Thank you Stellan:
Excellent job on Scandinavian History!!!!!!!!
I cannot contribute too much just yet as I have to go through some books but I can share some "Urban Legends" that I learned while living in Sweden.
The Danes are the best lovers
The Finns are the best fighters (but at least in Goteborg the Volvo Finnish workers kept live chickens and pigs in their flats much to the disgust of the other tenants)
Swedish men are the tallest, best looking and the strongest (but they drink too much just like the Finns)
The Norwegians (the poor cousins) were at that time considered as illiterate goat herders, sorry to Rolf, but now I bet it is really different since the oil boom.
Swedish women are the most beautiful, something I tend to agree with.
Poles were illiterate pig farmers suitable only for being maids and streetsweepers.
I type this in jest, even though the words may seem harsh but that was the general opinion 30 years ago.
To contribute to your remarks about how complicated European history is, I also found it quite interesting to observe the differences between different regions in Sweden. Sweden while a rather large country by European standards, has a pretty small population. In spite of this the regional differences were quite remarkable to a foreigner. The West Coast Swedes thought the East Coasters were snobbish royalists, the Stockholmers though of the Westerners as a bunch of lazy fishermen. The whole of the North population looked down on those of the South as a bunch of farmers. Those in the South thought of those in the North as a bunch reindeer cowboys who wore funny hats and so on.
The other marked difference to me was that when in Skane or other parts of the South, my carefully learned Swedish did me no good at all. I could understand maybe two words out of ten even though they understood me perfectly. I had to learn that I spoke Goteborgska, Stockholmers Stockholmska and southerners Skanska and they were almost totally separate languages.
Also interesting was that on my many visits to the West Coast of Finland, I could find any number of ethnic Finns who still spoke Swedish as their native language in the home.
Just a few remembrances of my so happy time in your beautiful land.
Cheers
Bill
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