Welcome to Litsy!

"The Pure Land - About the Art of Inventing One's Ancestors" is a story about some mostly made up or third-hand Roman nonsense (Tacitus' Germania) became the basis for a national mythology that stretches all the time way into today, about the idea of Sweden as homogenous (spoiler: it never was), about how ideas of race grew into an international ideology only to be forgotten when it became politically inconvenient, even as the myths live on.

There was no chance of any photos yesterday, the sun was too bright and my eyes kept tearing up from it. On the timeline, we've reached the 1920s and Actual Nazis, so everything is very creepy. I'm hoping to finish the book tonight. Lunch: linguini alla checca from last night.

Coffee Works was all out of edible food (dryass gluten free muffins in plastic don't count) so I went to Umbria. Fell off my knee scooter (steep edge in sidewalk) and jesus fuck people, when someone says they're fine leave them afuckinglone! What could have been 15 sec of getting up and continuing became a full humiliating minute of strangers pulling at me and literally everyone staring at me looking like an incompetent cunt. So pissed.

Excuse me?! "Viktor Rydberg is today almost forgotten as a participant of the public debate and a cultural historian." I mean, it's probably because he's a hometown boy, but I've known about him since I was like ten.
Lunch: quinoa bowl

This was the part where I thought I was going to have to disagree with Hagerman - she's hinted before that's she's sceptical of the term "Viking era" and I'm of the opinion that Christianity is such a essential characteristic of the medieval period that I wasn't persuaded that "early medieval" would work. However, she offered "late iron age" instead and no arguments there at all.

Soooo our elevator is broken and I don't have access to my knee scooter. Decided to take the bus to the coffee shop and sit at a table where my ankle won't have to dangle. Soon I have to walk five stories of stairs, that'll be ~*~great fun~*~. If it's not fixed tomorrow, I swear I'll choke someone.

"Hans Hildebrand's idea was grandiose, but the essential conditions of it were faulty. /.. /(researchers) imagined that people never changed their habits, living conditions, or tools unless they were forced to. They assumed that the natural state was static and that culture, language, race, people, and land weren't changing and could be used synonymously /.. / since the "spirit of the people" was continuous. "

Hey look, Coffee Works lunch again. I worked a half day today and went home to start cleaning earlier with time to rest my foot. In-laws visiting this weekend, so probably won't have much time to myself.
Hagerman is done with Count Gobineau and have moved on to Wagner; shit is getting real. And by real I mean really terrible.

Figured you'd like to see something else than coffee, so here's some quorn pasta salad with curry dressing. Quick lunch break today.

Lunch (well, lunch dessert; I had an actual egg and potato burrito) and coffee, featuring Anders Retzius and his weirdass research of skull shape. My high school education in actual Sweden didn't touch on him, but my intro to Anthro prof in college (in the US) definitely did. Actually, I think it's partially his fault I'm reading this book. It was very hyped a few years ago in Sw, but I wouldn't have been interested if not for Dr Vaughn.

"The images from the Götic Association's exhibit were drawn in a classical style. The characters were dressed in Roman attire and even Thor wore the armor of a Roman soldier. This all tied in well with theories about Aryan-ness and hellenic-norse familial ties/.../ but today the pictures mercilessly reveal just how little knowledge really existed about pre-medieval Scandinavia in the early 1800s, prior to the advent of archeology. "

And we're back in cultural history. We've reached the romantic period, and learn that antisemitism has been a part of the theory of "the peoples of Europe" since the very beginning. Pictured: not directly related, bracteate from what is now southern Sweden, the 400s.

Coffee Works was closed! But Umbria had granitas, so win? Next, scooting to groceries. The book is back in the 1600s, when Snorri's Edda (the prose Edda) first became famous.

It's officially summer in Seattle, but my ankle is angry with the amount of walking I've been doing, so I'm scooting everywhere today. Also basically having an early dinner at Coffee Works, I'll have a salad later. And the book? Well, we're back at early German historiography.

A sunny day, past page 100 and we've finally got what we came for: details on how poor history writing by the Romans, nation building in early medieval Britain, and bad early archeology combined with racist agendas in the late 1800s and formed the weirdass racist and nazi pseudosciences of the first half of the 1900s. It's not pretty, but it's interesting. And if I wanna keep reading outside I'm going to need sunglasses.

"At the same time, the ocean between Scandinavia and Britain had probably never seen heavier traffic. The North Sea coasts were dominated by superior sailors who habitually landed wherever they felt like, ignored the right of customs, and scared people half to death." (it's talking about early Saxons, btw, not vikings for another couple of hundred years.)

Page 76 and we get to the Anglo Saxons. I admit having a leg up on most readers here due to The British History Podcast. Lunch reading again after a naan with lentils and rice that was delicious, but I forgot to photograph it.

Lunch reading since I'm not allowed to walk much yet

Today is Seafood Fest in Ballard, which means a shitton of people everywhere. But I got to have strawberry shortcake 🍓 and then I went to Coffee Works for the first time since The Surgery and read some in the partial shade.

A local nursery has a coffee shop where you can drink your coffee in a greenhouse. It would be more lovely if it was open later, had better food, and the tables weren't so sticky.

Finally ordered this off of a used bookstore website in Sweden. The title translated to "The Pure Land. About the Art of Inventing Your Ancestors" and it's about the process of creating a unified national Swedish history out of basically thin air - there are few or no historical sources stretching far enough back to say anything meaningful about early Scandinavian history, least of all the weird race stuff that popped up in the late 1800s.