In her book “Lonesome as a Swede”, Katarzyna Tubylewicz explores the Swedish concept of ‘solitude’ and how it differs from ‘loneliness’. In the excerpt below, Tubylewicz talks with David Thurfjell – Professor of Religious Studies at Södertörns högskola in Stockholm – about the intersection of aloneness and nature in Swedish society.

In German there exists the word Waldeseinsamkeit, which describes a particular feeling of solitude or aloneness experienced only in forests. In Swedish, as well as in many other languages including Polish and English, there is no such word. Yet Sweden is precisely the country where being alone in the forest or some other place in the bosom of Nature is a state that people long for, seek and celebrate.

It is in the bosom of Nature that Swedes discover themselves. It is Nature that gives them the spiritual experiences they do not get in church. Sweden is a country whose inhabitants are sceptically inclined towards all institutionalised religions and usually define themselves as agnostic. Of course, in such a multicultural country, there is room also for religiosity, even zealous forms of it, but at the peripheries of mainstream social life. Meanwhile it is possible to detect elements of Protestant morality in the mindsets and actions of secular native Swedes, although its presence is not entirely conscious or connected with spirituality. Places of metaphysical searching are therefore not chapels but the skerries of the Stockholm or Gothenburg archipelagos, the flat rock above a lake beside a house, the dense forest which can be found everywhere in this country, the boundless meadows of Öland or Österlen.

David Thurfjell, Professor of Religious Studies at Södertörns högskola in Stockholm, recently