Centenarian Dagny Carlsson found fame as Sweden’s oldest blogger

When the widowed Dagny Carlsson turned to a computer to help fill the void of her once married life, she set off an online phenomenon.

Dagny Carlsson’s audience topped 2.3 million. Picture: Facebook.

Dagny Valborg Carlsson (nee Eriksson)
Blogger. Born Kristianstad, Sweden, May 8, 1912. Died Solna, Sweden, March 22, aged 109.

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Dagny Carlsson stopped dancing when she ran out of partners. There was nobody left. Her husband Harry had been an excellent dancer and when they were courting she had to share him with other women because they all wanted to dance with him. “He danced like a god,” she remembered.

They had been married for 53 years when Harry died in 2004 – they never had children – and the hole in Dagny’s life was unbearable. She had retired in 1978. By 2012, she had enough and, aged 99, she bought a computer and learnt how to use it. Aged 100, she started a blog. Sweden’s oldest blogger went by the name Bojan and was soon a star.

For the past decade Dagny appeared across dozens of television show, acted in a TV series, wrote a biography, hosted radio shows and gave speeches around Sweden.

She started posting lively and humorous stories about her active days – even if they involved attending funerals — and her audience grew each day.

By the time a documentary-maker turned up to film her new life, Dagny’s audience had topped 2.3 million and she was telling them how, aged 101, she had bought her first pair of jeans.

She also spoke of her greatly admired grandmother and the old woman’s life in the 19th century. She described getting a train across town to attend her younger sister’s 90th birthday, and applying for a passport so she could travel again. All this appeared alongside the selfies she took every day.

In March 2018, Dagny was invited to Stockholm’s royal palace to meet King Carl XVI Gustaf and his wife, Queen Silvia, and explain her blogging to the royal couple.

“(It’s) a grand palace and it contains so many rooms that I suspect the royal family has not even seen them all,” Dagny said afterwards. “We had an animated chat. With the king I spoke about history and about his predecessors.” She had been born in the first years of his grandfather’s reign.

Dagny was born in 1912, 23 days after the Titanic sank on the fourth day of its maiden journey and a few weeks before Stockholm hosted the fifth Olympics.

At school she had wanted to become a teacher – she always loved writing – but school was cut short and she was sent to work making shirts in a factory. They were long days of piecework with just Sundays off. A younger brother died of diphtheria aged six in 1920 and her father died in 1929. She had another brother and two sisters.

She worked for 20 years at the plant before completing her studies and becoming a foreman in a corset factory. In 1963 she started work at Swedish Social Insurance Agency, the country’s department of welfare.

Aged 30, Dagny married for the first time. It was an unhappy union. He drank heavily and gambled. She eventually escaped. After the war she met Harry, a carpenter who had taught himself English by playing gramophone 78s on a wind-up player.

“Harry did not want to get married at first and I was still married when we met,” she told an interviewer four years ago.

“At that time it was not possible to divorce without the husband’s consent and it took three years before my then husband agreed. Harry and I finally got married in 1951 … (he) was my great love and I thought that the second time you must not fail.”

They travelled often, although Harry liked warm countries where Dagny would stay in the shade.

“When Harry died I thought I was going to die too, it became so empty and lonely. But I did not die and then I decided to live.” That is when she booked computer lessons, changed her life and found fame. She was liberal with her advice to bloggers. “Add a photo to get more replies. Pick one where you look happy.”

She was a great believer in the #MeToo movement and urged her readers to go to the police if they were assaulted. “There are so many who have suffered in silence and felt very offended without being able to do anything about it,” she wrote. And she thought manners had been lost, particularly by men. Still, many men wrote to her.

“It would be quite nice to get to dance once more in life,” she told the documentary-makers before returning to her screen with a magnifying glass to look at her latest correspondence: “They are all kids … 68, 78 … one of them must know how to dance.”