When you think of swedes...

[thenooblet22]

When I think of Swedes...
I think of painful letters to pronounce

 

[McManus]

"Jag känn en bott, hon heter Anna, Anna heter hon
Och hon kan banna, banna dig så hårt
Hon röjer upp I våran kanal
Jag vill berätta för dig, att jag känner en bott"

Basshunter and piratebay are things that come to mind when thinking of Sweden... if I can get past the ice-hockey rage..

 

[Verbose]

Why viking killers and rapers are regarded as cool? That is something I can't understand.

Maybe because there was more to them than the raping and killing?

Trade, founding places, discovering others, turning up in the most unexpected places, sagas (lots of great one-liners)...

The Anglo-Saxon women seemed to prefer the Scandinavians to their own lice-infested men, according to one source. The Scandinavians at least washed on a regular basis.

 

[ParkCungHee]

By that comment, may I infer that you play Eurorails?

No, basically the first thing that springs to mind for most countries is something related to WWII.
Sweden = Iron and Romania = Oil.

 

[Urederra]

Maybe because there was more to them than the raping and killing?

Trade, founding places, discovering others, turning up in the most unexpected places, sagas (lots of great one-liners)...

They still are shy founders comparing to the roman legionaries, for example. No conquerors were limited to raping and killing, even the Khans brang their culture with them.

 

[Italian Celtic]

i think Ikea and Tetrepack which in the last century have saved the 60% of sweden forests(in the sense swedish are buying timber abroad)

 

[Love]

Swedish forests is so wast...

 

[Grey Fox]

They still are shy founders comparing to the roman legionaries, for example. No conquerors were limited to raping and killing, even the Khans brang their culture with them.

Capturing cities cost maintenance - Much more cost effective to get bribed off or sacking the place. Besides, only the chinese could build a Forbidden Palace at that time. A European spanning empire would have been economical and cultural suicide!

 

[Love]

But they are also thought that if you don't burn the city to the ground and kill all the civilians, then you could come back after ten years

 

[Urederra]

I just remind you guys that my point was that, after doing all those nasty things, the vikings are regarded as cool, which is perverse.

BTW, difficult to find more distant extremes than the vikings and Gandhi. Gandhi rules, you have changed a lot, weren't you a pacifist?

 

[Love]

I have never beent

 

[Tenochtitlan]

I just remind you guys that my point was that, after doing all those nasty things, the vikings are regarded as cool, which is perverse.

BTW, difficult to find more distant extremes than the vikings and Gandhi. Gandhi rules, you have changed a lot, weren't you a pacifist?

Wait a 1000 years on Hitler and he'll be cool, don't worry. They all become cool in the end, when the interests of the historians aren't affected.

 

[Verbose]

Vikings are cool these days because Nazism made it impossible to keep thinking old Germanic heroes were cool.

You've had an argument between Latins and Germanics about the merits or demerits of the Germanics barbaric ancestors since the Renaissance — "They toppled Rome! Bastards! Everything they have they got from us Latins." — "No way! It was already a rotting carcass! The heroic Germanics created modern Europe, democracy included!"

That's about the size of it. Come the late 19th c. sentiments get reeeal high strung. Rolled into all this is a reverence for the literary qualities of the Icelandic sagas, and and odd regard for the Scandinavian societies, which the Germans regarded as this quaint place, almost untouched by history (or so it seemed to them), vizened old Scandinavian geezers chewed dirt and flaxen haired, buxom girls smelt vaguely of fresh milk.

Think about the almost ridiculous reverence some people have for things Celtic and Irish. A good size chunk of that is likely displaced from people previously going potty over romantic Vikings, Germans with wings on their helmets, Wagner and all that jazz.

But it's still possible to idolize Vikings, because Scandinavia wasn't part of the Holocaust. Vikings=Scandinavians=OK. Germanic heroes=Germans=Nazis=not OK.
The German-Italian writer Curzio Malaparte in his WWII account "Kaputt" (written from the Italian and German side) uses in particular the Swedes as an example of a Germanic people which has not "gone insane with fear", which is how he sums up the German nation.

 

[C~G]

I just remind you guys that my point was that, after doing all those nasty things, the vikings are regarded as cool, which is perverse.

Yeah, leaving them out we have Pirates, Ninjas and Knights (of reconquista) that were all cool and nice guys.

 

[Phlegmak]

I just remind you guys that my point was that, after doing all those nasty things, the vikings are regarded as cool, which is perverse.

BTW, difficult to find more distant extremes than the vikings and Gandhi. Gandhi rules, you have changed a lot, weren't you a pacifist?

The Mongols were also mass murderers who are considered "cool" these days.

 

[Drewcifer]

When I think of Swedes I think of drunk people sitting next to me on airplanes. Beyond that I think of my grandfather, and also a specific girl I knew a long time ago from Lindstrom, Minnesota.

 

[malclave]

...what do you think about?

 

[Lone Wolf]

When I think of Sweden, I think about

IKEA, Karl XII and the Battle of Poltava, Scandinavian socialism, Astrid Lingdren and her books for children (hope I spelt her name right), Gustav Adolf and the 30 years war...

What rich associations do I have!

 

[Grey Fox]

Astrid Lingdren and her books for children (hope I spelt her name right)

It's Lindgren. Think of it as two words combined; Lind and Gren, which means linden (a kind of leaf tree) and branch. Thinking of it as two separate words probably helps with the consonant mumble in the middle.

 

[willemvanoranje]

I think of Köttbullar.. and the prototype Swede would be Markus Rosenberg, Marcus Allbäck, Christian Wilhelmsson and to some extend Olof Mellberg. Petter Hansson and Erik Edman are important ones I can't forget of course, although Hansson is almost too blond to be Swedish.

Ah, and of course 90% of Sweden is named -son (then again, a lot of Dutch have -se(n) too).