a blog by Peter Leonard
In late October I and six colleagues set off for Philadelphia to take part in the 2006 Swedish Teachers Conference, held this year at the University of Pennsylvania. Last year we met in Austin, and the year before that in Madison. Organized by the Consulate General in New York, these conferences bring together both graduate students as well as full-time language teachers from all over North America to exchange ideas and learn about recent developments in both language teaching pedagogy and the Swedish language itself. A full gallery of pictures is here.
The star attraction this year was Håkon Nesser, author of several best-selling detective novels. He's spending the next few years in New York City and at least a few of his books are coming out in English translation, so he came down to Philadelphia to talk with us about the writing process and his books. I got my copy of Människa utan hund (The Man without a Dog) autographed by him, and managed to get a head start reading it on the plane ride home.
In addition to talks by Håkon and others, we had a few field trips to notable sites of Swedish and/or American history in Philadelphia and the surrounding area. These included a visit to Gloria Dei, the "Old Swedes' Church" built in the early 1700s when the region was a part of the colony of Nya Sverige. Now an Episcopal congregation, services are still held in Swedish once a month.
The inscription in the picture here is taken from Gustav II Adolf's 1618 Bible and was probably carved for an older church in the area around 1646:
Thet folket som i morkret wandrar seer ett stort lius / och ofwer them som boo i morko tande skin det klario
(Note to those sent here by Google: please don't rely on my shaky ability to read blackletter and 17th-century Swedish.) Normalized to modern-day language, this is recognizable as Isaiah 9:2:
Det folk som vandrar i mörkret ser ett stort ljus / över dem som bor i mörkrets land strålar ljuset fram.
Outside, in the churchyard, was our first introduction to the over-eager 20th-century Swedish-Americans who were bound and determined to find a Swedishness at the very heart of early American history: a statue of John Hanson, described as the "First President of the United States." As our guide Kim-Erik Williams explained, however, nothing on the statue is correct. Hanson was not Swedish, nor was he the "President" of the American republic, but rather the president of the assembly which resulted in the Articles of Confederation. And he wasn't even the first 'president' of that. (Sidenote: perhaps Wikipedia should adopt the slogan "More Accurate than Early 20th-century Ethnic History.")
Following up on that theme, our next stop was the American Swedish Historical Museum, which is really has to be seen to be believed. The brainchild of the Swedish-American Amandus Johnson, this is now kind of a time capsule of 1930s art nouveau design and interior decoration, preserving in amber the zenith of (mostly) harmless ethnic celebration.
There are special rooms dedicated to Jenny Lind, John Ericsson, and others. The Ericsson room -- he of the Civil-War ironclad Monitor -- features a beautiful propeller-shaped light fixture hanging from the ceiling:
The entryway to the Museum itself is no less remarkable, with Christian von Schneidau's mural looming above the terraces and staircases depicting the "Arrival of Civilization in the Delaware Valley," brought about by the landing of the Swedes in 1638 aboard the ships Kalmar Nyckel and Fogel Grip.
To be fair, the curators are quick to point out that everything shown in the painting is wrong: there were no women and children aboard, the men weren't dressed like they are shown, and the Kalmar Nyckel was actually the second, not the first, ship to arrive.
To the right and left of the overhead painting are oversized portraits showcasing turning points in American history where Swedes played a pivotal role -- or at least were imagined to in the 1930s. These include the afore-mentioned election of John Hanson as the first President as well as a fellow named John Morten signing the Declaration of Independence. (If you believe, he was a Finland Swede.)
Tragically, I didn't take any pictures of by far the most astounding room in the entire museum: a bronze-leaf map spanning all four walls of a room, handcrafted in Stockholm using materials from the Falu Gruva mine and re-assembled in Philadelphia in the 1930s. The map represents the extent of Sweden's holdings in northern Europe during the 1600s, when the New Sweden colony was founded in the Delaware river valley. Hand-painted figures and buildings characterize each small valley and village, and the two landmasses of Finland and Sweden (minus Danish-controlled Skåne) encircle the visitor across four walls, in a cartographic projection belonging purely to the imagination. You stand somewhere in the Gulf of Bothnia, surrounded by all that the artistic power of 1930s could summon about a 17th-century kingdom, in order to make the Old World somehow relevant to the new.