The rehabilitation of Uppland

A modern statue of Birger jarl 

Originally posted on July 6, 2020

"Det svenska rikets födelse" (The Birth of the Swedish Kingdom) is a book by Dick Harrison, a Swedish professor of medieval history. The book is part of a long series of short popularized books on Swedish and European history written by the same author. However, it sounds more scholarly than most of the others, perhaps because the Swedish Middle Ages is close to Harrison´s main field of expertise. 

During most of the 20th century, the standard view among Swedish historians was that the Swedish kingdom emerged during the Viking Age, more specifically the 11th century, and that the center of the kingdom was Old Uppsala and Uppland more generally. After all, this was what the written sources suggested. To take just one example, in Snorri Sturluson´s "Heimskringla", Old Uppsala is prominently featured everytime the Icelandic writer mentions Sweden. While it´s true that Snorri was often retelling mythology, it could still be asked why *that* particular mythology? Archaeology also seemed to confirm the importance of Old Uppsala and Uppland. However, at the end of the 20th century, a new paradigm emerged which argued that the Swedish kingdom didn´t start to emerge until the 12th and 13th centuries, with the culmination point during the time of Birger jarl (de facto ruler 1248-1266). Even worse for the Uppland local patriots, this new scenario suggested that Götaland, Västergötland in particular, was the cradle of the Swedish kingdom, while Uppland was peripheral. One of the foremost popularizers of this perspective was novel writer and media personality Jan Guillou. Another was Dick Harrison...

Personally, I have no horse in this game, but I always found the Götaland hypothesis somewhat problematic, since it´s obvious that Uppland couldn´t have been a "periphery" in any meaningful sense of that term. Why did king Olof Skötkonung (who was indeed baptized in Västergötland) build a new town in Uppland, Sigtuna, which had the right to mint coins? Why were there royal halls in Uppland? What about all the runestones? And although no "real" Swedish kingdom existed during the 5th century, the gigantic burial mounds at Old Uppsala surely suggest some kind of powerful chiefdom? And what about those pesky written sources...

I therefore find it interesting that Harrison seems to have abandoned the Götaland-centric perspective of his previous popularizations. Instead, he paints a more sophisticated and therefore more believable picture of constantly evolving interactions between Götaland and Uppland. These interactions in turn were part of even broader networks of trade, political alliances, Church missionary activity and cultural diffusion, spanning all of northern Europe from England in the west to Kievan Rus in the east. In this scenario, there is no longer any "cradle of the Swedish kingdom", the whole concept being an anachronism (of course, in a sense it was an anachronism under the Götaland hypothesis, too, since kingdom-formation was seen as a gradual process). 

However, on one point Harrison is adamant: if there is a "founding father of Sweden", it really is Birger jarl. On that point, he is surely correct. Birger Magnusson (his real name) was the first Swedish ruler who created a "real" kingdom with a centralized administration, bailiffs to collect taxes from the peasantry, castles as outposts of the central power in various provinces, and national laws on top of the local ones. After Birger jarl, even virtual civil wars between factions within the nobility were about control of the state. Before Birger jarl, there essentially was no state. A very succesful ruler could create a vast "kingdom" or dominion by prowess in battle and/or clever marriage alliances, but the construction was unstable since it was tied to the king´s person and dependent on support from various local elite groups. Erik Segersäll comes to mind. But, of course, this is not the same thing as a kingdom sensu stricto. 

The main take aways from this extremely interesting book is that the Swedish kingdom evolved slowly through constant interchanges between different regions, that the process could have ended otherwise (perhaps with a much smaller Sweden, or with a Scandinavian kingdom, or with Scandinavia becoming a northern outpost of Germany), and that the process didn´t really reach its fruition until the mid-13th century. It´s also interesting to note the role of Christianity in the kingdom-building process. At this time, Christianity was the "royal" religion which legitimized the idea of an elevated ruler - one god, one king. Which makes me wonder what would have happened if Scandinavia remained pagan...

With those reflections, I end this review of Dick Harrison´s "Det svenska rikets födelse".