Consolidation of Sweden

The consolidation of Sweden was a long process during which the loosely organized social system consolidated under the power of the king. The actual age of the Swedish kingdom is unknown. Also, for various reasons, scholars differ in characterizing early Sweden as a country, state or kingdom by definition.

Unlike the history of Norway and Denmark, there is no agreement on a reliable date for a unified Sweden. Historians judge differently the sources for the history of Sweden's consolidation. The earliest history blends with Norse mythology. Early primary sources are foreign; secondary sources were written at a later date.

Based on the origins of the name of the kingdom as meaning (Kingdom of the Suiones) and a brief section in the Roman historian Tacitus, who described the early social system with several tribes, some historians have sometimes argued that Sweden was unified when the Swedes (Suiones) first solidified their control over the regions they were living in. This would imply that a Swedish/Suionic kingdom would have existed in the 1st to second centuries AD. However, with the increased rigour of historical method advanced in 20th century historical research, in Sweden as elsewhere, historians such as Curt Weibull maintained that these perspectives have become obsolete. Modern historians noted that a millennium had passed between Tacitus and more in-depth and reliable documented accounts (or notices of contemporary events relating to Sweden by Frankish and German writers) of Swedish history. The work of Birger Nerman (1925), who argued that Sweden held a senior rank among the existing European states at the time represents a nationalist reaction to the academic historiography, the latter taking a critical and/or cautious view of the value of old layers of sources of history especially if these documents and traditions are unsupported by any direct traces, any footprint of events and social or political conditions in the archaeological records, buildings, coinage etc. of the age in question.

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