The Charm of Scandinavia

by Francis E. Clark; Sydney Clark

It is a long time, is it not, since last I tried to impress you with the charm of Sweden. Do not think for a moment, however, that I have given up the pleasant task. It is, as you know, simply because other duties have interfered with the pleasure of telling you about this part of the great northern peninsula, and in my more brief and fragmentary letters I could not attempt to do justice to this interesting part of the earth’s surface. Now it is approaching midsummer, the glad, high days of all Scandinavia.

But to go back a little in my story. What a glorious season is spring in these northern latitudes! I pity the people who must spend all their lives in the tropics and never know the joy of seeing old mother earth wake up from her long winter’s nap.

Considering its latitude, spring comes wonderfully early in Scandinavia. Even in February you can see the yellowing of the willow trees, and the catkins begin to show their downy faces on many a bush. Very early in March you will see little girls from the country on the streets of Stockholm and Upsala, selling the earliest wild flowers, that look like our hepaticas. Soon the ice in the great lakes in the southern part of Sweden breaks up, and from the Mälar huge cakes, on which you might build a little house and float out to sea, come rushing down through the city to the Baltic.

Perhaps you remember that when in midwinter I went to the far North to see a sunless day my railway journey took me through the university city of Upsala. In this balmy June weather I want you to go with me by boat, for it is by far the most interesting and picturesque way. Starting from the Riddarholmen quay of Stockholm, we are soon out upon the great lake which adds so much beauty to Stockholm’s environments. On all sides of us are Sweden’s vast forests of pine and birch, clothing the gentle hills to their very top and coming down to the shore until their feet are almost washed by Mälar’s ripples. On through a long, narrow arm of the lake we steam, being admitted to new beauties by floating bridges that open their doors for us as we approach. Each turn in the channel reveals something a little more beautiful than the last scene.

Nor is it rural loveliness alone that enchants one with this journey, for we are constantly getting glimpses of charming villas, old chateaux, castles, and occasional ruins, each one of which is alive with historic interest.

The great palace of Drottningholm, with its beautiful gardens, a favorite residence of the kings of Sweden, is one of the first palaces that we see. Soon after the chateau of Lennartsnäs appears, and we remind ourselves that it was once owned by Lennart Torstenson, a hero of the Thirty Years’ War, with whom I fear that neither you nor I are acquainted. And now we come to the old city of Sigtuna, whose inhabitants, like many of the people of Palestine, are indebted to their ancestors for the modest degree of prosperity which they enjoy to-day.

A famous American preacher once published an oft-quoted sermon on the “dignity of human nature as disclosed by its ruins,” if I remember the title correctly. The former dignity of Sigtuna is certainly disclosed by its ruins, for above the few and humble dwellings of the present day rise the ruins of three mighty churches, St. Olaf, St. Per, and St. Lars.

Sigtuna was destroyed by the Esthonians from Russia, when they raided Sweden away back in the year 1181. It is said that they carried off two great silver doors from one of these churches, and if you go to Novgorod, in Russia, perhaps you will see them doing duty in some Greek Orthodox church of the present day.

But the most interesting palace that we see on our way to Upsala is Skokloster. You will see that there is more than a suspicion of a cloister in this name, for the Cistercian nuns once lived in these woods in a forest cloister. But the palace that we see was erected by the great Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Wrangel, and by studying its treasures you can learn more in half a day about the Thirty Years’ War than by reading a small library of books. It is still in the possession of the descendants of the Field Marshal, and I venture to say there is no more interesting collection in the world of the relics of the titanic struggle that freed Europe from her long thralldom.