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History of Sweden told by its early travellers

The first writers to mention Sweden did so from afar. Around AD 98, Tacitus described the Suiones in his Germania as a people strong in ships, living in the midst of the Ocean; in the sixth century Jordanes called Scandza a "workshop of nations". The first eyewitness was a monk: Ansgar preached at Birka, on Lake Mälaren, around 830, and his pupil Rimbert wrote the story of the mission. Uppsala long remained a great pagan sanctuary; the country converted only slowly, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Sweden soon began to tell its own story, often from exile. Archbishop Olaus Magnus, who had fled to Rome after Gustav Vasa's Reformation, printed his Carta marina in Venice in 1539, the first great map of the North, and in 1555 his History of the Northern Peoples: skates, sledges, reindeer, sea monsters and endless nights shaped Europe's picture of the North for two centuries. In 1673 Johannes Schefferus, a professor at Uppsala, devoted the first whole book to the Sami, his Lapponia.

In the seventeenth century Sweden became a great power and drew diplomats and scholars. Descartes, summoned by Queen Christina, died in Stockholm in 1650; Bulstrode Whitelocke, Cromwell's ambassador, kept a journal of his embassy to her court in 1653 and 1654. Attention then turned to the far North. In 1732 the young Linnaeus crossed Lapland to record its plants and ways of life, and in 1736 and 1737 Maupertuis's expedition measured a degree of the meridian in the Torne valley to settle the question of the shape of the Earth.

By the end of the eighteenth century Sweden was part of a northern tour. The naturalist Edward Daniel Clarke and the economist Thomas Malthus crossed it in 1799; in the same year the Italian Giuseppe Acerbi went on to the North Cape. They described the copper mines of Falun, the ironworks, the post stations with horses requisitioned from farmers, and the long light of summer.

In the nineteenth century the gaze became romantic, then ethnographic. Xavier Marmier sailed with the French Recherche expedition to the North in 1838 and 1839; Hans Christian Andersen published his impressions of Sweden in 1851; in the 1870s the American Paul Du Chaillu travelled the country as far as Lapland. The Göta Canal, opened in 1832, and then the railway made the journey commonplace.

This collection brings together our editions of eyewitness accounts and a directory of other early writings on Sweden.

Our titles on this subject

The Description of the Northern Islands

Adam of Bremen, c. 1075-1080

Around 1075, a canon of Bremen drafts the first written portrait of Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, and the mysterious Vinland, without ever leaving his cell.

Around 1075, Latin Europe knew the Scandinavian North only by hearsay. Adam, a canon of the Church of Hamburg-Bremen, which was charged with converting those lands, gathered what missionaries, merchants and above all the Danish king Sweyn Estridsson could tell him. The result is the first reasoned geography of the Baltic and the North Atlantic islands, written as the northern kingdoms turned Christian, and the only mention of Vinland older than the Icelandic sagas.

The History of Lapland

Johannes Schefferus, 1673

The first great treatise on the Sámi: language, shamanism and survival in the heart of the Arctic.

In the seventeenth century, Sweden, now a great power, wants to know and convert the Sámi of the Lappmarken, and to silence the rumours of witchcraft that Europe spreads about them. Johannes Scheffer, a professor at Uppsala, does not travel: he gathers reports from the pastors of the North, seized objects and the accounts of Sámi students. This study-bound method, rare among the writings of the time, produces an orderly picture of a people hitherto known by hearsay, immediately translated across Europe.

Lachesis Lapponica, or a Tour in Lapland

Carl Linnaeus, 1732

A young naturalist among the Sami: Linnaeus in Lapland, 1732.

In 1732, Lapland was still poorly known to learned Europe. Carl Linnaeus, a young Uppsala student commissioned by the Royal Society of Sciences, spent five months crossing it, from the Gulf of Bothnia to the Lapland Alps and the fjords of Norway, before returning through Finland. His journal, which remained in manuscript until the English translation of 1811, captures the life of the Sami, their reindeer and their plants, and prepares the way for the *Flora Lapponica* of 1737.

The Figure of the Earth

Pierre Louis Maupertuis, 1736-1737

Four scholars set out onto the ice of the polar circle to measure the Earth, and their figure will change the image of the Earth.

The Figure of the Earth tells how Maupertuis and his companions settled, in 1736 and 1737, the great scientific quarrel of their age: the Earth is flattened at the poles, as Newton had predicted, and not elongated as the Cassinis maintained. Triangles cast from summit to summit through the forest, a baseline measured on the frozen river at the solstice, winter at Tornio: Enlightenment science becomes a journey to the Far North, between present-day Sweden and Finland.

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla (c. 1230)

A century after Adam, the Icelander Snorri recounts from within the kings the canon knew only by hearsay. Harald Bluetooth, the two Olafs, and Cnut the Great reappear here, but seen by the Norsemen themselves, with their sagas, their skalds, and their own memory. To read Snorri after Adam is to hear the other version of the same history, that of the conquered finally given voice.
Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum (c. 1200)

Around 1200, this Danish clerk composed in Latin the great chronicle of his people. He knew Adam's work and carried it forward, giving the Danish kings their national epic. Here one meets the heroes and legends that Bremen had barely glimpsed, in an ample language that seeks to rival the Ancients.
Olaus Magnus, A Description of the Northern Peoples (1555)

In 1555, this Swedish prelate, exiled in Rome, published a vast description of Scandinavia, illustrated with famous engravings. Five centuries after Adam, he still describes the same ice, the same sea monsters, the same peoples of the far reaches, but with the eye of the Renaissance. Adam's wonder survives here, barely tempered by the new science.
Réginald Outhier, Journal d'un voyage au Nord, en 1736 et 1737 (1744)

The same journey, seen through other eyes. Abbé Réginald Outhier, a priest of the diocese of Besançon and correspondent of the Academy, in charge of the expedition's signals and maps, keeps his journal day by day during the two years spent in the North. Published in 1744, it shows what Maupertuis's Discours leaves in shadow: life in the hamlets along the river, the customs and beliefs of the Lapps, the view of a Catholic priest on a Lutheran country. Outhier draws the plates himself, including plans of Tornio and Stockholm and a view of Falun. To read the two texts side by side is to hear both the leader of the expedition and the man who carried the signals up the summits.
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Giuseppe Acerbi, Voyage au cap Nord (1802)

At the turn of the nineteenth century, an Italian travels up Scandinavia to the extreme tip of the continent, where Scheffer placed the limits of the known world. Acerbi notes the songs, dances, instruments and daily life of the Sámi with the curiosity of an enlightened amateur. Here we find, alive and changed, the customs that the Lapponia had fixed a century and a half earlier.
Giuseppe Acerbi, Travels through Sweden, Finland, and Lapland, to the North Cape (1802)

The young Italian Giuseppe Acerbi left Stockholm in 1798 on a journey that would take him to the North Cape. In the depths of winter he crossed the ice-bound Sea of Åland by sledge, reached Finland and followed the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia up to Oulu and Torneå, in the opposite direction to Linné's return. When summer 1799 came, he went up the Torne and the Muonio by boat, from rapid to rapid, to the Lapp encampments and the Arctic Ocean. His Travels, published in London in 1802 with many engravings, offer a lively picture of the Finns, the Lapps and their reindeer, two generations after the journal of 1732.
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Giuseppe Acerbi, Travels through Sweden, Finland, and Lapland, to the North Cape, in the Years 1798 and 1799 (1802)

More than sixty years after Maupertuis, the young Italian Giuseppe Acerbi takes the road to Tornio again with a new ambition: to reach the North Cape by land. In spring 1799, his small party passes through Oulu and Kemi, reaches Tornio, goes up the Torne by boat and then the Muonio with its rapids, crosses the marshes of Enontekiö on foot to Kautokeino, and reaches the North Cape by sea on 19 July, under the midnight sun. Published in London in 1802, his two volumes describe the nature, inhabitants and customs of Finland and Lapland. The academicians' river becomes the gateway to a great adventure journey.
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Leopold von Buch, Reise durch Norwegen und Lappland (1810)

The Prussian geologist Leopold von Buch travels through Norway and Lapland from 1806 to 1808. Coming from Alta Fjord, he descends toward the Gulf of Bothnia by the Torne valley, passing Pello and Korpikylä, hamlets Maupertuis had known, before reaching Tornio. Where the academician measured the shape of the globe, Buch questions its subsoil and climate: he observes how plants are distributed by latitude and establishes that Sweden is slowly rising above the sea. Published in Berlin in 1810 and translated into English as early as 1813, his account shows Lapland entering the age of geology, a generation after that of geodesy.
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Xavier Marmier, Lettres sur le Nord (1840)

A romantic and learned traveller, Marmier journeyed through Scandinavia around 1840 and brought back from Lapland pages where emotion competes with observation. He visits the parishes, listens to the pastors, collects traditions and wonders about the future of a people that modernity is beginning to press closely. The book extends, in French, Scheffer's gesture: making the North known to those of the South.
Léonie d'Aunet, Voyage d'une femme au Spitzberg (1854)

In 1839, the very young Léonie d'Aunet accompanied the painter Biard on the expedition of the corvette La Recherche to Spitsbergen. For the return, she chose Lapland: Kautokeino, with its little wooden houses and welcoming parsonage, then Karesuando and the descent of the Muonio and the Torne to Torneå and Haparanda. She observes the encampments, the reindeer by the hundred, the dress and customs of the Lapps, and compares what she sees with the learned authorities: on the antlers of gelded reindeer, she notes with mischief, "Linné says yes, and Buffon says no." Her lively, personal account appeared in 1854 and remains one of the most endearing of the Romantic North.
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Bayard Taylor, Northern Travel: Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland (1858)

The American writer Bayard Taylor chooses the harshest season for Lapland. Leaving Lübeck in December 1856, he sees in the New Year on the road to the Gulf of Bothnia, stops at Haparanda, then goes up the Torne valley by sleigh in deep winter. He watches for Avasaxa mountain, "one of the stations of Celsius, Maupertuis and the French academicians", and cries out with joy on crossing the polar circle, his beard frozen. He then reaches Muonio, where the English naturalist John Wolley welcomes him, and observes the life of the Lapps. Published in 1858, Northern Travel: Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland offers the wintry counterpoint to Maupertuis's book: the same polar night, this time sought for its own sake.
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Paul Du Chaillu, The Land of the Midnight Sun (1881)

Made famous by his gorillas of Gabon, Paul Du Chaillu changed latitude in the 1870s: he spent several summers and winters in Sweden, Norway, Lapland and northern Finland. He took the post road that leads from Uppsala to Haparanda by seventy-one stages, the very one Linné had travelled northward on horseback, then journeyed by boat and reindeer sledge, lodging with peasants, pastors and Lapps. Festivals, meals, costumes, the work of each season: The Land of the Midnight Sun, published in 1881, offers a teeming portrait of these northern countrysides a century and a half after the young naturalist.
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Pierre Loti, An Iceland Fisherman (1886)

At the end of the nineteenth century, the French novelist follows Breton sailors on their campaigns across the icy fishing banks of Iceland. Adam's Thule, a land where the ice burns, has become a place of toil and mourning. The novel gives flesh, eight centuries on, to the dread the canon felt before these seas at the edge of the world.
Paul-Émile Victor, Boréal

Much later, a Frenchman goes to live among the peoples of the Arctic and returns with an account of immersion. Though the region differs, his gaze converses with Scheffer's: the same world of snow, reindeer and tents, but now told from within, by someone who shared the cold instead of compiling it. Read it to measure the distance travelled between learned description and lived experience.

History of Sweden told by its early travellers