Ättestupa

History of the term

The idea of senicide, or the practice of elderly people jumping from cliffs, appears in ancient writings. The Paradoxographus Vaticanus mentions it among the Ligurians, and Procopius describes it for the Heruli in the 6th century CE. Solinus wrote about the Hyperboreans at the North Pole, where daylight lasts from the vernal to the autumnal equinox, and claimed the climate was so healthy that people never died of illness but instead leaped from a cliff into the sea.

The Swedish term ättestupa first appeared in the 17th century, inspired by the Old Icelandic Gautreks saga, which is set partly in the Swedish region of Götaland. The saga includes a comical episode called Dalafíflaþáttr, or "the story of the fools from the valleys," about a miserly family that would rather kill themselves than spend their wealth on hospitality. They jump off a cliff the saga calls Ættarstapi or Ætternisstapi, meaning "dynasty precipice."

This word appears in no other Old Norse text. The saga became known in Sweden in 1664 when Olaus Verelius published an edition and Swedish translation. This likely led Swedish antiquarians from the 17th through the 19th centuries to label various cliffs as ättestupa. At the end of the 19th century, Swedish linguist Adolf Noreen began questioning the myth, and researchers now generally agree that suicide precipices never actually existed.

However, place-names inspired by Gautreks saga remain in the Swedish landscape. In modern times, the term ättestupa is often used in political debates to criticize insufficiently funded social security programs, especially for retirees.

In popular culture

The concept of ättestupa was first invented as a joke on the Swedish radio comedy show Mosebacke Monarki during the 1960s. The program satirically proposed it, abbreviated as ÄTP, as a replacement for ATP, the country’s state pension system. In the 2019 film Midsommar, a folk horror movie, the main characters see an ättestupa ritual take place the morning after they reach their Swedish friend’s ancestral commune for a midsummer celebration. On the CBS remake of Ghosts, in season two’s eighth episode titled “The Liquor License,” which aired December 9, 2022, the Viking ghost Thorfin mentions that he once performed ättestupa.

The Netflix series Norsemen features an extended scene in its first episode, “The Homecoming,” from season one. A group of elderly men from Norheim are urged by a slave to carry out an ättestupa ceremony. After the first man leaps to his death, the others are not convinced to follow. The slave, admitting he cannot force them to do anything against their will, negotiates with them to simply stay away from Norheim so the community never learns they refused to jump.