Sweden feels like home
Finding an affinity with Sweden, land of the Vikings, is an unexpected pleasure.
The SAS flight attendant takes my boarding pass, swipes it and hands it back to me with a smile. She is 50-something, with long blonde hair in a ponytail, red lipstick, black eyeliner. It’s as if I’m looking in the mirror. These are my people. For someone raised in the suburbs of Melbourne, who loves long, hot summers and hates a cool breeze, my affinity for Sweden, that chilly northern country where so-called T-shirt weather in spring is a balmy 10C, is a bit unexpected. I have no Scandinavian heritage, as far as I know, and I didn’t read Pippi Longstocking as a child.
My first encounter with actual Swedish people was when I enrolled in Swedish language classes at Melbourne University. An odd choice, but my English degree demanded it. Very serious and scholarly, my tutors weren’t at all like ABBA, who had burst onto the music scene in 1972. I spent a year watching the films of Ingmar Bergman and fashionable Swedish soft-porn movies such as I am Curious (Yellow). All I retained from the language course were a few not-so-useful phrases in Swedish, such as, “I have a glass”.
Fast-forward a couple of decades to the 1990s, and I’m engrossed in Swedish crime novels, notably the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, and later Henning Mankell. In the early 2000s I watch the original Wallender, with Krister Henriksson, on TV. When “Scandi crime” and “Nordic noir” become the rage on streaming services, I’m glued to the screen, addicted to The Bridge. Lead detective Saga Noren is a modern Viking, fierce and relentless. And I really want her overcoat.
But it is the advent in 2013 of Vikings, the violent and sexy drama from The History Channel, that finally connects everything. I relate to Queen Lagertha and her shieldmaidens, the brave assemblage of Viking women who fought alongside their men. I know, for sure, I was a shieldmaiden in another life. I’m definitely a Viking.
I realise this as soon as I arrive in Sweden. It’s not just the genetic connection, the tall blondes like the flight attendant; it’s the way the women wear their clothes and hair, and the calm way they seem to go about everything. My great-grandfather was a Scot and I see now that my noble father, brave, blond and loyal, was clearly descended from the Nordic chieftains.
My first sight of Sweden is from a carriage on the VSOE, the Orient Express, on its inaugural trip to Stockholm. It’s April 2013 and despite being spring, there’s still quite a bit of snow on the ground. The countryside is as lovely as I imagined — brightly coloured wooden farmhouses, birch forests and a few frozen lakes, deer stopping in their tracks, alerted to the sounds of the unfamiliar train.
Stockholm has been the capital for 400 years. It’s made up of 14 islands, many linked by roads. Ferries carry people where they can’t walk or bicycle. Despite the gloomy spring skies, the city feels jaunty. And it’s more European than I expected, graced with beautiful, ornate 18th and 19th-century buildings and expansive parks. Somehow, I imagined it would all look a bit IKEA.
A brisk walk from the hotel across to Gamla Stan, the “old town”, introduces me to my first Vikings in the form of the collection of bearded troll dolls in horned helmets that peer out from the windows of souvenir shops that crowd the cobbled streets. I find out later the Vikings didn’t wear horns on their helmets, so these are frauds. Elsewhere, though, Viking runes are carved into the building stones of the narrow streets, the marks more than 10 centuries old.
On this first trip to Stockholm, I take a Millennium tour of Sodermalm, the edgy neighbourhood where Stieg Larsson set his Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy. I eat meatballs with lingonberry sauce and too many of the delicious, seed-spiked flatbreads that come with every meal. Rugged up, I wander the retail streets, peering in the windows of shops called Fartygsmagasinet (a nautical store) and Sticka, selling reindeer pelts and skeins of wool. I practise the tradition of fika, or the long coffee break, in old cafes with deep window sills, lit by candlelight. I could get used to this kind of cold.
My next visit is in August and the city is transformed. I’m not sure there’s any more beautiful city in the world than Stockholm in summer. The water, flowing from the Baltic Sea, surrounds everything, linking all those islands and gardens, and sparkles and furrows like silk as the dozens of ferries and yachts plough through. People are conducting their lives outdoors, as the city’s terraces open up for the long days and nights, and the shores reveal little beaches, rowing skiffs and paddle boats.
This visit, I walk miles in the balmy air, crossing from island to island, taking a ferry wherever possible. A day is happily spent on the island of Djurgardsvagen, which houses several museums, including the unmissable ABBA The Museum, and one devoted to alcoholic spirits. There’s also a charming old funfair near the ferry terminal, kids screaming from nostalgic big dippers and Ferris wheels. Back at the hotel, I spend an afternoon in the Nordic Spa, enjoying the sauna, steam room and warm pools. But stay away from the icy plunge pool — evidently, I still have a long way to go to be truly Scandinavian. Even so, everywhere I go, people start talking to me in Swedish, assuming I am one of them. There’s always that awkward moment when they realise they have to switch to English for me to understand. I say “hey”, which means hello, and “tak” for thanks, but every fan of Scandi crime TV knows those words. “I have a glass” doesn’t cut it.
Later, on a Baltic cruise, I visit other Viking lands — Denmark and Norway, as well as Gotland, the large island that was a big trading centre during the Viking age, from the 8th century onwards. (Viking refers to all Scandinavians who traded by sea.) Gotland is the home of Pippi Longstocking, and Swedish crime writer Mari Jungstedt sets her novels there. It’s also home to the marvellous Gotlands Museum, in the village of Visby, where the world’s largest Viking treasure, the Spillings Hoard, consisting of 67kg of silver coins and jewellery, is piled metres high in darkened rooms. As I wander Visby’s pretty lanes, its walls overhanging with flowery vines, past ancient, ruined churches, houses painted blue and yellow, it’s easy to imagine I’ve been here before. And that at least a few of the 486 silver bangles in the Spillings Hoard once were mine.
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MORE TO THE STORY
STAY: Stockholm’s venerable Grand Hotel, where the original Nobel Prize Awards took place in 1901, is on the waterfront, directly across from the Royal Palace and in walking distance of many of the city’s attractions. Dating from 1874, it has had an elegant renovation by notable Swedish interior designer Martin Brusnizki in recent years. The rooms are classic and beautifully proportioned, the Nordic Spa with its saunas and ice-cold plunge pool an event in itself.
EAT: Meatballs, of course, at casual restaurant Osterlanggatan 17, or Den Gyldene Freden, Stockholm’s oldest restaurant, established in 1722. For a more modern take on Scandinavian cuisine, Speceriet is the “back door” of the pricier Gastrologik restaurant.
PLAY: Even non-fans should get a kick out of the wonderful ABBA The Museum, which is full of optional interactive activities, such as jumping on stage and performing Dancing Queen with a hologram of the group, plus dazzling costume displays and very personal collections of artefacts from the band’s beginnings to the present. More highbrow, but equally as essential, is the contemporary photography museum, Fotografiska, which occupies the old customs building on the dock at Sodermalm. There’s a great cafe upstairs with views of the working waterfront.
SHOP: Head for SoFo, (south of Folkungagatan), the main street on this island that connects to the old town. It’s full of bohemian cafes populated by locals, leisurely practising fika, interesting boutiques brimming with designs and crafts by local artisans, and antique shops selling well-priced mid-century Scandinavian furniture.
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