"Jag glömmer aldrig åskvädret 1960 tror jag det var" - ovädersberättelser

The aim of this article is to study how experiences of storms assume narrative form. It examines how people talk about their experiences and why their narratives are often dramatic and emotional in character. The stories are drawn from responses to a questionnaire entitled ‘Nice weather today!’, sent out by the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland in the winter of 2015–16.

In the article I analyse the building blocks of stories, their form and emotionality, and micronarratives. The storm narratives considered here describe threatening events which nevertheless ended well. The disaster that could have occurred failed to do so. I call these ‘almost’ stories. They describe how a storm almost brought down trees, how lightning almost struck and, if it did strike, how the people involved almost died. Stories about storms are largely concerned with a situation that is beyond human control and defies our need for control. These dramatic, even terrifying, incidents can be shaped into concludable narratives with a clear element of cause-and-effect, of causality, and clear markers of internal and external value judgements in the form of emotive words and expressions. The dramatic thing that ‘almost’ happened can be seen as an exaggeration, a way of recounting something exciting, but it can also be interpreted as a powerful expression of emotion: a fear of the forces of nature. Analysing storm stories by focusing on their narrative exaggeration thus becomes a way of understanding the dramatisation of existential fear.