Visitors arriving in the coastal timber city of Sundsvall in central Swedenquickly notice a strange, charming creature appearing on municipal buses, park statues, brewery labels, and museum crests: a woodland animal with the long ears, whiskered nose, and furry body of a European hare, seamlessly fused with the feathered wings, tail fan, and clawed hind feet of a forest grouse. Known across Scandinavia as the Skvader, this winged hare is Sweden’s most beloved modern mythical beast. Unlike ancient creatures born in Viking Age sagas, we know the exact hunter, the exact taxidermist, and the exact tavern dinner in the early twentieth century that brought the Skvader into the world.
Hakan Dahlmark’s Tall Tale at the Hotel Knaust
The story of the Skvader began around the turn of the twentieth century inside the grand dining room of the Hotel Knaust in Sundsvall, a legendary gathering spot where wealthy timber barons, merchants, and local hunters met over punch and cigars to swap stories about their adventures in the northern forests. Among the most regular and entertaining raconteurs at these dinners was Hakan Dahlmark, a genial timber inspector and farm owner from Lunde on the island of Alnon.
One evening, growing tired of his friends’ increasingly exaggerated hunting boasts, Dahlmark leaned across the table with a deadpan expression and announced that back in the autumn of 1874, while hunting in the woods outside Sundsvall, he had personally shot a winged hare that had flown out of a pine tree. When his dinner companions burst out laughing and challenged him to prove such an animal existed, Dahlmark decided to take the joke to its ultimate conclusion.
The 1907 Birthday Painting and the Taxidermist Rudolf Granberg
In 1907, for Hakan Dahlmark’s birthday, his housekeeper’s nephew carefully painted an oil picture depicting the mythical winged hare standing proudly in a forest clearing, presenting the canvas to Dahlmark so he could hang it on his wall as “proof” of his 1874 hunt. Just before his death in 1912, Dahlmark donated this whimsical painting to the Medelpad Antiquities Association, which managed the open-air museum on Norra Berget overlooking Sundsvall.
When the museum director, Carl Erik Hammarberg, saw how much visitors loved the painting, he realized the museum needed the “real” animal to go along with it. In 1918, Hammarberg approached a gifted taxidermist from Granlo named Rudolf Granberg and commissioned him to construct a physical, three-dimensional specimen matching Dahlmark’s painting. Working with surgical precision, Granberg took the head, forelegs, and torso pelt of an actual European brown hare (Lepus europaeus) and seamlessly stitched them onto the feathered wings, tail, and scaled hind legs of a female Western capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus, a large woodland grouse). Perched on a pine branch inside a glass case at the Norra Berget museum, the lifelike mount was so seamlessly constructed that generations of visiting schoolchildren—and more than a few gullible adult tourists—stared in awe, convinced they were looking at a rare mutation of the Swedish wilderness.
How a Joke Entered the Swedish Dictionary and Scientific Taxonomy
Soon after the mounted creature went on display in 1918, the word “skvader” leaped from a local Sundsvall joke into the national Swedish language. Etymologically, linguists trace the name to a playful blending of two Swedish dialect words: skva (evoking the sudden whirring sound of a forest bird flushing from the brush) and tader (a dialect variation of tjader, the Swedish word for the capercaillie grouse). Today, in everyday Swedish conversation, the word skvader is officially recognized in the Swedish Academy Dictionary to describe any bizarre compromise, poorly matched hybrid machine, or contradictory political committee that tries to combine two incompatible things.
Playing along with the joke in full scholarly deadpan, biologists at the Swedish Museum of Natural History even assigned the Skvader an official Latin binomial name: Tetpus, formed by combining the first half of Tetrao (grouse) with the second half of Lepus (hare). When American tourists later compared the Skvader to the horned North American Jackalope or the Bavarian Wolpertinger, the citizens of Sundsvall proudly defended their creation, culminating in 1987 when the province of Medelpad officially voted the Skvader as its symbolic regional animal alongside the real mountain hare.
