Every man an aristocrat

 

Johannes Bureus 

“Alla är vi valloner” (We are all Walloons) is a 2023 book by Peter Sjölund, a Swedish expert on genealogical research. Apparently, he managed to solve a crime case using DNA-based genealogies. In this somewhat eclectic book, Sjölund takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through “true and false genealogies in Sweden”. I rather naïvely assumed that Swedish genealogical research must be at least relatively easy, due to the large amount of preserved church documents detailing every birth, marriage and death in the parish. Especially today, when the stuff is usually digitalized and available on the web. While that´s true, many databases apparently contain fake genealogies, invariably ones going back centuries – even millennia – to ancient kings or heroic knights. This has led to the emergence of a kind of cult genealogy, with Internet-based communities of true believers hotly defending unproven family lineages, even to the point of uploading the “information” into genealogical databases. If this sounds a lot like, say, the 17^th century…bingo. It´s absolutely that kind of thing. Indeed, some of the fake genealogies quite literally hail from that century!

A large portion of the book deals with Johan Bure (Johannes Bureus), the 17^th century Swedish polymath, whose omnivorous interests ranged from documenting runic inscriptions to literal mysticism. Bureus did carry out extensive and quite serious genealogical research (perhaps uniquely for his time), interviewing his relatives and comparing oral traditions from different branches of the family, visiting several different Swedish provinces in the process. In this way, he managed to trace his ancestry back about 300 years. That Bureus wasn´t confabulating is proven by the fact that most of his ancestors were ordinary peasants, and that he also included stories about criminal family members (including some who were executed). The Bure family (Bureätten) in *this* sense has been mostly proven by modern DNA research.

However, as a child of the nobility-obsessed 17^th century, Bureus simply couldn´t stop there. He went further and eventually created a fantasy genealogy for himself, centered on a 12^th century knight named Fale Bure, very loosely based on a real person whose name is found on a tomb in the church at Skön in Medelpad. Bureus improved the local tall tales surrounding this supposed medieval hero (whose original name was Fartegn unge or Fale hin unge) and claimed descent from him – since this would give Bureus aristocratic ancestry. Three of Johannes Bureus´ cousins would later improve upon his “research”, inventing further lineages, much to their benefit (all three cousins were ennobled by king Gustavus Adolphus). And so it went, with distant relations of Bureus making up their own family lines. And apparently some people still today believe it!

The author tells a dramatic story from 2013 about how he and some associates managed to stop the rising of a modern statue of Fale Bure outside a large shopping mall at Birsta in Medelpad, close to Skön. The grand ceremony (which was supposed to include Viking Age-obsessed Swedish pop star E-type!) was cancelled at the last moment and the statue placed outside the Skön church instead. Not sure if policing local mythology in this way is the best way to spend your time as a skeptical genealogist, but there you go.

Another family of tall tales (pun intended) concerns the Walloons. Just like the Bure story, a grain of truth has metastasized into something else entirely. During the 17^th century, thousands of Walloons from the Spanish Netherlands and adjacent territories did immigrate to Sweden. (Present-day Wallonia is a region in southern Belgium.) The Walloons spoke a language related to French. Still today, some old Swedish families have French surnames and can trace some of their ancestry back to the Walloon immigrants. At some point during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the 17^th century Walloons – some of whom were smiths and hence highly skilled workers – became downright mythologized, both by the Swedish labor movement and by race biologists. The latter claimed that Walloon-Nordic intermarriage was one of the few examples of beneficial race mixing, a message heavily promoted through exhibitions directed at the general population. By contrast, Travelers (a Gypsy-like sub-population) were considered extremely low on the racial hierarchy. Both Walloons and Travelers were considered to be “darker” than pure bred Swedes. This probably prompted people of Traveler ancestry to claim Walloon ancestry instead. 

Gradually, the stereotypical “Walloon” acquired more and more characteristics usually considered negative and malformed, such as a big hump at the back of the neck, a constant propensity for back pain, or strange thumbs. Black hair and green or brown eyes seem to be constant. It does sound like some kind of “cope”. If you´re different in a “bad” way, at least you can claim descent from a respected (and to many people somewhat mysterious) immigrant group. (Fun fact: the only person with a Walloon surname I ever met looked almost stereotypically Nordic!)

“Alla är vi valloner” does contain some other interesting information (you´d never guess where the name “Rambo” originally comes from), but the above was what caught my eye on a first reading. As for myself, one of the names running in my family come from medieval Spanish knights claiming descent from Theoderic the Great, the famed Ostrogoth king of Italy. And since the Goths according to their mythology originated in Scandza (perhaps Scandinavia), this would make me more primordially Swedish than most Swedes. If you choose to believe the hype, that is. Another family name is Basque. And the Basque are racially pure Paleo-Europeans from Atlantis, right? Right.

When will wayward humanity come to its senses, I wonder?