Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan, GIH

Bohemians and outsiders have long fascinated the media and the general public because they challenge conventional lifestyles and societal norms. This fascination extends to sport, where narratives about such figures appear in both historical and contemporary media. By analysing the media’s framing of cross-country skier Lars Theodor Jonsson (1903–1998) and speed skater Nils van der Poel (1996–), this essay identifies two distinct ideal types: the ‘idealistic bohemian’ of modern society and the ‘rational outsider’ of postmodern society. Through an examination of these athletes’ careers, public personae, and lifestyle choices as represented in the media, the essay sheds light on how sporting hero narratives evolve in relation to broader social and cultural changes.

This article focuses on how the idea of Borealism intervened in the establishment of cross-country (XC) skiing as a modern sport in late nineteenth-century Sweden. Borealism is analogous to Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism and refers to an exoticizing discourse, not of the Orient, but of Lapland, the region that covers the greatest part of northern Sweden’s hinterland. The clearest expression of Borealism was the organization of so-called National skiing competitions with Lapland skiers at the center. The propaganda purpose of these competitions was to enable the public to learn the technical skills of skiing from the masters of the North. Although most of them were Sámi, the Swedish skiing elite – referred to here as the ‘Boreal athletes’ – were an ethnically heterogeneous group. That skiers of Lapland without Sámi ancestry, commonly referred to as ‘settlers’, were also promoted as ideals of skiing technique suggests that the Boreal athletes embodied a hybrid cultural identity, in which the categories of ‘Sámi’ and ‘settler’ were intertwined and cross-fertilized. In the spirit of nature romanticism, these masters of skiing were perceived as untainted by civilization; they had acquired their skills through wolf hunting and wilderness living, reflecting a romanticized lifestyle idealized during the age of Borealism. They appeared as outsiders, both admired and exoticized.

Gotland, the largest island in the Baltic Sea, has historically had an ambivalent relationship with mainland Sweden. While political autonomy has never been demanded in modern times, Gotland has shown strong regionalism, not least reflected in its domestic sports culture. Among these sports, pärk - a local variant of the medieval ball game jeu de paume - stands out as a key element in shaping Gotlandic identity. Despite uncertainties about its origins, pärk is presented in local history-writing as a remnant of Gotland's medieval heydays. Over time, the game has served various functions: as a rural sport at parish festivals, as an urban bourgeois pastime in the mid-nineteenth century, as a Gothicist symbol of Norse strength at the turn of the twentieth century, and as the centrepiece of contemporary regional sporting events such as the Stånga Games in Gotland. When analyzing the changing social and cultural functions of pärk over historical periods, pärk appears as a traditional sport in the sense of a 'temporally adaptive sport'. Such a concept highlights how long-lived sports adapt to societal changes, illustrating their enduring relevance and ability to shape and reshape collective identities in changing historical contexts.

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.

Kapitlet har tillkommit inom ramen för ett forskningsprojekt som finansierats genom medel från fysikern Ragnar Holms stiftelse. Sedan tidigare finns en forskningsartikel av Isak Lidström, ”Modern skis in a nostalgic landscapes: The technological development of Swedish cross-country skiing, 1892–1932”, Scandinavian journal of history (2025). Kapitlet här bygger i stora delar på artikeln men texten är avsevärt bearbetad och utvidgad i samarbete mellan Isak Lidström och Sverker Sörlin.

In the history of sport, we find athletes, teams, events, and specific sports that, as ‘outsiders’ or ‘underdogs,’ have challenged established norms. Their actions have both questioned and reinforced the logic, ideals, and rationalities of sport, including performance standards, talent identification, training approaches, lifestyles, and engagement with media. Of course, in a certain context, these cases, actions, and efforts, and thus the individuals involved, have fascinated sport consumers and generated media coverage in various ways and directions, and thus, belong to the celebration of sport, differences, and the virtue of ‘the uncertainty of outcome’ in 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.

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?