Music

Swedish Folk Instruments

• Click here to download an introduction to a selection of Swedish folk instruments, drawn largely from Jan Ling's Svensk folkmusik: Bondens musik i helg och söcken.

• You can watch a video here that combines the same information from the brochure above with recordings of some of the instruments (nyckelharpa, fiol, hummel, psalmodikon, spilåpipa, dragspel).

Listen

You can visit our YouTube channel for recordings of Swedish folk music (but mostly contains stories from Swedish folklore), including a playlist featuring recordings and photographs collected by Jan Ling as part of his doctoral thesis Nyckelharpan - Studier i ett folkligt musikinstrument (The Nyckelharpa - Studies of a Folk Instrument) (1967).

Nyckelharpa. From Länsmuseet Gävleborg, CC BY-SA, via Digitalt Museum.

Okänd spelman [Otto Larsson], photograph by Jan Ling. From National Collections of Music, Theatre and Dance, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.