, let's close with the most surprising thing there: A small room with Santa asleep in it.
Snoring.
Cipolle: Sleep Apnea Santa!
Sparber: Snoring in a way that has us all concerned.
Cipolle: Get this man a CPAP for Christmas.
Sparber: I told them that if he stops making noise, they should just shake him a little.
He's a jolly elf, unlike tomte.
You wake tomte up, he'll burn down your farm.
Cipolle: 🔥
