Thoughts 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...
View ArticleDeservedly Forgotten Swedish Drink
Sweden used to have its own version of Irish Coffee: kaffekask. It was big in the 19th century and I believe it dropped from favour during our 1917-55 period of liquor rationing. Nobody seems to drink...
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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 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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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...
View ArticleThey Moved To The City And Found Someone To Marry
My personal genealogy has never interested me much, knowing as I do that the number of ancestors multiplies by a factor of two with each generation. Thus in AD 1800 someone born in 1975 had about...
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Three Ways To Depose Karl Knutsson
The 12-15th centuries are reckoned as Sweden’s Middle Ages. Politically, it was a highly volatile period, where the average tenure of a ruler was less than 11 years. One trait that can look modern to a...
View ArticleAlboin and Cunimund in Hell
Back in 2012 we had a look at the first novel written in Swedish, 1666/68′s Stratonice by Urban Hiärne (1641-1724). He went on to become a high-ranking doctor, founded a hydrotherapeutic spa resort,...
View ArticleCastle Owners
My excavations this summer will target the ruins of two Medieval castles near Norrköping. Christian Lovén and I have selected these two because unusually, both have curtain walls (Sw. ringmur) but do...
View ArticleCoin Challenges Written Record
A fun thing about historical archaeology, the archaeological study of areas and periods with abundant indigenous written documentation, is when the archaeology challenges the written record. According...
View ArticlePoet and Spy
Reading a good book, Charles’ Nicholl’s The Reckoning. The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (1992, 2nd expanded ed. 2002), about the 16th century playwright. It’s a bit overloaded with asides and covers...
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An Heraldic Snail
I visited Grödinge church south of Stockholm for the first time Thursday. The occasion was my great aunt Märta’s funeral, an event which, though of course sombre, cannot be called tragic. The old lady...
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A Medieval Lady’s Seal
My detectorist friend and long-time collaborator Svante Tibell found a seal matrix in the field next to Skällvik Castle this past summer. In the Middle Ages of Sweden, people of means didn’t sign their...
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