Nordstrom Byron J. Culture and Customs of Sweden (ENG)

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original, it ran from 2000 to 2007 on Kanal 5. It focused on the dynamics of

making about a dozen very different people live together in a single dwelling

and then voting people out until only one remained—the “winner.” Documen-

taries and made-for-TV ﬁlms, often of very high quality, have been produced by

SVT and independents, and enjoyed good audience support. The advent of

cable and satellite has, of course, internationalized the viewing habits of Swedes.

From the b eginning American series enjoyed great popularit y. Programs like

Bro

derna Cartwright/Bonanza, Dallas ,themorerecentCSI iterations, and

sitcoms like Everybody Loves Raymond and How I Met Your Mother have been

hits, and their stars have enjoy ed great popularity. As noted earlier, Disney’s

Donald Duck Christmas program developed into a kind of folk tradition, and

Julkalendern/The Christmas Calendar appears to have a similarly wide appeal,

especially among young people. A glance at the program listings at http://

tvplaneten.tv4.se/ presents a good picture of what is offered on 62 channels.

(The Swedish channels include: SVT1, SVT2, TV3, TV4, TV4PLus, Kanal 5,

TV6, TV7, TV8, Kanal 9, TV4 Film, TV400, TV4Fakta, TV4Guld, TV4Comedy,

TV4Sport,andTV4ScienceFiction.)

One thing that television in Sweden does not represent well, aside from

some local programming, is the growing ethnic diversity of the population.

An interesting and controversial exception to this was the 2008 program

Halal-TV, aired by Swedish Television and featuring three devout

Swedish-Muslim women; Cherin Awad, Dalia Azzam Kassem, and Khadiga

El Khabiry. Seven of eight programs in which the women explored various

aspects of Sweden and Swed ishness with gu ests were broadcast . The ﬁna l

was cancelled amidst a storm of protest from public and private individuals

opposed to the women’s orthodox and apparently un-Swedish views on

topics like law, gender, sex, and even public courtesies like shaking hands.

NOTES

1. See https://poit.bolagsverket.se/poit/PublikPoitIn.do. Accessed July 29, 2009.

2. An excellent survey of Sweden’s press history is Hadenius and Weibull’s 1999

article in Nordicom Review. Their 2008 book is an extended and updated version of

this article.

3. Ingela Wadbring, En tidning i tiden? Metro och den svenska dagstidningsmark-

naden/A Paper for Its Time? Metro and the Swedish Newspaper Market.

4. See http://www.tu.se/tidningar na.asp#. Accessed July 30, 2009.

5. On Al Muhajer News, see http://www.almuhajer.se/. Accessed July 30, 2 009.

On The Local see http://www.thelocal.se/. Accessed July 30, 2009

6. See St atistis ka centralbyra

n: Pressmeddelande f ra

nSCB. December 17, 2008.

Nr. 2008:361; and Svensk dagspress 2008: Fakta om marknad och media. Tidnings

92 CULTURE AND CUSTOMS OF SWEDEN

Utgivarna at http://www.tu.se/document/Svensk_dagspress_2008.pdf. Accessed

July 30, 2009.

7. For a comprehensive list by category, see http://www.magazino.se/. (Subtitled:

Din guide i tidningsdjungeln/Your g uide in the peri odical jungle.) Accessed July 30,

2009. A good for statistical information on the media in Sweden is http://www

.nordicom.gu.se/eng.php?portal=&main=. Accessed July 30, 2009. Nordicom also

publishes a numbe r of periodicals, including one in English.

8. The history of radio in Sweden is well covered in “Radiohistoria: Sveriges Radio

i allma

nhetens tja

nst i o

ver 80 a

r” at http://www.sr.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid

=3113&artikel=1971599. Accessed July 30, 2009. Also see the Bengtsson volume

in the Bibliography.

9. For a history of Swedish television, see http://svt.se/svt/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d

=29768. Accessed July 30, 2009.

MEDIA 93

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Literature

CONTEMPORARY SWEDISH literature is rich, diverse, and innovative. Some works

are clearly place bound in Sweden and deal speciﬁcally with issues unique to

the country, but many are set in more regional or even global contexts and/or

address issues that are more broadly “human.” As a result, a signiﬁcant number

of Swedish books are translated into a large number of languages.

Broadly speaking, contem porary Swe dish literature includes an extensive

thematic array of poetry; theater and screen drama that ranges from the

deeply serious to the absurd; prose ﬁction that focuses on themes such as

the darker si des of Sweden’s past, gender and sexual preference issue s, prob-

lems in contemporary Swedish society, global issues, the lives of the new

Swedes, and the telling of good stories; highly popular crime ﬁction that

often is used as a vehicle for social criticism; and serious and frivolous child-

ren’s stories aimed at a wide range of ages. In addition, biography, history,

and cooking are genres well represented among current publications and are

highly popular.

The number of authors writing today is dizzying, and the system encour-

ages their work. Government- a nd organization-sponsored writing prize s

and subsidies, the lure of royalties, and a library system that compensates

authors based on book use are some of the ways this is done.

And Swedes read! Publishing is a good business to be in, and one list

includes nearly 200 publishing companies. The largest national publishers’

associatio n has about 70 members—although a few large companies domi-

nate the industry: Bonnier, Norstedt, Pirat, and Natur och Kultur. Book-

stores are everywhere, b oth new and used. Bokus.com is one of several large

and successful Internet book sources; while antikvariat.net provides easy

access to many of Scandinavia’s used bookstores.

In recent reports from the Swedish Publishers’ Association (Svenska Fo

rla

garefo

reningen), what they refer to as ﬁne literature was the biggest selling

sector of the market and showed continuous growth. Works by Swedish

authors in this genre were doing better than translations of foreign authors

in late 2008, which says something about the quality and popularity of Swedish

writers. A sector that was doing less well was children’s and young people’s

books, which had been in decline since 2004. The explanations for this seem

to include changes within the publishing industry tied to proﬁt motives and

the growing popularity of other entertainment or time-use options among

young people caught up in the digital age.

Before turning to look at a few of the best-known writers in Sweden today,

it is important to give some attention to the canon, to a brief introduction to

some of Sweden’s greatest authors from the past and a few of the works that

are vital to the national identity and important to the context in which con-

temporary literature is written. No attempt will be made here to be either

inclusive or extensive.

CLASSIC SWEDISH LITERATURE

How old is Swedish literature, and wher e do its beginnings lie? These are

oft-debated questions without clear answers. Also, the academic answers

include authors and works that many Swedes have either never heard of o r

never read. How might ordinary Swedes answer these questions? Certainly,

they would accept the idea that the terse runic inscriptions of the Viking

Age, the thirteenth century’s Ynglingasaga/The Saga of the Ynglings (written

in Old Norse by the Icelander, Snorri Sturlusson) that in part describes much

earlier “events” surrounding the development of very early kingship in Sweden,

provincial law codes from the Middle Ages, the Revelations of St. Birgitta, the

Gustav Vasa Bible (1541), and Olof Rudbeck’s Atlantica (1679) were parts of

the oldest historical canon of Swedish literature. Would they be enthusiastic

or highly familiar with any of these? Probably not.

If you mentioned Carl Michael Bellman (1740–95), however, the reaction

would likely be more enthusiastic. He is the earliest and, for many, the best

loved in a sequence of national poets every Swede reads and can recite or, in

the case of Bellman, sing. The son of a Stockholm bureaucrat, Bellman earned

a living (barely) through a sequence of minor ofﬁcial positions. His real life, the

96 CULTURE AND CUSTOMS OF SWEDEN

life he loved and lived to the fullest, was spent in the taverns of Stockholm,

where he performed songs about local life and personalities or about a cast

of ﬁctional characters engaged in lives of debauchery and merrymaking—all

set to familiar local tunes or melodies of his own composition. As James

Massengale writes in a recent history of Swedish literature, his Fredmans

epistlar/Fredman’s Letters, a book containing some of his best-known work

that was ﬁrst published in 1790, “is arguably the most import ant songbook

in Swedish literary history and probably Sweden’s most popular single collec-

tion of poems in general.”

Bellman was followed by a sequence of nineteenth century writers whose

works also belong on the list of books or writings familiar to most Swede s.

In fact, the century witnessed quit e stunn ing growth in both the number of

ﬁne writers and the volume and variety of their work. These developments

were caused in part by the falling c osts of book production, greater educa-

tional opportunities and a growing reading public, the rise of new and often

competing ideologies, and conscious efforts to create a Swedish national

identity and public consciousness of that identity. The period began with

the Romantics and e nded with Realism, analyses of social problems, and

psychological explorations of the so-called modern breakthrough.

Among the leading Romantic writers were Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783–1847)

and Esaias Tegner (1782–1846). Geijer was a historian, university rector,

poet, and songwriter. Tegner was a pastor, bishop of Va

xjo

,andpoet.Both

were caugh t up the conservative-liberal debates of their time. Geij er’s poem

“The Viking” and Tegner’s epic Frithjof’s Saga idealized the Viking Age and

became pieces in the fabric of Sweden’s emerging national identity. Also

important were Carl Jonas Love Almqvist (1793–1866) and Fredrika Bremer

(1801–65). Both were perceptive and outspoken critics of certain aspects of

the conservative society in which they lived. In the late 1830s, for example,

Almqvist attacked traditional notions of marriage in the novel Det ga

ran

(translated as Sara Videbeck or Why Not?), while Bremer did the same in

Hemmet (The Home). These works and many others also reﬂected the success

of prose ﬁction, primarily the novel, as the most popular literary genre,

especially for Sweden’s growing middle class.

The international giant in the history of Swedish literature in the late nine-

teenth and early twentieth century was August Strindberg (1849–1912).

In terms of sheer volume and variety, the output of this brilliant and complex

man was remarkable. One edition of his plays, short stories, novels, p oems,

and essays runs to 55 volumes. In his early work, he tended toward the realis-

tic and the historical; his last works were deeply psychological and loaded

with symbolism. In almost all there were elements of the personal, of his

own life. Det ro

da rummet/The Red Room from 1879, with its combination

LITERATURE 97

of real ism and attention to contemporary societal problems, has been called

Sweden’s ﬁrst modern novel and embodied what was termed “the modern

breakthrough” by the Danish critique Georg Brandes a few years later.

Among h is best- known plays are Maste r Olof, Miss Julie, The Father, Easter,

A D ream Play,andGhost Sonata. Hi s w el l - k n own novel s i n c l u de Getting

Married, Son of a Servant, and Natives of Hemso

HE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The twentieth century was a rich and varied period for Swedish literature,

and this remains true in the early twenty-ﬁrs t century. Six Swedes from this

period have won the Nobel Prize in Literature since its introduction in

1901: Selma Lagerlo

f (1909), Verner von Heidenstam (1916), Erik Axel

Karlfeldt (posthumously in 1931), P a

r Lagerkvist (1951), and E yvind Johnson

and Harr y Martinson (jointly in 1974). Many more have been or still are

members of the Svenska Akademien/The Swedish Aca demy, an organiza tion

founded in 1786 by King Gustav III to “work for the Swedish language’s

purity, strength, and greatness, or its clarity, expressiveness, and reputation.”

Its membership or “chair holders,” which includes some of Sweden’s ﬁnest

writers, is limited to 18. In 2009, the members were: Sten Rudholm, b.

1918 (e lected 1977), (dec eased November 29, 2008) ; Bo Ralph, b. 1945

(elected 1999); Sture Alle

n, b. 1928 (elected 1980); Anders Olsson, b. 1949

(elected 200 8); Go

ran Malmqvist, b. 1924 (elected 1985); Birgitta Trotzig,

b. 1929 (elected 1993); Knut Ahnlund, b. 1923 (elected 1983); Jesper Sven-

bro, b. 1944 (elected 2006); Torgny Lindgren, b. 1938 (elected 1991); Peter

Englund, b. 1957 (elected 2002); Ulf Linde, b. 1929 (elected 1977); Per

stberg, b. 1933 (elected 1997); Gunnel Vallquist, b. 1918 (elected 1982);

Kristina Lugn, b. 1948 (elected 2006); Kerstin Ekman, b. 1933 (elected

1978);KjellEspmark,b.1930(elected1981);HoraceEngdahl,b.1948

(elected 1997), Permanent Secretary; and Katarina Frostenson, b. 1953

(elected 1992).

To make order of all that has been and continues to be written in Sweden in

the last century or so, many scholars have divided the period into decades, so

there are the writers of the century change (sekelskiftet), the 1910s (tiotalister),

the 1920s (tjugotalister), and so on. Also, writers and their works have been

typed by speciﬁc genre labels that include neo-romantic, modern, post mod-

ern, working class, regional, epic narrative, feminist, historic, autobiographic,

documentary, political, social criticism, crime ﬁction, and immigrant. The

lists of authors who have made it into literature histories, the syllabi of the

public schools and universities, best-seller lists, and the hearts of Swedish

readers are long, and only a small sampling will be attempted here.

98 CULTURE AND CUSTOMS OF SWEDEN

No survey of the late ninete enth and twentieth c enturies would be

complete without Selma Lagerlo

f (1858–1940). She and Astrid Lindgren

(see below) are two of Sweden’s best-known women writers. Lagerlo

fwas

the ﬁrst Swede to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the ﬁrst women to

receive a chair in the Swedish Academy. A keen obser ver of reality and the

human psyche, she was above all a superb teller of complex and multileveled

stories. Two of her best-known works are Go

sta Berlings Saga (1891) and The

Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson (1906/7). The former, set in nine-

teenth century Va

rmland, is classiﬁed as a neo-romantic novel and focuses on

the redemption of the degenerate Pastor Berling and those around him.

LITERATURE 99

Selma Lag erlo

f, 1858–1940. The ﬁrst Swedish

woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature

(1909), Lagerlo

fremainsoneofSweden’s

best-known and most widely read authors.

(Photo by the Hansen & Weller Studio,

Web site of Royal Library/Kungliga Biblioteket,

Stockholm. Reprinted with permission.)

The latter grew out of a request from the country’s national education board

for a book for school children that would help them learn about their

country. The stor y revolves around a rather naughty little boy, Nils, who is

turned into a tomte and carried off by geese who take him on a tour of

Sweden’s provinces. It offers lessons in geography, history, folklore, the real-

ities of life, how to treat and not to treat this world, and growing up. Among

her outstanding contemporaries were Gustaf Fro

ding, Oscar Levertin, Verner

von Heidenstam, Hjalmar So

derberg, and the poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt.

r Lagerkvist (1891–1974) is another of Sw eden’s greatest modern

writers. His work spans more than half of the twentieth century. His ﬁrst

novel, People (Ma

nniskor), appeared in 1912; his last, Marianne, in 1967.

Throughout his life he, like many other writers of the century, was preoccu-

pied with the deepest and most profound questions of human existence: with

the meaning or meaninglessness of life, the anxiety created by not knowing

life’s meaning, the prevalence of evil and violence, man’s cruelty to man, the

existence of God, and the efﬁcacy of individual actions. His writings, most

of which have been translated, include the 1916 collection of poems entitled

ngst/Anguish (1916), The Guest of Reality (1926), The Hangman (1936) ,

The Dwarf (1945), and Barab bas (1950). Among the Swedish writers who

shared some of Lagerkvist’s themes are Hjalmar Bergman, Karin Boye, Stig

Dagerman, and Eyvind Johnson.

Working Class Writers

One of the more important groups from the last century were the so-called

working class writers. Historically, most of the authors before them had come

from the upper classes, which is hardly surprising given the limited educa-

tional opportunities, poverty, and the employment options available to the

lower classes. By the 1930s, however, much of this was changing. Basic

schooling was well established, job opportunities had improved, labor unions

were legitimate players in the job market, and from 1932 the Social Demo-

crats were the leading party in politics and pursuing policies designed to

improve the lives of ordinary people. (With the exception of the summer of

1936, the party headed Sweden’s governments from 1932 to 1976.) It was

then that the ﬁrst generation of working class writers emerged. This included

Vilhelm Moberg, Ivar Lo-Johansson, Jan Fridega

rd, and Moa Martinson. Each

came from poverty. Moberg was the son of a soldier-crofter, Lo-Johansson

and Fridega

rd were sons of landless farm workers, and Martinson was the ille-

gitimate daughter of factory worker. Many of their works focused on the lives

of the rural and urban poor and were often autobiographical. But these writ-

ers were capable of dealing with much more than the miseries of poverty.

100 CULTURE AND CUSTOMS OF SWEDEN

M oberg illustrates this well. He was a novelist, dramatist, journalist, social critic,

and historian. Among his books are the autobiographical Raskens (1927);

Rid i natt/Ride This Night (1941), a critique of the Swedish government

for its un-neutral neutrality in World War II; his epic four-volume novel

about emigration to North America, The Emigrants, Unto a Good Land, The

Settlers,andTheLastLetterHome(1949–59; and two volumes in what he

envisioned would be a longer series he titled Min svenska historia/My Swedish

History (1970–71).

Per Anders F ogelstro

m (1917–98) was in the second generation of important

working class authors. He grew up and lived most of his life in the working class

district of So

der in Stockholm and in many ways can be identiﬁed with that

part of the city. Among his works are eight novels about the working poor of

Stockholm from the early eighteenth century to the contemporary era. Written

between 1965 and 1987, the best known and most popular is Mina dro

mmars

stad/City of My Dreams—the story of Henning Nilsson, a poor lad from the

countryside who arrives in Stockholm around 1860 ﬁlled with dreams of a

new and better life. The harsh realities he encounters never break his spirit,

and the life he builds around friends and family show how success can have

many deﬁnitions.

Post–World War II

Several new themes developed in Swedish prose ﬁction in the years follow-

ing World War II. Among these were assessments of the growing the welfare

state, intensiﬁed interest in women’s issues, concern for global problems,

and the lives of the immigrants to Sweden. At the same time, genres of the

novel such as documentar y, historical, crime ﬁction, and immigrant were

employed to address these and other themes. Some of the leading authors in

this period belonged to the older generation, active from before and during

the war, but new generations were also important.

One of the foremost writers to work in the historical or documentary novel

genre of the last half century has been Per Olof Enquist. His Legiona

rerna: En

bokombaltutla

mningen/The Legionaires: A Book about the Baltic Refugees

(1968), Musikanternas utta

g/The March of the Musicians (1978), and Livla

karens beso

k/The Royal Physi cian’s Visit (1999) are three examples. In the

ﬁrst, he critically examined how former freedom ﬁghters from the Baltic

states ﬂed to Sweden and then were deported as Soviet forces overran their

countries at the close of World War II. In the second, he looked at working

conditio ns in northern Sweden’s timber mills in the early twentieth century.

In the third, he explored the life of J. F. Struensee during a remarkable two-

year period in Danish history in the early 1770s, when this enigmatic

LITERATURE 101