Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan, GIH

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

This article examines STIHL Timbersports® and its amalgamation of craftmanship, competition, eventification and branding, through the lens of decontextualization of sport. It thus revisits and revitalizes the concept of sportification, as well as discusses the characteristics of sport such as authenticity and “uncertainty of outcome”. The aim of the article is to grasp the different processes that challenge our common positions regarding sport, which may in turn progress sport beyond the prevalent conceptualization of modern sport.

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.

The article sheds light on how the stranding of an English cargo ship in 1845 led to the introduction of English bat-and-ball games (i.e., rounders and feeder) on the secluded island of Runö. These were incorporated into preexisting tradi-tions of playing ball games at Easter. During this process, the ball games were adapted to local customs and were, so to speak, transformed into the “new” practice of leik mjul (play ball). A conspicuous fact is that feeder existed and was still practised on Runö in the 1940s, apparently long after the game had become extinct in England.

Cross-country skiing in Sweden has long been a sport with connotations of nationalism. When skiing became a popular sport in the 1920s, an image emerged of the elite male cross-country skier as a ”folk hero” embodying certain characteristics: he was a silent, willful and hard-working lumberjack. The present study contributes to the discussion of identity formation within Swedish cross-country skiing by adding an ethnic perspective. Although skiing had an important function in early twentieth-century national identity formation, skiing was also strongly associated with the Sami people, the indigenous population of the Nordic countries who resides in a region that stretches across the national borders of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia. The study analyzes and sheds light on the contrast between ”Swedishness” and ”Saminess” in descriptions of individual elite cross-country skiers in press material and skiing literature of the early twentieth century. Two ideal types of cross-country skiers, both with connotations of nationalism and ethnicity, emerge from the sources. First, the ”rational ascetic,” representing the characteristics of the ”folk hero.” His industriousness, silence, restraint and unpretentiousness embody a protestant ethic, which combines the pursuit of success with an asceticism that prevents the skier from being satisfied with his achievements. Athletic skills were thereby explained as the result of intentions put into practice through rational goals and methods. The ”noble savage”, the second ideal type, on the other hand, represents neither rationality nor asceticism. Instead, his skills were understood to be an innate ability. Since the ”noble savage” belongs to the state of nature, where harmony and balance prevails, no aspirations of any kind are needed. Therefore, neither discipline, rational training or time perception are the bases for the success of a ”noble savage.” He is a ”natural talent” possessing biological properties suitable for skiing. Whereas the success of ”Swedish” skiers (rational athletes) were explained as the result of individual capacities, a victory for a Sami skier was perceived to be due to external circumstances – for example the ”lappföre”, a particular snow condition, or certain weather, trail and track conditions which were difficult to master – because their abilities were natural and not acquired. The heroization of Swedish elite skiers was thus a process reinforced by the construction of ethnic contrasts between the ”rational (Swedish) ascetic”, depicted as an active subject, and the ”noble (Sami) savage”, depicted as a passive object.

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.

Puritansk återhållsamhet och folkrörelsemoral fostrade idrotts-Sverige. Kanske är det därför som padels explosiva framgång provocerar, med sportens lättsamma framtoning och kommersiella framgång. Till idrottens finrum har padel dock inte nått - ännu.

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.

The Singular Slalom Skier from Kittelfjäll: A Biographical Study About Bengt-Erik Grahn

This article is a sports biography of Bengt-Erik Grahn, a prominent figure in Swedish alpine skiing during the 1960s. By discussing representations of Bengt-Erik Grahn in the Swedish daily press and comparing these with his own life story and memories from his time as an elite alpine skier, the objective is to study the cultural identities that appear in relation to his sports career. Bengt-Erik Grahn grew up in a Sami family in Kittelfjall in the Swedish province of Vasterbotten and spent his early school years at the Sami nomad school in Tarnaby. Due to his Sami background and position as a representative of the Swedish national alpine team, the article focuses in particular on how identity constructs such as "Swedishness" and "Saminess" appear in the source material. For instance, it is argued that his Sami identity served an important function when Bengt-Erik Grahn was depicted as a Swedish sports hero. In addition, his Sami background, meager way of life, odd sporting outfit (a hand-knitted wool sweater and hat) and profession as a forestry worker were all characteristics presented in the press coverage as distinguishing the Swedish sporting identity of amateurism from what was perceived as a jet-set and playboy mentality represented by the professional Continental European alpine skiers. However, simultaneously with this idealization, Bengt-Erik Grahn's Simi heritage was also used as a stereotype to explain his aggressive and risky tactics, which often resulted in crashes in the most important competitions. Bengt-Erik Grahn's own life story in several ways offers nuance to the perceptions of the daily press. In particular, it reveals the challenges facing Bengt-Erik Grahn in his youth as he chose to focus on a career in alpine skiing. For example, there were strong expectations that a Sami skier should devote him- or herself to cross-country skiing, which was considered a traditional Sami sport at the time. Alpine skiing, on the other hand, was perceived as modern and alien to Sami sports culture. In that way, Bengt-Erik Grahn's odd and independent way of skiing appears in his life story as a demonstration of empowerment. Despite the prevailing culture, he chose the sport and how to perform it entirely on his own.

Under sitt besök i England fick blivande kung Johan III böta för alla bollar som han spelade bort under sina många tennismatcher. Alltsedan vasakungarnas tid har kungligheterna gått i bräschen för tennissporten i Sverige.

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. 

The aim of this compilation thesis is to shed light on the Sámi history of ski sport in Sweden from an organizational and cultural history perspective where concepts like nation and ethnicity fill an important function. The Sámi are an indigenous people living in Sápmi, a land area extending across the North Calotte region and including parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. The thesis contains six separate articles which together comprise a research period extending between 1879 and 1990.  The articles have been studied from different points of view with the focus on how skis as sport equipment have been historically charged with cultural expressions created by the individual skiers as well as by the general public’s interest in skiing. These cultural expressions have also been internalized as collective identification objects positioning the mutual relations between groups and collectives. By historical links to kings, heroic myths and polar expeditions, the sport of skiing has, for example, become associated with a national Swedish identity. By pinpointing its Sámi origins in the light of history, the ski sport is in this thesis instead viewed as a culturally heterogeneous phenomenon.    In three of the articles of the thesis, the Sámi history of Swedish ski sport is studied. The focus of these studies lies on how ”Sáminess” and ”Swedishness”, viewed as cultural identities, were constructed in connection with the early rise and development of ski sport from the late 19th century to the interwar period (Articles I and II) as well as with the sporting career of downhill skier Bengt-Erik Grahn in the 1960s (Article V). The studies illustrate that, at its rise and early development, cross-country skiing in Sweden was regarded as a Sámi sport. In the early 20th century, however, an ethnic borderline was created between what was Sámi and what was Swedish, which gradually invisibilized the Sámi link to ski sport. Instead, cross-country skiing acquired the inofficial character of being the Swedish national sport. The three remaining studies investigate the separately organized Sámi sport movement from its rise in 1948 through the year 1990 (Articles III, IV and VI). The origin of this movement derives from the Sámi Championships, a winter event whose original contests include skiing and other sports with a background in reindeer husbandry.  The articles clarify the importance of ski sport in creating contrastive ethnic identities between Sáminess and Swedishness (Articles I–V). Similarly, these constructed cultural markers of Sáminess and Swedishness have been interwoven to symbolize an overarching ethnic national identity (Articles IV–V). In addition, the way ski sport has been operated within the separately organized Sámi sport movement has carried weight in the creation of Sápmi as a crossborder nation (Article VI).  

This article sheds light on the history of Sámi sport and focuses on the emergence of the Sámi Ski Championships in Sweden, a winter sport event founded in 1948 in which the Sámi, an indigenous people living in the north of Europe, compete against each other in cross-country skiing and other sports with roots in Sámi culture. The championships have had an important function in shaping a Sámi identity through sporting activities. Although competition and performance were prominent elements of the Sámi Ski Championships in the early years, a superior aim was to create a space where Sámi could meet and socialize, and where the Sámi cohesion could be strengthened. However, in this study it becomes apparent that the event was not only an arena for inclusion but also for exclusion. During the first decades, only Sámi residing in Sweden had the right to participate in the championships, although the Sámi live in an area that stretches across the state borders of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia (formerly the Soviet Union). However, the exclusion went even further. In fact, only those (the Sámi) who had the right to carry out reindeer husbandry were allowed to compete, thereby excluding a major part of the Sámi population in Sweden. The article therefore provides an analysis of how a Sámi identity was constructed at the Sámi Ski Championships from 1948 to 1959 – a construction entangled with cultural markers related to state borders as well as ethnic boundaries.

When art becomes ski races: Swedish painter Anders Zorn as sports rebel in the early 1900s This paper deals with a conflict that arose between the organized sports movement in Sweden and the well-known Swedish artist Anders Zorn in the early 1900s. At this time, the Swedish sports movement expanded very fast, and it was strongly influenced by the English amateur ideal. The reason behind the conflict was the “church race” (kyrklopp), a ski event that Zorn organized annually from 1907 to 1909. In opposition to the amateur rules, the top skiers were awarded great amounts of money from Zorn’s private funds. Therefore, the Swedish Ski Association (Svenska Skidförbundet), as well as local sports associations, banned the event. The conflict is in its historical context understood as a battle between competing ideals of masculinity. The sports movement (Swedish Ski Association) represented a modern and sportified form of cross-country skiing, with standardized courses and detailed rules as characteristics. As a reaction against this “disciplined” culture of sports, Zorn created through his event a more challenging cross-country skiing in trackless terrain, with wilderness, traditionalism and an unbound ideal of masculinity in focus. Through the church races, Anders Zorn wanted to recreate the nature romanticism in his art in real life.

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?

Sport, Swedishness and Diaspora The Estonian-Swedish sports movement 1936−1944 This article sheds light on the function that organized sports had among the Swedish-speaking minority in Estonia the years before and during the Second World War. In the late 1930s, the Estonian-Swedes were subjected to an Estonian nationalistic policy of assimilation. After the outbreak of the war, one year of Soviet rule, followed by three years of German occupation, led to the evacuation of approximately 7 000 Estonian-Swedes, the absolute majority, to Sweden. The assumption of the article is that ethnic identity is defined through the boundaries constructed between groups. The Estonian-Swedish minority is in the article treated as a diaspora, existing in a triangular relationship with the “motherland” (Sweden) and the host society (Estonia). The article shows how the “Swedishness”, as a minority identity, was constructed in relation to several surrounding majority groups and regimes. Sports had a large impact on this identity formation. It affected the identity through the construction of boundaries that separated the minority from both the surrounding society in Estonia, and from the Swedish motherland. First, the identity was strengthened through the transnational interaction between Sweden and the minority in Estonia. The emergence of an Estonian- Swedish sports movement was realized by funds from Swedish associations and organizations that wanted to preserve and promote Swedish culture in Estonia. Second, national identification – “Swedishness” – was strengthened by the contacts that sports events established between isolated Estonian- Swedish villages. The Estonian-Swedish newspaper Kustbon’s sports articles were used in order to homogenize the Swedish speaking minority to one unified tribe. Third, the Swedish identity was defined through the ethnic boundaries and the rivalry that competitions in athletics between Swedes and Estonians gave rise to. Fourth, the Estonian Swedish sports movement generated a rhetoric of pride and decisiveness, which can be interpreted as a reaction against the in Sweden common opinion that Estonian- Swedes were a degenerated and paralyzed remnant of people, whose survival depended on the motherland’s interventions. Keywords: history of sports, ethnicity, identity, diaspora, Estonian-Swedes

När det första Vasaloppet arrangerades för jämnt 100 år sedan var själva tävlingsmomentet inte det viktiga. Framför allt ville man skapa en nationell ritual som skulle hjälpa till att vitalisera synen på allmogens betydelse i den svenska historien.

It is widely agreed that sport and national identity are two interwoven phenomena. Recently, researchers have taken an interest in how sport has been used for nation-building purposes among groups not defined in terms of nation-states. These include the Sámi, an Indigenous people living in an area that extends over the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Sámi championships and a Sámi national football team have been important elements in shaping a Sámi national identity across the state borders. Against this background, the historical development that led to the formation in 1990 of a Sámi National Sports Federation was highly complicated. The period from 1970 to 1990 was fraught by the dilemma of how sport was to be organized – based on the division of the Sámi by state borders or through a transnational Sámi sports organization. The outcome was a compromise in that the Sámi National Sports Federation was founded as an umbrella organization under which Sámi in Norway, Sámi in Finland, and Sámi in Sweden established separate and autonomous Sámi ‘district associations’.

Utmattning, blodutgjutelse och knäckta skidor. Sådant fick några tappra skidåkare stå ut med när de i obanad terräng genomförde konstnären Anders Zorns ”kyrklopp” 1907-1909. Dessa idag bortglömda skidtävlingar var föregångare till Vasaloppet – världens idag längsta och äldsta långlopp på skidor. Historiken bakom Vasaloppet har sedan barnsben intresserat bokens författare Isak Lidström som själv har sina rötter i Västerdalarna och har en masterexamen i historia från Stockholms universitet. Kyrkloppens målgrupp var Ovansiljans fattiga bondpojkar som Zorn ville stötta ekonomiskt. Men de frikostiga prispengar som utdelades ledde till att deltagarna uteslöts ur idrottsrörelsen, som vid denna tid spred ett strikt amatörreglemente. – Kyrkloppen arrangerades i en tid när den moderna idrottsrörelsen var mycket ung och ville visa sin makt i de landsändar där få visste vad Svenska Skidförbundet var för något och ännu färre visste vad det innebar att vara amatör, säger Isak Lidström. Zorn arrangerade sina tävlingar på ett egensinnigt sätt och lade grunden till en traditionalistiskt rotad idrottskultur i Dalarna. Denna gammalmodiga typ av skidåkning, liksom konflikten med skididrottsrörelsen, fick förnyad aktualitet när det första Vasaloppet blev verklighet 1922. – Förhoppningsvis kan boken öka intresset för längdskidåkningens historia i Dalarna. Min ambition har också varit att få kunskap om de konflikter som uppstod när längdskidåkningen blev en del av den organiserade idrottsrörelsen, så som vi känner den idag, menar Isak Lidström.

A common topic of discussion among baseball historians is the question whether baseball is the ancestor of rounders or not. In order to shed new light on this debate, historians need to expand the limited knowledge about the old bat-and-ball games of Continental Europe in order to develop a more cogent consideration of the origins of baseball. Traditional European bat-and-ball games, known by names such as 'longball', schlagball, meta, palant or lapta, have been overlooked in previous studies on the roots of baseball. By comparing variants of this game and baseball, as described by Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths in the late eighteenth century, resemblances and connections between English bat-and-ball games and counterparts in Continental Europe are highlighted.

In this essay we will use a historical approach to comprehend, firstly, the progress and challenges of the Swedish Sport Movement, and secondly, as a stimulus to a reflection on current challenges in regard to the policy and organization of Swedish sport.Thus, the famous Swedish painter Anders Zorn, and his entrepreneurial approach in regard to ski competitions, in addition to his naturalistic ideas, stood in the early 1900 as a (serious) challenge to the initial progress of the Swedish Sport Confederation and its tradition, ideology and, in the prolongation, its hegemonic position. This historical review will, additionally, be related to a contemporary case -'The Motor Sport Case'- in which the Swedish Sport Model has become challenged by EU Law and Competition Law. The presentation will offer a fair amount of - archeological - evidence to better understand the inherent (generic) conflicts as well as the hegemony of the Swedish sport movement. The theoretical framework builds roughly on the perspectives of power and hegemony, which includes concept such as domination, encapsulation, rebellion and noncomplia nce.The reflection focuses on the'organizational capital'as the vital drive in the progress of the Swedish Sport Confederation and its monopoly.

This article sets out to discuss the material culture of traditional physical education from an ethnobiological point of view. The focus is on the use of reed, Phragmites australis Trin. ex Steud., club-rush, Schoenoplectus lacustris L., inflated skins and animal bladders when making buoyancy devices used by children and adolescents for learning to swim. As these teaching methods occurred from thousands of years ago up to very recently, it is argued that child-related practices connected with the bio-cultural domain and arising out of human-biota interaction have noticeably transcended time and societal changes.

Introduction: Modern sports equipment is nowadays manufactured industrially according to globally accepted and standardized models, but traditionally tools for play and games were prepared from materials found in the local environment. The objective of this article is to investigate various aspects of Sami local knowledge about organisms used for their material culture of traditional sports and games in northern Fennoscandia (Sápmi). What functions did the surrounding biota have in the production of equipment used in sports and games?

Methods: A qualitative method was used; the ethnographic literature and travel narratives have been analyzed particularly for descriptions and notes on traditional games, toys, and sports.

Results: Before the turn of the twentieth century, bats, balls, and skis were seldom produced in factories, but by children and adults who utilized available materials from the surrounding environment. The manufacture of tools for play and games was characterized by a rich creativity in the use of various biological and natural resources. A wide range of such resources is presented in this article, among them the bracket fungus Fomitopsis betulina, used for making balls, reindeer antlers utilized for lassoing contests, and pine bark painted with reindeer blood, prepared for playing cards. We also highlight how tools usually associated with means of transport could switch functions and serve playful and competitive purposes, such as skis made of compression pine or walking sticks of birch: The former were used in skiing races, and the latter appeared in fencing competitions.

Conclusion: The industrialization of the material culture of sports has been contributed to a loss of local knowledge and familiarity with locally available organic stuffs for producing equipment for play and games. By reconnecting with previous knowledge of traditional games, we discover a potentially new direction for modern sports and games, shifting from globalization to environmentalization. Such an environmentalization could permit the local environmental context define the content, meaning and structure of sports, and simultaneously enrich both sports and outdoor life.

Ethnomycology is the study of the bio-cultural aspects of human-fungal interactions. This article discusses the involvement of the bracket fungus Fomitopsis betulina within the material culture of traditional games. With a particular focus on the Nordic countries, the aim is to review and analyze the use of simple balls made of bracket fungi. We argue that the fungi ball can be considered the precursor of the rubber (and the gutta-percha) ball. Moreover, the replacement of fungi balls with rubber balls marks, to a certain extent, a temporal transition from traditional folk games with roots in pre-industrial society to modern sports in which balls and other equipment received a more standardized shape.