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Iarlabanki Had This Stone Made While He Still Lived
If we look only at contemporaneous written evidence and disregard kings, Iarlabanki Ingefastson is probably the most copiously documented Scandinavian of the Viking Period. But his name does not occur...
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17th Century Pastoral Novel
As a schoolboy I read the first original play performed publically written in Swedish, Urban Hiärne‘s Rosimunda (1665). Me and my friend Tor loved the absurd spelling, the odd changes that had...
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Weekend Fun
Played Eclipse for the first time with my new Muscovite friends Anton & Maria and frequent guest Swedepat. This Finnish 2011 boardgame has become a runaway international hit and is currently...
View ArticleAll My Readers are Descendants of Slaves
I was thinking about African American culture and how it still shows signs of these people descending from slaves, US slavery having been abolished less than 150 years ago. And I asked myself, what is...
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The Changing Fortunes of a Labour Monument
Vår Gård in Saltsjöbaden is a conference venue and training centre whose history illustrates political trends in Sweden over the past century and more. 1892. The Thiel brothers, two of Sweden’s...
View ArticleNew Guide Book on Medieval Uppland
Sweden’s traditionally divided into 25 landskap provinces. They live on in people’s minds despite having been superseded by a new län division in 1634. The boundaries of the landskap go way back into...
View ArticleNew Rolling Stones E-Book
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones’s first gig, at the Marquee Club in London. Journalist Hanspeter Kuenzler and Bavarian e-book publishers The eBook People GmbH celebrate the...
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Medieval Zombies: the Grateful Dead
Reading Anund & Qviberg’s new guide book on Medieval Uppland, I came across a great religious legend: “The Grateful Dead“. (The band got its name from a dictionary entry on this family of stories.)...
View ArticleThoughts of Violence Past in a Peaceful City
Ferdinand Balfoort contributes a guest entry upon a recent ancestral pilgrimage to Stockholm. I gladly agreed to write something for the blog after being introduced by Martin to a book by Frans G....
View ArticleHistory of the Swedish Boardgame Market
Karl Olausson has just submitted his Bachelor’s thesis in history: a study of the post-WW2 Swedish boardgame market. The material he’s used is largely interviews with people in our country’s boardgame...
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The Sacred Blue String of Ethnic Identity
In this well-written, painstakingly annotated and beautifully designed book, physicist Baruch Sterman (with contributor Judy Taubes Sterman) traces the history and prehistory of a certain blue pigment,...
View ArticleNorse Saga About The Buddha
I found something pretty wild in an essay by J.L. Borges this morning. There’s a 13th century Norse saga about the Buddha. And the story has other fine twists as well. This all revolves around a...
View ArticleNew Paper On The Wreck Of The Rikswasa
A few years ago I did some fieldwork at Djurhamn, a peripheral naval harbour of the 15th through the 17th centuries (and blogged much about it: A – B – C – D – E – F – G – H, and published a paper on...
View ArticleNew ?Guide Book To Medieval Stockholm
Historiska media is a publishing house in Lund. In recent years they have been putting out pop-sci guide books about Medieval Sweden, province by province. I’ve reviewed the volumes about Södermanland...
View ArticleAncient Seeress Foresees Twilight of Gods and Scented Candles
This is priceless. There’s a line of scented candles and other spa treatment paraphernalia called Voluspa. Volu-spa, get it? Now, the firm shows no awareness of what their chosen name means. Völuspá is...
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Changing Fates of the Sälna Runestone
The Stone of Sälna is a runestone (U 323) erected about AD 1000 at Sälna hamlet where a major road crossed Hargsån stream in Skånela parish, Uppland. (This is not far from where Arlanda airport now...
View ArticleHistorians of Science Need to Know Current Science
I like reading about the history of science, including my own discipline. But there is one kind of history of science that annoys me hugely, and that’s the knowledge relativist kind. A knowledge...
View ArticleHistory Is Fine And Scientists Are Co-Owners
Recently I blogged about historians of science who chronicle scientific debates of the past neutrally and leave it to the reader to find out who (if anyone) turned out to be right in the end. This...
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Grandpa’s Gruesome Punjab Crocodile Tale
My maternal grandpa Ingemar Leander worked as a sales agent of the Swedish Match Company in Punjab in the 30s before he got married. It was the adventure of his lifetime. Here’s the story of his that I...
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An Attempt To Move The Hanging Gardens
About the time of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, Greek writers started to offer lists of Seven Wonders that the well-read traveller should see. In the 2nd century BC the Hanging Gardens of...
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