An encounter with Johan Skytte

It was a brisk evening in the Danish village of Skagen in the fall of 2001 and my fellow students and I, as well as some teachers from my study program, were sitting around drinking alcoholic beverages in one of the few cafes in town that were open past 10 pm.

One of the 'teachers' was actually a librarian named Peter who was 60 years old and wore leather pants to work. In other words, Peter may have been old, but he was still 'cool'. And so I asked Peter a question that had been burning on my mind during the weeks I had spent in Copenhagen.

"Peter, why is that everytime I have a bit too much to drink, people ask me if I am Swedish?"

"Well," he replied. "The short answer is that Swedes like to come to Denmark to get drunk because the beer is cheaper here. But the truth is that Danes actually feel a bit inferior to Swedes. I mean they have Volvo and Ikea. What does Denmark have? The Little Mermaid?"

This was about as soul-searching as the Danish-Swedish dialog got during my time there. Most other times it was "damn drunk Swedes", "drunk as a Swede", "you have a beer in your hand, you must be Swedish" and, "Looks like a Swede threw up in the street again."

It got to the point that one time while walking home from a party in Norrebro I encountered a man staggering to the street after peeing on the wall of an apartment block. "Are you Swedish?" I asked him, quite convinced he must be. "No mate," he replied. "I'm Australian."

Eesti-Rootsi

Fast forward six years and here I am in Tartu in the midst of sügis, the Estonian season that roughly corresponds to the American fall and the British autumn. But unlike visions of crisp October days and Indian Summers, sügis is damp, wet, soaking ... märg. They put the 'ü' in 'sügis' just to capture the feeling of wading through slops of wet leaves. It was like this last week when I climbed up Toomemäe in Tartu to see a new monument -- the Johan Skytte memorial, recently opened with the help of Queen Silvia of Sweden (see above). It was the Swede Skytte who founded the university, 375 years ago this month.

While checking out the Skytte monument, I began to wonder why is it that here in Estland, the Swedish cultural influence is respected and memorialized in national historiography, but in places like Denmark, Norway, and Finland, Swedes are looked upon as Carlsberg-chugging, self-absorbed primadonnas who are too busy thinking about their perfect society to notice anyone else around them? The Danes and Finns and Norwegians say their jokes are all in good fun, but are they really?

The answer to this question is rooted in the geopolitical repositioning of the nascent Estonian state in the 1920s under the tutelage of respected political thinkers like Jaan Tõnisson, who was at the heart of the Baltoscandia idea -- linking the Scandinavian and Baltic states into a union that could counterbalance Russian and German influence.

Beyond that though there is the reality that the Estonian past feels truncated. There's the mythology -- 800 years of slavery -- but then the reality. How many Estonian stories have been passed down from the times of the Great Northern War? Some. Our tour guide through Tartu the other day basically took the side of Karl XII in the end. He was trying to be unbiased, but it was so hard for him to be.

But did the Estonians of the time feel that way? Remember, regardless of noblemen and armies, the Estonians were maarahvas -- people of the land. While the Swedish influence cannot be understated by academics or politicians or clergymen, it probably trickled down to the maarahvas in ways that they may have not noticed. There was probably not a rash of newborn babies named Johan in 1633, to put it simply. The Estonian mothers kept naming their kids Tõnu and Tiidrik.

Nagu Rootsi Kuningas

But one day in Tartu I met a man who had named his son Karl, Karl "nagu rootsi kuningas", he said as he smiled to me. It's kind of odd to think that people even today have warm feelings about the Swedish monarchy. Another friend, a Swede, told me that when he visited an old couple in Noarootsi, the walls were covered with photos of the Swedish royal family.

Now I admit the Swedes are nice looking people. That they are so ashamed of their own language that they insist on cranking out pop hits in English, rather than paa svenska, is ok with me also. But let's just say that if I named my future son Gustav, I'd be doing it for Gustav Suits, not for King Gustavus Adolphus.

Still I just can't put my finger on what it is about Skytte's people that still endears them to the locals here. I can only guess that if a drunk Estonian somewhere out there has to find an alleyway where he can relieve himself and finds himself beside a Swede engaged in the same activity, he feels a tinge of familiarity and camaraderie with his fellow traveler.