Stories

Long-form essays on Nordic history — the legends separated from what actually happened.

The king who did not die of pea soup

Everyone in Sweden knows how Erik XIV died: a bowl of poisoned pea soup in his prison. But the soup enters the record half a century after his death, in a prisoner's manuscript — and when the grave was opened in 1958, the chemists found the poison and no soup. What actually happened is colder, and worse.

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The town that was never burned

Sweden's most famous history painting shows an event that never happened. What did happen outside Visby's wall in July 1361 is worse — and the ground still holds the proof.

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