9

KNOW THYSELF

There is something about Skansen, the world’s oldest open-air museum, in Stockholm. Inside the gates time moves at a different pace, the hours are stretched into long, almost endless periods, and chronology ceases to exist. Even though the walls to the outside world aren’t particularly high, Skansen appears to be a separate space, a world within the world and yet separated from the world at the same time. A parenthesis where multiple layers of time exist simultaneously and therefore there is no actual time at all.

Perhaps that was the plan. The founder, Artur Hazelius, was never really interested in the order of events, but seemed to prefer a geographical principle when placing rune-stones and buildings from the eighteenth century next to each other. Skåne’s cultural heritage was laid in the southwest and the Sami cultural heritage in the northwest; in the middle, he’d put Dalarna. Everything and everybody were welcome at Artur Hazelius’ open-air museum — except time. And if time happened to enter, it must be stopped.

Ideas are often inherited from one generation to the next. This was especially true in the Hazelius family. Artur Hazelius’ father was an army officer, who founded schools for military education and wrote books about artillery and fortification. His wish was to contribute to Swedish culture, making it richer and more vital. Together with his close friend, the writer Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, he went on long walks, discussing the ideal beauty of the simple country life. He and his friend were also involved in an influential patriotic association, where young men fulfilled ‘the spirit of old Sweden’. Thus, the ideals that would lead to the creation of Skansen were introduced to Artur Hazelius at an early age. For his upbringing, his father sent him to different parts of the Swedish countryside in order to get to know the customs and the nature. Artur Hazelius became interested in folk traditions and learned how to weave. To him, the life of a farmer seemed to symbolise everything that was noble and exalted: proximity to the earth and a life in harmony with the divine nature. In Hazelius’ vocabulary, it could all be summarised in a single word: Swedishness.

After studying at university and then writing popular nationalist children’s books, Artur Hazelius took time out. For two years he did nothing but ask himself what to do with his life. Where could he leave a patriotic mark on the world? Should he become an archaeologist? Should he devote himself to erecting rune stones? Meanwhile his wife had to let some rooms in their home in order to keep the household running.

One thing worried him more than anything else: industrialisation. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. During a trip to the landscape of Dalarna he had witnessed the old life disappearing. Nature’s beauty was ruined when workshops and industries were built; traditions were exchanged for consumption when the farmers became rich. Everything he knew and loved seemed to change: the way people dressed, what they ate, even how they viewed religion. And that’s when he found the purpose of his life. He would save the past from the future. Clothing, furniture, tools, paintings, music, dances, words, traditions, the lot, were to be collected and preserved.

Being a collector as such was not a novelty. The original part of his idea concerned what to collect. Hazelius yearned for stuff which was considered insignificant and common. The ideas planted in him by his father and the writer Almqvist were now fully grown into a life’s task.

Artur Hazelius took the motto ‘Know thyself’ and got down to work. He travelled around Sweden, bought things, and took them to Stockholm; thousands of things, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Soon, he had over a million items in his collection, which became so wild and unsorted that he created a foundation to build a museum where it all could be kept. Nordiska Museet (The Nordic Museum) in Stockholm is the result.

For 25,000 Swedish krona, he bought some land on the Skansenhill next to the museum, and started to build roads, clean ponds, and plant trees. He bought all the land he possibly could, using his own money and donations. He then bought buildings, one from the south of Sweden, another from the western part, a Sami summer residence from the north, and placed them here and there in his open-air museum to be.

The houses would look neatly authentic indoors, but outside no attempt was made to recreate the landscape where they once stood. A parenthesis was created, where he built a world of his own. Friends contributed to the collection during their travels in the country. Hazelius occasionally sent them small sums of money along with detailed instructions for their purchases.

Skansen opened in 1891 and quickly became popular. Particularly enticing were the many festivals that Hazelius invented, like celebrating the national day on 6 June or Saint Lucia’s Day on 13 December (the latter a treat still given to every Nobel prize laureate as a part of receiving the prize in Stockholm). Most Swedes believe these to be ancient customs, but they were actually born out of Artur Hazelius’ imagination. At a time when the ideal of enlightenment and rationality gave way to the romantic focus on emotions and a general longing for national affinity, he provided a collective identity based on cultural heritage.

His motto, ‘Know thyself’, was once displayed at the entrance to the temple of Apollo where the oracle in Delphi spoke her advice. Originally, it may have been even older, taken from grave scriptures in ancient Egypt. The words became the motto of Socrates, they were used by Plato, and then reached the Romans who translated them into Nosce Te Ipsum. In the seventeenth century, the proverb was used by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, Carl Linnaeus wrote it in the first edition of Systema Naturæ, US President Benjamin Franklin quoted it in 1750, the French author Jean-Jacques Rousseau referred to it — and then there’s Artur Hazelius.

Today Skansen is on the very top of the tourist list of Stockholm’s attractions. Its web site states: ‘At Skansen, you can discover Sweden’s history and find out how Swedes once lived according to the changing seasons, through the customs and traditions, work, celebrations and everyday life of times gone by.’

Hazelius wanted the people of Sweden to know themselves through their history. Fair enough. He chose a moment in time, before industrialisation, and called it The Past. He then dressed it in folk costumes and furnished it with looms and haybales. He fabricated traditions and gave Sweden a life it had never had. And there you have it: Skansen — a living picture book beyond time and space, a fragment of time reborn as a universe.