Swedish landscapes through early modern eyes: Diaries, military maps and ruins

If you want to see different views of the landscape today, it’s pretty straightforward: all you need to do is open Google Earth. But how could someone living in the early modern period learn about the landscape? And what do landscape descriptions tell us about their authors?

Natalie Smith

11/26/20255 min read

It’s impossible to be truly objective when describing the landscape. Whether intentional or not, the depiction will be shaped both by the purpose for which it is being produced, and the context that the creator is working in. This point can be demonstrated by looking at a variety of domestic Swedish travel accounts.

From the 17th century onwards, the rise of European Enlightenment brought with it an emphasis on measuring, categorising and documenting the natural world. Travel writing, both international and domestic, became an important way for people to process the world around them.

This was certainly the case in Sweden, a sparsely populated country with many regions considered under-explored by scholars and the state alike. This was especially pronounced in the case of Sápmi, the northern part of Fenno-scandia (formerly known in English as Lappland) and the homeland of the indigenous Sámi people. The Swedish colonisation of these territories was enabled with scientific travel expeditions led by explorers such as Olof Rudbeck the Younger and Carl Linnaeus.

But natural scientists were not the only ones who turned to travel writing as a means for understanding the landscape, and for spreading this knowledge to others. Let’s take a closer look at three different examples of early modern travel accounts.

Landscape sketch by Carl Gustav Gottfried Hilfeling, 1788 or 1790.

A local travel diary in northern Sweden

Fale Abrahamson Burnam (1758-1809), a historian and high school teacher from Undersåkers socken in Jämtland in Sápmi), spent five summers between 1793 to 1802 travelling throughout his local region. Hoping to eventually publish a comprehensive book on the history, geology, archaeology, topography and economic prospects of Jämtland, he took detailed notes during his journeys.

Topographical depiction of Jämtland by Fale Burnam, 1798.

While Burnam’s ambition of publishing this work was never realised, the material he left behind makes for an intriguing source. His topographical descriptions offer a literal, almost survey-like view of the landscape, with the locations of trees, stones and bushes noted in detail. It also includes some more eclectic tales: a horse being struck by lightning, accounts of how certain villages acquired derogatory nicknames for their inhabitants, and descriptions of the Swedish border to Norway, to name a few.

Burnam also assessed natural resources and how they might be exploited. For example, he identified areas he believed suitable for iron-ore mining or agricultural development. Writing less than fifty years after the 1749 Lappmarksreglementet, a royal decree outlining Swedish ambitions to transform the Sápmi region into farmland through settler-colonialism, these observations can be understood as representing a distinctly Swedish settler perspective on Jämtland.

This perspective becomes even clearer in his comments on local farmers. Burnam describes them as strong and healthy, something which he attributes to their hunting abilities. Yet, the 1749 Lappmarksreglemente forbade settlers from hunting, a right reserved for the Sámi. His remarks show that the rules in the royal decree weren’t being followed, and hints at tensions in the indigenous-settler dynamics.

Military Maps in Skåne, Finland and Russia

Military maps offer yet another perspective of the landscape. They are typically thought of as objective descriptions, with their value resting on how well they represent reality. They are, after all, a tool intended to help one make strategic decisions during war. But as the military maps created by Barthold Anders Ennes (1764-1841) show, they still include a great deal of both interpretation and selective emphasis.

Map showing Russia’s attack on Pirtmäki camp in Finland, by Barthold Anders Ennes, 1790.

Ennes served as an officer in the Swedish army in Gustav III’s Russian wars of 1788-1790, and the Pomeranian war 1806-1808. His maps of Skåne in Southern Sweden, Finland (which until 1809 was Eastern Sweden) and Russian enemy camps were shaped by the practical needs of warfare. Instead of highlighting mineral resources or describing the local flora, the emphasis was instead on strategic vantage points, locating supply lines and rendering the terrain in ways useful to military planning. What was irrelevant to decision-making was often omitted entirely.

Antiquarian travel accounts to southern Sweden

Not all representations of the landscape focused on topography and nature. Antiquarian travel writing, produced by scholars and hobbyists seeking out historical sites, was concerned with the imprints humans had left on the land. Viking artefacts, in particular, became a major point of fascination for many of these writers, and we discussed some of these here.

Ennes himself was one such hobbyist. After retiring from military service, in addition to writing multiple books of military history which remain important for Swedish historians, he travelled across southern Sweden, documenting runestones, Viking graves, and other ruins.

Drawing of Viking grave in Blomholm by Hilfeling, 1788 or 1790.

Other antiquarians worked in more official capacities. Carl Gustav Gottfried Hilfeling (1740-1823), for example, was commissioned by the Danish crown to document remains of potential national interest for Denmark in the Swedish territories of Skåne and Blekinge. These territories had been Danish just over a century earlier, and his assignment highlights the contested nature of national heritage, especially in border regions. The drawings Hilfeling produced during this Danish commission were later used in Swedish historical works aimed at cultivating a strengthened Swedish national identity, but that’s a story for another day…

Resisting the idea of an “objective” perspective

There is no objective or neutral way of viewing the landscape. Every attempt to record it, whether through detailed travel diaries, military maps, or sketches of ancient ruins, reveals something about the priorities and cultural context of those creating the depiction. We could even make a similar analysis of Google maps, with its blurring of certain regions of North Korea and Russia, how they chose to draw contested borders and placenames depending on the location of the users, what roads they prioritise when calculating your route through the city you’re visiting.

This lack of objectivity isn’t inherently a bad thing; we are, after all, shaped by the societies we grow up in. But it does mean that we should look at material which tries to depict the world around us with a critical eye, paying attention both to what is being shown, and what has been omitted.

Sources

This post draws on material explored during my Rettig Fellowship, generously funded by the Swedish National Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieämbetet) and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities (Kungl. Vitterhetsakademien). All materials, except the original for Burnam’s diary, are held in the personal archive of the respective individuals at the ATA Archives in Stockholm.

Fale Burnam’s diaries have been digitised and can be found here: https://www.fornskrift.se/Avskrifter/Burman_dagbocker.pdf