by Chalerm Raksanti
Snow-capped mountains and cool neutrality divide Sweden
from its European neighbors, including their cousins in Norway, who
descend from the same Nordic ancestors and speak a Germanic language
similar to Swedish, give or take a few local idioms and the happy little
bounce the Norwegians give at the end of a sentence.
Bearing
candles and Christmas cheer this woman wears a traditional hat and assumes
the role of Lucia, the medieval saint who brings light to Swedish homes
each December 13th.
Swedes in turn are often kidded by other Scandinavians
for their starch reserve. A Swedish friend once shared an old joke that is
supposed to give a hint to the various Scandinavian national characters.
“Two Danes, two Norwegians, two Finns and two Swedes were shipwrecked on
an island. By the time they were rescued, the Danes had formed a
cooperative, the Norwegians built a fishing boat, and the Finns chopped
down all the trees. The Swedes were still waiting to be introduced”.
Tidying
up in autumn, many Swedish farmers machine-wrap their hay in air-tight
polyethylene to preserve it through winter. It’s cheaper than building
silos.
Apart from mountains in the west, Sweden is a
relatively uniform land, dominated in the south by agricultural lowlands
and elsewhere by rolling, thinly-soiled hills studded with granite. What
elevates this landscape from pristine to sublime are Sweden’s 90,000
lakes which were left behind by retreating glaciers 12,000 years ago and
are today the Swede’s pride and joy. Between these lakes nearly half of
Sweden is covered with thick forests of conifers and birch. Swedes abide
by the ancient rules of ‘allemansratten’, which roughly means that
every person’s rights can wander freely, and there is glory in solitude
and perfect stillness. It is the land that the Swedes talk about when they
express patriotism or love for their country. It is geography that unifies
them and silence that keeps them apart.
A visitor to Sweden may find the Swedes a shy people.
They are taught very early not to stand out from the crowd or risk making
anyone uncomfortable. Rules of society teach them to take a middle way. If
the traveler overlooks the modernity of Sweden, he or she will see an
underlying sense of what the locals refer to as lagon, or appropriateness
which is the guiding principal for everyday life. The term may have
originated with the Viking’s but it lives on with a purposeful
definition of what is acceptable and what is not. It makes for an orderly
society and colors all sides of Swedish existence. To be average is good
in Sweden.
Country
life in a small Swedish village.
The winters are long and harsh but what gets most
Swedes through these rigid months is dreaming of what they will do when
summer comes. And summers in Sweden are glorious. A sunlit clearing in the
forest will reveal a cabin painted dark red with white trim, overlooking
water, and a Swedish flag fluttering from a pole in the yard. These rustic
little cottages are called stugas and the Swedes tend them with muted
passion.
They are made beautiful over time, functional and
perfect to the last detail. This is the essence of Sweden. Owners of these
lovely cabins forsake their high rise apartments in the gleaming cities
and become a nation of pilgrims between the midsummer months through the
end of August for five weeks in a stuga, most of which are located near
small farming towns where their grandparents may have been born.
Sometimes
referred to the Venice of the North, Stockholm mingles with the Baltic
Sea.
Much of urban Sweden is modern and freshly minted.
Sparkling offices and apartment complexes, super-highways, hotels,
spotless playgrounds and even the Swedish people themselves make it easy
to forget that the nation is a profoundly provincial country.
Stockholm presents itself with regal bearing. Often
called the Venice of the North because of its graceful mingling with the
Baltic Sea, the city came of age during Sweden’s 17th century heyday as
a European empire. Today its people enjoy one of the highest standards of
living in the world. But their ideals and their monarchy are in tact.
“We’re just old-fashioned Swedes,” my friend insisted. The same
values that ruled the small town and Sweden’s country folk are still the
rules that govern modern Sweden.
