Ordspråk och Gök (Sayings and Cuckoos)

Mom's Farfar,
Johan August Carlsson

Now, I’ve thought about some more of Farfar’s ordspråk. He’d say, “Små grytor har också öron.” A gryta is a cooking pot, usually round, with one handle on each side. The iron pots often had small round handles that kind of looked like ears and we actually called them ears. The saying translates as, “Little pots also have ears” which meant that little children can hear too. If there was something that shouldn’t be repeated, you shouldn’t say it in front of a small child. When we heard that saying as kids, we knew that we were going to miss out on something interesting!

Another of his sayings was “Lagom är bäst med det är sällan hemma.” This one can be said, “Moderation is best but that is seldom at home.” The Swedish word lagom is interesting because there isn’t really one English word that means exactly that. It does mean “moderation” or “enough” but it’s a good thing.  When we say “enough,” that sounds like too little doesn’t it? Maybe a better way to translate lagom is “just right.” Farfar would say this ordspråk at the same times as he would say, “Förmycket eller förlitet skämmer allt.” This one means, “Too much or too little will spoil anything.”  I remember him saying either of these when one of us kids would take too much food at the dinner table. He’d also say, “Den som gapar efter mycket missar ofta hela sticket.” “Those who desire too much often miss the whole thing.”

“Bättre en fågel i handen än tio i skogen.” That’s, “It’s better to have one bird in your hand than ten in the forest.” It’s the Swedish equivalent of “Better a bird in the hand than two in the bush.” That one came out whenever one of us kids was wishing for something different than what we had. It was important to be grateful and satisfied with what we had.

There were a bunch of sayings about cuckoo birds too. We had them in the part of Sweden where we lived. A cuckoo is a pretty big wild bird, about as big as a blue jay here. A cuckoo bird mama is very lazy though; she lays her eggs in another bird's nest and the other bird will lay on the egg for her. Then when the eggs hatch, the other baby birds are smaller and don't move so fast.

Young cuckoo being fed by a songbird

The baby cuckoo bird will kick all the others out one after another. Then finally the substitute parents only have the cuckoo bird left. They keep feeding him and working so hard. He's hungry all the time because he's a big bird. The two little birds will fly back and forth nonstop to find food for him. It's such strange behavior that somehow there came to be some old stories or traditions about this bird. People used to ask each other if they had heard a cuckoo bird yet and there was sort of a competition to see who could hear one first. It wasn't only to see who had heard him first but which direction you had heard him from. The saying was, "Norr-gök är sorg-gök. Söder-gök är döder-gök. Öster-gök är tröster-gök. Väster-gök är bäster-gök." In other words, "If you hear it from the North, that means sorrow. If you hear it from the South, that means death. If you hear it from the East, that is a consoling sound. But West is best." There was also a saying that if you see a cuckoo bird sitting on the fence to your yard, that means someone in that house will die that year. I saw a half-grown cuckoo bird one time sitting on the fence between Mellangården and us and watched the tiny mother bird flying back and forth feeding it, even though the cuckoo baby was already twice as big as her. But no-one died that year in either house. That made me start to wonder about these sayings.

Note: The video is of Mom reciting the cuckoo saying. Gök is the Swedish word for cuckoo. The background in the video is a drawing done of Mom in 1986 by Jeanne Peterson Link.