In oral historical traditions recorded in the Danish countryside during
the late nineteenth century, cunning forest thiefs play a conspicuously
prominent role. All available post-1850 evidence, however, indicates that
forest thefts no longer formed a prevalent political problem. Hence, the
tradition primarily relates to an interpretation of the past (eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries). Interestingly, this motif was almost totally
absent from the folklore collected during the same period and published
in Sweden, where hundreds of forest thiefs were annually convicted.
Some scholars feel that the apparently contrasting popular traditions
regarding woodland management and property rights in Denmark and Sweden
did not only stem from the fact that the quantity, distribution, and utilization
of forest resources were dissimilar in the two Scandinavian countries.
Since the seventeenth century, Denmark had been a net timber importer,
its own highly fragmented, deciduous forests permitting only a restricted,
local supply of fuelwood and minor timber. Sweden, on the other hand, with
its abundant coniferous woodlands, consituted one of the world's most prominent
early-modern wood producers and exporters. The character and extent of
forest thefts as well as the legislation and administration of justice
in the two countries was, nevertheless, in general, comparable. The only
significant difference seems to be that corporal punishment was a common
feature in the feudal Danish society, whereas it seems to have been absent
in a rural, Swedish society generally dominated by freeholders.
Rather than existing in the relatively distant past described
by oral tradition, the reason for the different impact of the forest thief
motif is found in the present and immediate past of late nineteenth century
ethnography. During the land reform period of the early nineteenth
century, Denmark and Sweden experienced two very dissimilar paths of development.
In Denmark, previous tenants acquired their farms as freeholds, thus the
growing class of cottagers and laborers never suffered poverty to the extreme
found in other parts of Europe. In Sweden there was a traditional dominance
of freeholds, but there conflict between peasantry and the landless was
sharpened. Thus, late nineteenth century Danish peasants with newly acquired
property-rights sought to construct a self-image dissociating themselves
from the old, recently abandoned feudal order. This objective was, however,
relatively irrelevant for a Swedish peasantry dominated for centuries by
freeholders, who ardently continued their long-standing struggle against
the forest thefts perpetrated by the ever increasing
class of unpropertied.