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| Still from The Seventh Seal |
In late August this year the Swedish government published a 300 page document titled A Cultural Canon for Sweden, explaining
its rationale and listing one hundred works of art, literature, architecture,
and concepts like “Allemansrätten,” the right
to explore and enjoy nature on both public and private lands.
The list, which includes the paintings of Karin and Carl Larsson, the children's book by Astrid Lindgren,
Pippi Longstocking, and the
Seventh Seal by filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, has
its roots in an agreement between political parties, dating back to 2022, when
the Sweden Democrats, a right-wing party, came in second in the popular vote. This
party, once considered extreme, but now able to leverage concessions from the traditional
parties, made it a priority to create a cultural canon that would distill
Swedish culture into a list of works and activities decided upon by a committee
appointed by the government. The underlying agenda, many felt, was to limit the
concept of Swedishness and exclude the contributions from more recent arrivals
to the country; others, especially on the right, felt it would establish criteria
for assimilating immigrants by pointing out what they needed to understand
about Sweden.
There was push-back from the cultural sector as well as from many
Swedish citizens even before the cultural canon was published. A New York Times article from May 26, 2025, quoted Ida Ölmedal, the culture editor of the
Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet:
Most of the culture world is against the idea of a canon.
. . . It’s being used as a populist tool to point out what is Swedish and not,
and to exclude some people from the concept of Swedishness.”
“But even if it wasn’t nationalist, it would still be
wrong for politicians to point out what is important culture,” Ölmedal added.
“We have a proud tradition of the government financing culture without trying
to govern culture — and this is an exception.”
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| Johan Turi |
A friend of mine in Stockholm emailed me the report with its list of the 100 items of cultural importance; she pointed out at
least one choice that would have been surprising twenty or thirty years ago. That
is the inclusion of Johan Turi’s book,
Muitalus sámiid birra, published first
in a North Sámi-Danish edition in 1910. This title, known in English first as
Turi’s
Book of Lapland and in its current translation by Thomas A. DuBois as
An Account of the Sámi, was first translated to Swedish in 1917 and reissued by
a Swedish publisher in 1987. As far as I know, it has been out of print in
Sweden for many years. The committee noted in their reason for the choice that “The
oral Sami storytelling tradition has been easy to overlook in a
writing-oriented culture such as Sweden's,” adding that, “This creates a
multifaceted whole that transcends the sharp Western boundary between realism
and magic.”
Today, Johan Turi is generally better known in Norway (he
was born there) than in Sweden, where he lived in the area around Lake
Torneträsk. But that wasn’t always the case. During his lifetime he was famous
in Stockholm and around the world, visited by well-known figures of the time. On
his eightieth birthday in 1934 he was presented with the king’s medal. Most of
his archives are in Sweden, including Nordiska Museum in
Stockholm, which holds his artwork and the original notebooks and manuscripts
of Muitalus sámiid birra, which he was encouraged to work on by his
friend, the Danish artist and ethnographer Emilie Demant Hatt. She translated his work and acted as the managing editor of the eventual book in
1910. A government agency in Uppsala, the Institute for Language and Folklore (ISOF:
Institutet för språk och
folkminnen), which studies and collects materials concerning
dialects and folklore in Sweden, has recently given more attention to Turi on
its website (only in Swedish).
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| Johan Turi on his 80th birthday |
Among the eight other authors of prose works listed in the
report are
Gosta Berling's Saga by Selma Lagerlöf,
Getting Married by
August Strindberg,
The Emigrants by Vilhelm Moberg, along with the greatest of all,
Pippi Longstocking. These classics make the inclusion of Johan Turi’s remarkable
book based on his life as a hunter, herder, artist and writer, even more interesting,
especially since Turi takes a critical view of Sweden’s treatment of his
people. The Swedish Democrats, with their emphasis on nationalism and barely
disguised contempt for Jews, immigrants, and all minorities in Sweden, don’t generally
have a positive view of past or contemporary Sámi culture.
So, in spite of the limits of the Cultural Canon of Sweden
(as many have complained, “Where’s ABBA?!”), I can only say bravo to the inclusion
of Muitalus sámiid birra. It is time.
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