VASALOPPET

Vasaloppet ("the Vasa race") is the world's oldest, longest and biggest cross-country ski race. Run since 1922 on the first Sunday in March, the route covers 90km in Sweden from Sälen to Mora. Yesterday's event had 15,800 participants, including the Crown Prince of Denmark (for the second time) and Pippa Middleton, and a couple of million watching on television. It was won by a Norwegian in a time of just over three hours and fifty minutes.

The race commemorates the flight from Sweden (albeit in the opposite direction) in 1521 of King Gustav Vasa. For most of the Middle Ages, Norway, Sweden and Denmark were united under the Danish crown. Danish sovereignty over Norway was easier, since the crown was hereditary there, whereas it was elective in both Denmark and Sweden. So much of Scandinavian history between 1000 and 1500 is the history of those pesky Swedes repeatedly trying to gain their independence. Invasion, rebellion, battles and so on.

In 1520, Christian II, who was already King of Denmark and Norway and married to the sister of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, hit on a decidedly imperial strategy for gaining the Swedish throne. Invading Sweden, he defeated the Swedes at a battle where the leading Swedish pretender was mortally wounded. The Swedes then surrendered against a promise of amnesty for all rebels. On 4 November Christian was acclaimed hereditary king in Stockholm and launched a four-day long party. On the last day, in what came to be known as the Stockholm Bloodbath, he locked the city gates, and had a large proportion of the country's nobility and churchmen beheaded in the main square. The event triggered widespread revulsion throughout Europe, not necessarily because of its brutality, but because the king had so obviously broken his word.

Unfortunately for Christian, the young noble Gustav Vasa was not in Stockholm at the time, and managed to flee the country. As one of the few remaining Swedish nobles left alive, he rallied his countrymen to his cause and founded the Vasa dynasty, which eventually wrested the throne from the Danes and put Sweden on the map as an independent country. Meanwhile, the Danish nobles tired of Christian's continued demands for money to supply troops for a fresh invasion. In 1523, the King lost his nerve and fled to the Netherlands, leaving the nobles to elect his uncle Frederik I in his place. In 1531 Christian tried to return to reclaim his throne. Tricked into coming to negotiations, he was taken prisoner and locked up in Sønderborg and Kalundborg castles for the rest of his life, eventually dying in January 1559 a few weeks after the death of Frederik's son Christian III. The Danish habit of having alternating kings called Frederik and Christian was now in full swing.

Apart from eventually leading to the Vasaloppet, the above events from Christian II's life form the backdrop to what many regard as the greatest Danish novel of the twentieth century, namely Kongens Fald ("the Fall of the King"), by Johannes V. Jensen, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1944. When I first came to Denmark and had to learn Danish, I had to read Kongens Fald, which is one of only two novels that I have ever read in Danish (the other is Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow). It's a very good book, if you ever get the chance to read it.

Walter Blotscher