Skiing an Being Swedish

Skiing and Being Swedish: Taking a Cold Look at Swedish Winter Picture Books Sports play an important role in the construction of national identities. We need only think of hockey and Canada, or football and Brazil. These are sports that are grounded in people’s living conditions, and historical self-understanding, and which symbolic value that goes beyond mere sports consumption. In Sweden skiing is such a sport. Skiing is associated with the country’s winter climate, and used to be a necessary skill for forestry, hunting and transportation in wintertime. It is also associated with historical, nationally coded events, such as Gustav Vasa’s rebellion in 1520. In modern times, it has become an important leisure time activity, as well as a popular sport. In this paper, I show how Swedish picture books over a hundred years connect skiing and Swedishness. My argument is that these picture books both reflect and create skiing as a national sport. My examples will be Elsa Beskow’s Ollie’s Ski Trip from 1907, a winter fantasy with strong nationalist connotations; further, Bertil Almqvist’s Barna Hedenhös Vinterresa [The Winter Journey of the Hedenhös Children] (1958), which rewrites the nationalist agenda as a story of technical and social progress; and finally, Tove Jansson’s comic strip Moominland Midwinter, in which she subverts some of the prevalent skiing and winter sports stereotypes