Hacker (folklore)

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The Hackers (Swedish Hackare) were a race of short people who used to live in Scandinavia, according to Swedish folklore.

They were called hackers because they cultivated the land by hacking the soil and not by plowing it. The sites where they had been were marked by heaps of stones, hackehemman (meaning "hacker homesteads"), which were large stones that the hackers could not move, and smaller stones around them.

They supposedly had many children and large families, and when a family had many children, they were compared to the hackers.

The Swedish author Verner von Heidenstam connected the tradition to escaped thralls who made a living of the poor soils which others did not wish to use.