The great Jarl seems to have been the first one to have discovered the impregnable position which Stockholm’s islands offered for defense. To be sure there was quite a population on these islands before Birger’s time, but he was a man of far-seeing vision, as his position on his lofty monument indicates, so he made of Stockholm one great fort. On every side it was surrounded by water, the great Lake Mälar, and the two rushing rivers that carried its waters to the Baltic.
Birger was never anything but a Jarl, but he was the greatest of all the earls, and so powerful that he was able to place his son Magnus above all his brother earls, and made him the first king of Sweden. Magnus was not unworthy of his name, for he too was a great ruler for those rude times, though if the son was Magnus I think the father should be called Major, if not Maximus, for he really founded the kingdom of Sweden, as well as the city of Stockholm.
Sweden of course had a history before the days of Birger and Magnus, but it is so mixed up with that of Norway and Denmark, who were really the predominant partners in those early days, that I shall have to resign St. Olaf and some of the other exceedingly interesting worthies of that time to the pen of Aylmer, thus giving him, my dear Judicia, a vast advantage in his efforts to claim for Norway your favorable verdict.
I must remark in passing, however, that St. Olaf, or King Olaf Haraldson of Norway, to give him his full title, once found himself and all his fleet shut up in Lake Mälar by chains stretched across its western outlet. This was in the year 1007; so in order to get out of his cul-de-sac, he dug a shallow channel across a neck of land that prevented him from making his way into the Baltic, that he might thus evade the clutches of Olaf Skötkonung of Sweden. Nature favored his project, and the strong current that sets from the great lake to the Baltic Sea soon wore a wide thoroughfare, through which the king and all his ships escaped into the Baltic and thence home to Norway. This channel made of a former peninsula the island of Staden, so that the Swedes may thank St. Olaf for making one of the three great islands of their capital which Birger Jarl found it so easy to fortify and defend.
A monument that I have been looking for but have not yet found, though there may be one somewhere in Stockholm, is a memorial to St. Bridget. If any Swedish woman deserves a monument, surely it is this same saint “Birgitta,” as she is called in Swedish. In my youth I naturally supposed that St. Bridget was an Irish lady; but she was a pure Swede, and a Swede of the mystical type, in some respects not unlike a fellow countryman of more modern days—the great Swedenborg. She devoutly believed that she received many revelations from Christ and the Virgin Mary, which are preserved to this day in large tomes.
She lived before the Reformation, but was none the less a reformer of the first order. The rule of her abbey, which she believed was enjoined by Christ himself, made chastity, humility, and voluntary poverty the first requisites. “No member of the convent could possess the smallest piece of money; nor even touch silver or gold except when necessary for embroidery, and then only after permission obtained from the abbess. The nuns ate the simplest food and fasted three days in the week. To remind them of their mortality, a bier always stood at the church door, and near the cloister yawned an open grave. Thither these devout women repaired every day, and the abbess threw a handful of earth into the pit, while the sisters repeated psalms and prayers.”[1]
In these days, when the social pendulum has swung so far to the other extreme, there is something worthily heroic in this story of good Birgitta. There is a tonic in it, like a strong east wind, that blows away the miasma of modern social life.
Whatever we may think of her, she made a tremendous impression upon Sweden, an impression which is fresh and vivid to this day, as anyone who studies the history of Sweden speedily discovers. St. Bridget was a woman of tremendous courage. She knew how to reprove the Pope as well as the King. Moreover, her influence was not confined to Sweden, for she spent much time in Rome and is acknowledged throughout the whole Catholic world as one of their greatest saints.
Again come with me to one of the chief squares of Stockholm, and there we will see the figure of the noblest Swede of them all, Gustavus Adolphus, the hero of Protestantism, the victor of a score of hard-fought battles. I will not take you to the monument of Gustavus Vasa, the grandfather of Gustavus Adolphus, for we have already traced his glorious career from the days when he was a hunted fugitive in Dalecarlia to the day when he mounted in triumph the Swedish throne at Stockholm.
But great as was the grandfather, his grandson Adolphus was greater still, as a general, as a reformer, as a man. Between the days of the grandfather and the grandson Sweden had thrown off the power of the Roman church, whose possessions had been seized by the crown; and two of the immediate disciples and pupils of Luther, the brothers Olaus and Laurentius Petri, had firmly established the reformed religion throughout the kingdom.