Swedes Erotic

Swedes are a North Germanic people whose sense of themselves was forged less by conquest than by long stretches of organized stability — a state that consolidated early, reached briefly across the Baltic as a great power in the seventeenth century, then settled into a quieter role as one of Europe's most administratively coherent societies. The homeland stretches from the agricultural plains of Skåne in the south through the lake country of Götaland and Svealand to the forests and tundra of Norrland, a long thin country where most people live in the lower third and the upper reaches belong as much to the Sámi as to anyone. That north-south stretch shows up in the people too: Scanians in the south, with a soft burred speech that sounds halfway to Danish; the Jamtish of the inland north, historically Norwegian-leaning; and the Gutes of Gotland, whose old island dialect Gutnish preserves features the mainland lost centuries ago. Swedish-speakers in coastal Finland and on Åland are not a diaspora in the ordinary sense — they have been there as long as Finland has had cities — and there are older emigrant communities in the American Midwest, the Canadian prairies, and, more curiously, in a small Argentine farming colony in Misiones.

The language is mutually intelligible with Norwegian and largely with Danish, a continuum more than a set of separate tongues, and Swedes tend to read the other two with little effort and complain affectionately about how they sound. Lutheranism arrived with the Reformation under Gustav Vasa and became the state church for nearly five centuries; it was disestablished only in 2000, and active belief is now thin, but the cultural inheritance remains visible in the calendar, the architecture of every village, and a certain Protestant temperament — a preference for understatement, a discomfort with showing off, a deep suspicion of anyone who talks too much about themselves. The cultural code that foreigners notice first is lagom, the idea that the right amount is neither too little nor too much, paired with jantelagen, an unspoken northern injunction against considering yourself special. Set against this is a real streak of seasonal hedonism: the long dark winters are answered with crayfish parties in late summer, Midsummer poles raised in every meadow, and the candle-lit Lucia processions that mark the darkest week of December. The contrast is the point — restraint most of the year, then a few nights of organized abandon.