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    Made in Sweden: 25 ideas that created a country
    Made in Sweden: 25 ideas that created a country
    Made in Sweden: 25 ideas that created a country
    Ebook121 pages2 hours

    Made in Sweden: 25 ideas that created a country

    By Elisabeth Åsbrink

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    What are the real Swedish Values? Who is the real Swedish Model?

    In recent times, we have come to favour all things Scandi — their food, furnishings, fiction, fashion, and general way of life. We seem to regard the Swedes and their Scandinavian neighbours as altogether more sophisticated, admirable, and evolved than us. We have all aspired to be Swedish, to live in their perfectly designed society from the future. But what if we have invested all our faith in a fantasy? What if Sweden has in fact never been as moderate, egalitarian, dignified, or tolerant as it would like to (have us) think? The recent rise to political prominence of an openly neo-Nazi party has begun to crack the illusion, and here now is Swede Elisabeth Åsbrink, who loves her country ‘but not blindly’, presenting twenty-five of her nation’s key words and icons afresh, in order to give the world a clearer-eyed understanding of this fascinating country …

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribe Publications
    Release dateApr 30, 2019
    ISBN9781925693706
    Made in Sweden: 25 ideas that created a country
    Author

    Elisabeth Åsbrink

    Elisabeth Åsbrink is a journalist and author. Her parents were Hungarian and English, and she was born and raised in, and now lives in, Sweden. Her previous books have won the August Prize, the Danish-Swedish Cultural Fund Prize, and Poland's Kapuscinski Prize. 1947 (the first of her books to be published in English, by Scribe in 2017) won the prestigious Letterstedt Prize, was translated into 19 languages, and was published in the UK, Australia, the USA, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Brazil, South Korea, Poland, Denmark, Finland, and Norway, among others. Her latest book is Made in Sweden.

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      Book preview

      Made in Sweden - Elisabeth Åsbrink

      2018

      1

      SUINOM HINC CIVITAS

      Suionum hinc civitates ipso in oceano praeter viros armaque classibus valent.

      And now begin the states of the Suiones, situated on the Ocean itself, and these, besides men and arms, are powerful in ships.*

      [* Tacitus, Cornelius, ‘Germany and its tribes’, The Complete Works of Tacitus. Translated by Church, Alfred John and Brodribb, William Jackson, with an introduction by Hadas, Moses. New York: The Modern Library (1942). http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0083%3Achapter%3D44]

      ‘Suionum’, he wrote, the Roman historian Tacitus, in 98 AD, and by doing so, he became the first to mention the people who would become known as ‘the Swedes’. Later, in ancient Anglo-Saxon literature, the word ‘sweonas’ appears. In the sixth century, the historian Jordanes wrote about ‘suehans’ as well as ‘suetidi’, and in his chronicle from the eleventh century, Adam of Bremen, a German historian, told the story about ‘sueones’. At the same time, the Icelandic sagas speak of ‘sviar’.

      Are they all describing the same people? We have no idea. Are they Swedish? Who knows? Spurred by a general longing for logic in the random events we call history-leading-up-to-the-present, historians and nationalists use Tacitus and the others as if they were suppliers of indubitable facts, when it would be more accurate to describe them as isolated sources of light in a compact historical darkness. Or, to quote the anonymous, probably many-headed creator of the Swedish Wikipedia page about the Swedes: ‘the lack of sources is massive’.

      Apart from in Germanic legends and Nordic mythology — neither accepted as irrefutable grounds for accurate history writing — there is hardly any information describing the ancient Swedes. The one thing that can be said for sure is that they were a Germanic population living in the present Sweden. That’s all. Nothing about where this population had their home, how widespread it was, or its development is known for sure. According to an early historical theory, the Swedes’ core area was situated just north of Stockholm, from where the population expanded. However, the denominator ‘Swedes’ (‘svear’) may also have been used for a specific, demarcated layer of the population.

      The ancient Swedes are often said to have been seafaring and warlike, and are sometimes posed as opposite to the ‘Goths’ (‘goter’), another supposedly ancient group of people that may have formed the base of the present Swedish population — hence, for instance, the name of the city of Gothenburg in the west of Sweden. But, again, neither Goths nor Swedes are easily defined.

      The Eastern Roman historian Jordanes wrote a chronicle of the history of the Gothic people: De origine actibusque Getarum (The Origin and Deeds of the Getae/Goths). In this, he claims that the Goths are connected to the ancient Getae people, thus bestowing on them a long and glorious history. In his work, Jordanes describes Scandinavia as the ‘womb of all nations’, from where the Goths emigrated and conquered most parts of the world.

      This interpretation of history continued for centuries. Lines of connection were drawn between Getae — Goths — Götar (the Swedish form of ‘Goths’), transforming a cold, peripheric part of the world into its cultural birthplace. A good story, but fake facts. Nevertheless, in time Jordanes’ chronicle became the main source for a strong cult of Swedish self-awareness and pride.

      Another historian to acknowledge the Swedes early on, as previously mentioned, was Adam of Bremen, in the eleventh century. He got most of his information from the Danish king at the time, Sven Estridsson, who used the term ‘Swedes’ in two different, contradictory ways: on one hand, as the name of a certain group of people, excluding the Goths; on the other, in a way that included the Goths. Some of Adam of Bremen’s depictions of the old settlements in Uppsala, Birka, and Sigtuna contain details that may very well be historically correct. Others do not:

      There lies the great community of Sigtuna. In the east, it borders the Ripheic mountains, where there are vast deserts and high snowmasses, and where flocks of monstrous people hinder further intrusion. There are Amazons, people with dogs’ heads, cyclopes, who have a single eye in the forehead. Furthermore, there are the creatures that Solinus calls ‘himantopodes’, who run on one leg, and also those who enjoy human flesh as food. That’s why one should evade them and also rightly choose not to mention them.

      However, at the same time as Adam of Bremen describes the Swedish cannibals, the first proof of an actual people who actually call themselves Swedes emerges — of all places in the port of Piraeus, just outside Athens, three thousand kilometres due south.

      Once, there was a stone lion, sculpted in white-shimmering Pentelic marble quarried in Attica. At three metres high, the lion had been guarding the Piraeus harbour since the first century AD. Around the year 1050, a group of Scandinavian mercenaries in the service of the Byzantine Empire must have come by, laid eyes on the sculpture, and liked what they saw.

      Several historical documents testify that so-called Varangians, warriors from the north, were used in the Byzantine Emperor’s navy or army. Many of them had been drafted in the 1000s to crush a Bulgarian rebellion and then travelled to Piraeus to celebrate the victory. This particular group of Varangians had lost one of its men, a farmer named Horse. He had unfortunately fallen before being paid for his soldier’s struggle. Many rune stones in Scandinavia had been erected to honour men with a similar fate, who had died in Greece before acquiring wealth for their heirs. To commemorate Horse, his fellow warriors decided to make their grief plain on the lion’s left leg:

      they carved, the troopers … and in this harbour, these men carved runes after Horse the farm-owner … Swedes had this done on the lion. Fell before he could take a ransom.*

      [* Snædal, Thorgunn, ‘Runes from Byzantium: reconsidering the Piraeus lion’. Byzantium and the Viking world. Edited by Androshchuk, Fedir, Shepard, Jonathan, and White, Monica. Uppsala: Uppsala Universiteit (2016).]

      This translation was made a few years back by rune expert Thorgunn Snædal. She bases her interpretation on the fact that, by the ninth century, most people residing in the north had ceased to erect memorial stones, while the custom continued to flourish in large parts of what is now Sweden. Snædal concludes that the ornamental message on the Piraeus Lion actually is the very first evidence of people who consider themselves Swedes.

      Svions, sweonas, suehans, suetidi, sueones, sviar … The words lie shimmering like silver coins in the bottom of a well and reflect light to anyone in need of a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. It may be the story of a people, of a language, of a country; the story of a story — then the fragments, the silver below the surface, will be of use.

      Perhaps the greeting on the white marble lion in Piraeus can be read in another way? That you are what you call yourself?

      2

      BEOWULF

      The idea of a national epic — a mythologised legendary poetical work that defines the very soul of a nation — arose in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Up until then, the long poem about the fighter Beowulf had just been another dusty manuscript lying around, not considered more valuable than any other old poem, equally dusty. But then it was ‘discovered’ and dubbed a national epic in England. As it takes place in Scandinavia, with a hero from what might be present-day Sweden, the poem is seen as a national epic there as well.

      The fact that Beowulf is regarded as the oldest surviving poem in England is due to two lines of events. First, King Henry VIII destroyed the English monasteries when he broke with Catholicism and introduced the English version of the Protestant faith. As a consequence, hundreds, maybe thousands, of old manuscripts were destroyed or disappeared. But as it happened, the Beowulf manuscript survived. Secondly, there was a fire at Ashburnham House in Westminster in 1731, where Beowulf and other old manuscripts had been brought for safekeeping. The epic poem was severely damaged, but survived, once again.

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