Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan, GIH

This article is a study of technological change in cross-country (XC) skiing in Sweden from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s. While technological development in sport is usually seen as a linear and predetermined process, it is instead treated in this context as an arena where wills and intentions – grouped under the concepts of nostalgia and intensification – are negotiated. Nostalgia, in this sense, reflects a scepticism of innovation and change based on contemporary civilizational and rural-romantic concerns, whereas intensification represents the total mobilization of resources to improve sporting performance. The article shows that in its beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century, XC skiing expressed a romantic vision of a distinctive Swedish national landscape where skis were to be made using traditional and old-fashioned craftsmanship. In the early twentieth century, however, XC skiing changed and became progressive. The traditional Swedish skiing landscape was abandoned and the sport adapted to international conditions to enable Swedish athletes to compete successfully abroad. In other words, skiing was intensified because of the mobilization of resources by the Swedish Ski Association in close cooperation with the Swedish ski industry, which was then in an expansion phase.

The aim of this article is to examine the emergence and establishment of the ball game ‘brännboll’ (lit. burnball) in Sweden. In doing so, it contributes to the knowledge of how sports have spread historically and how they have changed when established in new places. First of all, the existence of the concept of brännboll throughout history is examined. Although it can be traced back to the 17th century, the game we now commonly call brännboll is a modified form of the English game of rounders that was introduced to Sweden at the end of the 19th century. Unlike the closely related game of baseball, brännboll never developed into a modern sport with standardised rules, organisations and bureaucracy. This is seen in the study as a consequence of the fact that brännboll gained a foothold in the ‘play movement’ rather than in the modern sports movement, and that physical education was considered more important in brännboll than performance and results. As a result of this process of pedagogisation, the game developed into a simplified, stripped-down and more static game compared to its English predecessor.

Medan idrottshistoria i Sverige varit en utpräglad modernhistorisk disciplin har äldre tiders idrott främst studerats av etnologer som intresserat sig för bondesamhällets folkliga lekar och tävlingar. I denna artikel uppmärksammas i stället den aristokratiskt präglade tennisen och dess betydelse för kungligheters och eliters statussträvanden i Vasatidens Sverige. Ett sådant studieobjekt aktualiserar behovet av nyanserade begrepp för att bättre förstå idrottens samhälleliga funktion överlängre tidsperioder.

The kings of the early modern tennis court: Ball games, status, and early modern sportification in Sweden

In Sweden, the history of sport is a discipline that mainly focuses on the modern era. Sporting life in earlier times has mainly been studied by ethnologists interested in the popular games and competitions of agrarian society. This article focuses instead on real tennis, which was evidently aristocratic in nature and known for its importance in establishing the status of the royals and elites. From an international perspective, tennis under the Vasa dynasty in Sweden (1523–1654) was a peripheral offshoot of an early modern European sports culture. It was introduced at the Swedish royal court in the mid sixteenth century, at a time when Europe’s urban tennis culture had already reached its peak in Central Europe. Tennis’s emergence and development in Sweden in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is described here in terms of an exclusionary process of sportification. It took the form of the institutionalisation of ball games associated with the royal court: the construction of special sports facilities, commercialisation, royal sportswear, and the introduction of sports-related occupations. In other words, it was a process of sportification for the absolute elite of society. Tennis culture in Sweden under the Vasa dynasty was not about the rationalisation of activities or involving as many people as possible to select talent and optimize sporting performance, as is the credo of modern sport. Rather, its driving force was to emphasise both the elites’ difference from their subjects and their affinity with similar elites elsewhere in Europe, achieved using consumption, exclusive habits, and codes of conduct.

The transition from agrarian society’s traditional sporting life to a modern culture of sport, which has been studied extensively in previous research, is not the whole answer when interpreting the tennis playing of the Vasa kings. Typologies of sport history tend to identify a number of characteristics of modern sport against which older forms of sport are measured. The result is history written backwards, with the sporting life of earlier times assumed to be a rudimentary form of modern sport, which in turn is the predetermined end point in the history of sport. This was not the case with tennis in early modern Sweden. This study shows that sporting life in the past must instead be studied in its particular sociocultural context, which was clearly different from that of modern society. It is also misleading to see sportification as a continual development from the Renaissance on, as the literature suggests. In fact, there were two separate processes of sportification, driven independently by different conditions in two distinct periods. 

Skidvallans historia framstår som en spegelbild av samhällets utveckling, där svensk ingenjörskonst länge ledde jakten på en universalvalla. När fluorvallan nu av ekologiska skäl förbjudits kanske vi åter börjar söka fästet i tjärdalen och glidet i talg?

Report from the conference D’Autre Corps, D’Autre Jeux (in English Other Bodies, Other Games), Paris, 12-14 June 2024.

This chapter focuses on a landmark change in ski wax production that took place in the 1940s. The production of synthetic waxes, developed as a result of scientific testing and engineering, replaced the previously small-scale and experience-based ski wax production. The chapter explores the historical circumstances and processes – such as industrialization and scientification – that affected the technological development of skiing and paved the way for this change.

Sports historians have argued that the type of ball games common in the British Isles, which were practiced by two teams and in which the ball was driven with sticks towards predetermined goals – i.e., hurling, shinty, bandy and hockey – were never played in early modern Sweden. By highlighting descriptions of ballgames in Johannes Schefferus’s The History of Lapland (1674), a source previously ignored by sports historians, this article challenges such a claim. One of the games described by Schefferus has some similarities with the violent stick-and-ball game known in Icelandic sagas as knattleikr. Even greater similarities (such as the start of the game with a face-off and the goals consisting of lines on the short edges) emerge when the game is compared with the Scottish game of shinty. Thus, pre-modern Scandinavia does not appear to have been as isolated in terms of sports and games as has been suggested by Swedish sports historians.

Sveriges sista bödlar, eller skarprättare som de hellre kallades, levde för inte så länge sedan – den allra sista dog 1920. Ändå representerade de ett gammaldags Sverige där frågor om rätt och fel värderades utifrån den mosaiska rättens skoningslösa principer.

Det här är en krönika över en långlivad och sägenomspunnen yrkesgrupps upplösning i ett moderniserat land där den inte längre var önskvärd. Bödlarnas bakgrund och öden avslöjar en brokig grupp, och deras syn på yrket liksom omvärldens syn på dem varierade. Som denna bok kan visa ökade deras anseende ironiskt nog i takt med att straffen humaniserades, och även om somliga inte utövade sitt yrke mer än någon enstaka gång var deras plats i samhället långt ifrån självklar.