CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

THE EMERGENCE OF SWEDEN

Thomas Lindkvist

I

n 1442 the second version of the law code of the realm of Sweden was officially
promulgated by King Christopher (Sw Kristoffers landslag). It was initially stated that
the kingdom of Sweden had once originated from a heathen world, from a Svea and
a Göta rike (realm). The view that Sweden emerged through a union of two realms or
‘kingdoms’ is actually a statement about a great and profound transformation. From
a ‘heathen world’ Sweden had been Christianised and Sweden had been united of two
different parts: Svealand ‘the land of the Svear’ and Götaland ‘the land of the Götar’. It the
late Middle Ages this idea of a national origin of Sweden as a kingdom was invented and
articulated.
The conversion and the making of a Christian monarchy were the great trans-
formations in the breaking up from a Viking to a medieval world; but how and when all
this took place in Sweden has been much debated.
In modern research it is now stressed that the emergence of Sweden was a very long
and gradual process. Earlier scholarly reconstructions of a political and military conquest
of a Svea rike over a Göta rike in the sixth century, based upon archaeological evidence
and imaginative readings of the Icelandic Ynglingatal and the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf are
now more or less rejected (Stjerna 1905 ; Behre 1968 ; Gahrn 1988 ). It has also been
suggested that it was about the year 1000 that Sweden existed as a kingdom; then there
was a Christian king who can be connected to both Svealand and Götaland (Weibull
1921 ). But Sweden was far from a coherent political unit with a more or less undisputed
kingship on the eve of the second millennium.
The making of a Christian monarchy is a later and more unclear and incompre-
hensible process in Sweden than in Denmark and Norway. In Sweden there never
developed the great high medieval history-writing like Saxo for Denmark and Snorri for
Norway that has served as the great narratives for later interpretations of the making of
kingdoms. The source material is sparse and open to many interpretations. (Concerning
the discussion of the origins of Sweden and the early medieval political history, see
Sawyer 1989 , Hyenstrand 1996 and Lindkvist 2003 .)
The emergence of Sweden was the establishment of Christian and royal institutions
and organisations, as well as the emergence of a new economic and social structure.
These transformations meant a form of Europeanisation. Sweden, as well as the other