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Luffare

by Lesley Darling Gustavus Adolphus College Luffare. While in a course on sustainable living, I wandered through the Swedish countryside with a group of wonderful, easy-livin’ Swedes. Rather than list the numbers, facts, and statistical quotes about my time, I want to say that the people I spent my time with sought something different, something overlooked. Our patchwork group included meat-eaters and vegans, farmhands, butterfly-catching birdwatchers, and Stockholm dwellers. We were the alternative set, the wanderers, the seekers, the land-folk.…

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61 Degrees

By Lesley Darling Gustavus Adolphus College How does one take qualitative human experience and chart it? How does one quantify emotion? After an eight-month course on sustainable living in rural Sweden, I returned to my Midwestern undergraduate career both illuminated and disenchanted. Inspired and actualized through my land-living life in Sweden, I felt disillusioned by the systematic reality I faced here in America. I wanted to be back on the land, living intentionally. At the same time, I knew that…

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Old Swedish letter by Marcus Cederström

Serial Writers and Fiction Killers, or vice versa; A Discussion of the Battle for Authorship in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

By Emmon Rogers University of Wisconsin–Madison “Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?”(Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” in The Canterbury Tales Complete, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2000), I.692), [“Who painted the lion, tell me, who?” translated from Middle English by the author] runs Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous allusion to Marie de France’s fables in The Canterbury Tales. The question refers to the idea that any story is shaped dramatically by its author—had a lion painted…

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Woodcut of Inchelina

Inchelina’s Bildung Journey

By Linnea Rock University of Wisconsin–Madison A story of adventure and development with sorrows, triumphs, and love, along with magical qualities, dire situations, and complex characters is perhaps one of the most entertaining types of tales. “Inchelina,” by Hans Christian Andersen, was published in 1835, a time in which women did not have the same opportunities as women do today. By writing “Inchelina” during this time period, Anderson was able to demonstrate the sexism of society, as well as give…

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They Came From The North

By Ryan Gesme University of Wisconsin–Madison During the Viking Age, the Norsemen traveled from their northern dwellings to trade, plunder, and control much of Northern Europe. While the documentation of the Viking raids in Western Europe, especially in the British Isles, has been well researched for many years, there is still a lack of scholarship about their excursion into Eastern Europe. The Vikings created one of the largest trading, military, and control networks in Eastern Europe from 750 until 1100.…

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The Rise and Fall of Imperial Sweden

By Ben Pflughoeft University of Wisconsin–Madison The early sixteenth century heralded transformations to the organization of Sweden’s state formation, which elevated the poor and sparsely populated country to the status of a powerful and influential Scandinavian empire. Imperial Sweden, a dynamic government, proved itself to be an eclectic state of military, centralist, and localist influences distinct from many European contemporaries. For approximately two hundred years, this identity of a uniquely structured empire would operate under a complex formula defined by…

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