Uppsala: Myth, History and Memory

The historical and mythic layers surrounding Eline’s story in Uppsala.

Bergen hides secrets beneath timber, harbour water and stone.

Uppsala keeps them in memory.

In The Wolf and the Snow, fourteen-year-old Eline arrives in Sweden after the disappearance of her father and younger brother. Her mother, Anna, sends her to St. Agnes, an old boarding school in Uppsala, hoping distance and anonymity will keep her alive.

Instead, the city begins to tell Eline who she is.

It happens through books.

Through chess.

Through stories dismissed as mythology.

Through teachers who remember people Eline has never met.

Through a white owl.

Through an old photograph in which her mother appears impossibly young.

And through a university city where the Christian, scholarly and pagan pasts of Scandinavia occupy the same landscape.

Few places could suit Eline better.

Uppsala has been a centre of religion, royal power and scholarship for centuries. Its cathedral dominates the modern city. Its university, founded in 1477, is the oldest in Sweden. Carolina Rediviva preserves generations of manuscripts and books. A few kilometres to the north, the great burial mounds of Gamla Uppsala rise from a landscape associated for centuries with ancient kings, sacrifice and the gods of the old Norse world.

In 1931, a girl could move between all of them.

For Eline, that geography becomes personal.

She has been sent to Uppsala to escape her family's past.

Instead, she enters a city built upon it.

The Uppsala Eline enters is neither medieval nor entirely modern.

Electricity, automobiles, bicycles and cinemas belong to everyday life. Streets are paved. University students move through the city between lectures, libraries, cafés and the traditional student nations. Yet church bells still organize time, ancient buildings remain part of daily experience and academic customs inherited from earlier centuries continue to shape university life.

Photographs from around 1930 show broad cobbled streets beneath tram wires, pedestrians in long coats and hats, bicycles leaning against buildings and the cathedral towers rising over a city that still feels compact enough to cross on foot.

Uppsala University had already existed for more than 450 years.

Between 1880 and 1945, the university expanded from roughly 1,500 to 4,500 students. New disciplines appeared, scientific research grew and the institution increasingly occupied the physical city through new laboratories, lecture halls and libraries.

Women were also becoming more visible within Swedish academic life.

Women had first entered Swedish universities in the nineteenth century, and by 1925 they had obtained the same legal access to university education as men. By 1931, female students were therefore an established presence in Uppsala, even if academic institutions still reflected generations of male dominance.

The city retained its peculiar traditions.

One of the most characteristic was the academic quarter. A lecture announced for ten o'clock traditionally began at quarter past. The custom was associated with an older Uppsala in which students lived close enough to the cathedral to hear the bells and begin walking when the hour struck.

That small detail captures something important about Eline's Uppsala.

Time moves forward.

Memory remains.

St. Agnes is fictional.

It belongs to the world of The Wolf and the Snow, rather than to the historical city.

Yet placing it in Uppsala allows Eline's school life to exist beside one of Scandinavia's great centres of learning.

She arrives frightened, separated from her mother and carrying a protective amulet. Her father Arne and younger brother Branka have been taken by the Broderskap. Anna has sent Eline away because remaining close to the family has become dangerous. At St. Agnes she meets Nora, her roommate, and through her becomes friends with Nils and Kasper.

For a short time, Eline can pretend her problems are ordinary ones.

Classes.

Rules.

Dormitories.

Teachers.

Friendships.

Bullies.

Then there is Sansa Thorson.

Wealthy, arrogant and accustomed to controlling the students around her, Sansa becomes Eline's immediate antagonist. Their hostility begins as a school rivalry, but Eline eventually learns that Sansa's family name may conceal something older.

There is also Miss Lindt.

She teaches history and science.

She seems to understand far more about the ancient gods than a schoolteacher should.

And wherever she appears, a white owl never seems far away.

St. Agnes is supposed to hide Eline from the secret world.

Instead, that world has followed her into the classroom.

Max learns by doing.

Thorvald sends him into snow, forest, rivers and danger. Max must learn to track, shoot, endure cold and listen to the landscape.

Eline learns differently.

She reads.

Questions.

Argues.

Observes patterns.

Remembers contradictions.

That makes Uppsala ideal for her.

For centuries, the city had accumulated knowledge in physical form.

Books.

Manuscripts.

Scientific collections.

Archives.

Church records.

Maps.

Objects.

Portraits.

Academic traditions.

Each generation added another layer.

The university itself expanded during the nineteenth century with buildings including Carolina Rediviva, the Observatory, Chemicum and the new University Main Building. By Eline's time, Uppsala had become one of the intellectual centres of Scandinavia while remaining physically surrounded by evidence of much older worlds.

Eline's problem is that the knowledge she needs does not fit comfortably inside academic categories.

The textbooks speak of mythology.

Anna speaks as though some myths describe history.

The Eddas provide fragments.

Miss Lindt suggests that fragments may be all outsiders were ever allowed to keep.

For Eline, research becomes more than curiosity.

It becomes survival.

Carolina Rediviva stands at the top of Carolina Hill.

The present building opened as the university library in 1841. Its name means, roughly, “the revived Carolina,” recalling an earlier university building that had disappeared. During the nineteenth century the library was rebuilt and expanded, and reading rooms were created as its collections grew.

By 1931 it represented something powerful.

Knowledge preserved beyond the lives of the people who created it.

A manuscript could survive a king.

A letter could survive a family.

A book could preserve a belief centuries after the culture around it had changed.

That is exactly what Eline needs.

In The Wolf and the Snow, she enters the University Library with Nora, Nils and Kasper searching for evidence concerning divine bloodlines. There she discovers The Lost Lineages: Divine Blood on Earth, a fictional volume suggesting that descendants of the old gods may still exist among ordinary human beings.

The search is frustrating because Eline wants certainty.

Libraries rarely provide it.

Books disagree.

Sources contradict one another.

Important material is restricted.

Fragments survive without context.

This mirrors Eline's own family.

She has inherited pieces.

Anna's stories.

Her own visions.

A strange teacher.

A name.

An amulet.

The ability to see moves before they happen.

What she lacks is the explanation joining them together.

The library becomes another form of labyrinth.

Max enters caves.

Eline enters archives.

Uppsala Cathedral dominates the skyline.

For centuries it has been one of the great religious buildings of Sweden, associated with archbishops, royal ceremonies, scholars and the dead.

The city Eline sees in 1931 carries an especially immediate connection to the cathedral.

That year, Archbishop Nathan Söderblom died.

Söderblom had served as Archbishop of Uppsala since 1914 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1930. When he died in 1931, an extraordinary exception was made to a custom already more than a century old: he was buried inside the cathedral, in the high choir.

So during the precise year of Eline's story, Uppsala's past is still being physically added to.

The dead continue entering the memory of the city.

Kings lie there.

Scientists lie there.

Carl Linnaeus lies there.

Now Söderblom joins them.

For Eline, the cathedral represents the Sweden that replaced an older religious landscape.

But that older landscape has not vanished.

It lies only a short distance north.

Before modern Uppsala became a university city, another Uppsala existed.

Gamla Uppsala.

Old Uppsala.

Its monumental burial mounds dominate the landscape and have inspired stories for centuries.

The site was one of the great political and religious centres of Iron Age Scandinavia. The enormous mounds are associated with elite cremation burials dating broadly to the sixth and seventh centuries. Later tradition connected them with legendary Swedish rulers and with the gods themselves.

That tension between archaeology and mythology is central to Eline's story.

People once looked at the mounds and told stories about Odin, Thor and Freyr.

Archaeologists excavated them and found human burials.

The gods disappeared from the historical explanation.

The stories survived.

For Eline, that raises the question that follows her throughout Uppsala:

What does it mean when archaeology disproves one explanation but cannot erase the memory attached to a place?

A mound can contain a human king.

A legend can still remember a god.

Both facts can survive for centuries.

Gamla Uppsala is also associated with one of the most famous descriptions of pre-Christian Scandinavian religion.

In the eleventh century, Adam of Bremen wrote of a magnificent pagan sanctuary at Uppsala where Thor, Odin and Freyr were worshipped.

His description has shaped European ideas about pagan Uppsala ever since.

Yet Adam never visited the sanctuary himself.

He wrote as a Christian chronicler relying on information provided by others.

That matters.

His account is evidence.

It is not a photograph.

Historians and archaeologists therefore distinguish between what can be demonstrated about Gamla Uppsala as an important political and religious centre and the much harder question of exactly what kind of temple existed there, where it stood and how closely Adam's description reflected reality.

For historical fantasy, that uncertainty is valuable.

Archaeology tells us that Gamla Uppsala mattered.

Medieval testimony tells us that people remembered a great sanctuary.

Tradition fills the landscape with gods.

The gaps remain.

And gaps are where stories enter.

For Eline, one name matters more than the others.

Freyr.

Ancient tradition associates Gamla Uppsala particularly strongly with him.

Freyr belongs to the Vanir.

So does Freyja.

Within the mythology of The Wolf and the Snow, Eline's family descends from that older divine lineage. Anna possesses powerful seiðr, and Eline has grown up knowing that her mother can perceive things hidden from ordinary people. Yet Eline believes for much of her childhood that she has inherited little or nothing of Anna's gift.

That uncertainty becomes one of her deepest insecurities.

Anna is powerful.

Eline is clever.

For a fourteen-year-old girl, those can feel like entirely different things.

Then Olaf puts a chessboard in front of her.

Olaf is the caretaker at St. Agnes.

He is also a former chess champion.

Eline meets him because Miss Barnett throws her out of geography class after Eline becomes lost in a vision of Max and Thorvald in the North. Her punishment is to help Olaf with work around the school.

Then they play chess.

Eline beats him.

The victory itself is impressive.

The way she achieves it disturbs Olaf.

Eline does not calculate like an experienced player.

She anticipates.

She sees possibilities developing before they occur.

She knows which paths will collapse and which will remain open.

Olaf recognizes the ability as seiðr.

Later, during a regional chess competition, Sansa attempts to prevent Eline from participating because of her age.

Olaf proposes another test.

Three opponents.

Three boards.

Twenty minutes.

Eline enters the strange state she has begun to recognize. The pieces stop being pieces. Possibilities divide around her. Every move creates another future.

She defeats all three players.

The moment changes how Eline understands herself.

She has inherited Anna's gift.

It simply expresses itself differently.

Anna sees through seiðr.

Eline anticipates.

Max descends through the roots of the world to perceive where an arrow must travel.

Eline watches futures branch across sixty-four squares.

Two descendants of the same hidden world.

Two different ways of seeing.

Miss Lindt understands this before Eline does.

During her lessons she teaches an unusual version of the ancient conflict between Vanir and Æsir — a history far more detailed than anything Eline finds in ordinary books.

Eline becomes suspicious.

The standard texts feel incomplete.

Miss Lindt's version feels remembered.

That distinction draws Eline deeper into the past.

At the same time, Sansa's surname begins to matter.

Thorson.

A name tied to Thor.

Nils reveals it during Eline's investigations, and Eline begins to suspect that her school enemy may belong to an Æsir bloodline.

Suddenly the adolescent conflict changes scale.

Sansa may still be cruel, vain and vindictive.

But those qualities are no longer the whole story.

A quarrel between girls may be sitting on top of a conflict that began before either of them was born.

That is one of Uppsala's recurring patterns.

The ordinary world remains visible.

The ancient one keeps showing through.

Within St. Agnes, Eline and her friends also create their own geography.

The Club of the Veiled Stars occupies a hidden space filled with old objects, books, pictures and telescopes.

It is fictional.

Its function within Eline's story is crucial.

The club gives her something Max already possesses in another form: a place beyond adult control.

Max has the forest.

Eline has an attic filled with forgotten things.

From there the students look toward the stars while Eline searches backward through time.

The symbolism is deliberate.

Astronomy and mythology share the sky.

Modern science studies stars whose constellations still carry ancient names.

Cultures can abandon gods and continue speaking their names every night.

During one visit, Eline tells Nora the story of Baldr, Höðr, Loki and the fatal mistletoe. Then she finds an old book written in runes.

Inside it is a letter.

From Anna.

The past is no longer something Eline is researching.

It is communicating with her.

The most dangerous evidence Eline finds is not runic.

It is photographic.

Eline, Nora, Nils and Kasper cycle through the snowy city to a pub called Den Gamla Eken — the Old Oak.

The establishment is fictional.

Johan, its owner, is fictional.

But what Eline finds there changes her understanding of the past more effectively than any mythological manuscript.

A photograph.

Her mother is in it.

So is Thorvald.

So is a younger Johan.

And beside them stands another woman.

Bergdis.

Eline looks at the photograph and recognizes Miss Lindt.

The problem is time.

Johan has aged.

Anna and Bergdis seem almost untouched by it.

The evidence is simple enough for a child to understand.

Photographs record faces.

Faces age.

These have not.

Myth can be dismissed.

A family story can be exaggerated.

A vision can be doubted.

A photograph is harder to explain away.

For Eline, Uppsala's great theme suddenly becomes personal.

Memory has acquired a face.

And the face is still alive.

After the visit to Den Gamla Eken, Eline's suspicion becomes difficult to contain.

Miss Lindt may be Bergdis.

Bergdis knew Anna.

She knew Thorvald.

She appears in a photograph taken long before Eline arrived in Uppsala.

And she seems to have aged far less than Johan.

Then there is the owl.

Again and again, the white bird appears near moments of danger or revelation.

After Eline and Nora survive an attack following their night in the city, Eline remembers a mysterious woman carrying a runic staff.

When Miss Lindt disappears afterward, Eline uses her growing ability to search through the owl and senses Bergdis somewhere charged with ancient power.

By this point, St. Agnes has ceased to function as refuge.

It has become another node in the hidden war.

Yet Bergdis occupies a more ambiguous position than a simple protector.

She knows things.

She withholds things.

She guides Eline while refusing to give her every answer.

That makes her useful to Eline's development.

Knowledge handed to Eline would solve the mystery.

Knowledge withheld forces her to become the person capable of finding it.

The mythology surrounding Eline is not invented from nothing.

The names are old.

Odin.

Thor.

Freyr.

Freyja.

Baldr.

Loki.

Yggdrasil.

The Vanir.

The Æsir.

They survive through medieval texts written after Scandinavia had largely converted to Christianity.

That creates an unavoidable problem.

Much of what modern readers know about Norse mythology comes through authors recording a religious world that was already disappearing or had disappeared.

What survives is incomplete.

Sometimes contradictory.

Often filtered through Christian writers.

For a historian, that means caution.

For Eline, it means something else.

She begins to wonder whether incompleteness was accidental.

Within The Wolf and the Snow, myth is fragmented because human history has lost access to the full story.

Anna remembers more.

Bergdis remembers more.

The Broderskap remembers enough to kill for it.

And Eline is slowly learning that blood can preserve knowledge books have forgotten.

The distinction remains important.

Uppsala University is real.

It was founded in 1477 and had already shaped Swedish intellectual life for centuries by 1931.

Carolina Rediviva is real.

It has served as the university library since 1841.

Uppsala Cathedral is real.

Nathan Söderblom really was buried there in 1931.

Gamla Uppsala and its great burial mounds are real.

So is the archaeological evidence for an important Iron Age centre of power and religion.

The medieval traditions surrounding pagan worship at Uppsala are real historical sources, even where their details remain uncertain.

St. Agnes is fictional.

The Club of the Veiled Stars is fictional.

Den Gamla Eken is fictional.

Olaf, Nora, Nils, Kasper, Sansa and Bergdis belong to the novel.

The Lost Lineages: Divine Blood on Earth is fictional.

The surviving Vanir and Æsir bloodlines are fictional.

The Broderskap is fictional.

But the world in which those inventions are placed already possesses extraordinary historical depth.

That is where the fiction takes root.

Max's story strips things away from him.

Home.

Family.

Comfort.

Certainty.

The North reduces his world until he has to discover what remains inside him.

Eline's journey works differently.

Uppsala gives her pieces.

A teacher.

A chessboard.

A library.

A forbidden book.

A name.

A photograph.

A white owl.

A letter.

Each answer creates another question.

Each piece enlarges the world.

By 1931, Uppsala had spent centuries preserving memory.

Pagan burial mounds survived beside a Christian city.

Medieval traditions survived inside a modern university.

Books preserved the voices of people who had been dead for generations.

Students followed customs whose origins many of them could no longer explain.

Even the bells still carried traces of an older academic rhythm through the streets.

Eline enters that city believing she has been sent there to hide.

She is actually learning to remember.

Some things survive as history.

Some survive as myth.

Some survive as names.

Some survive in photographs.

And in The Wolf and the Snow, some memories survive another way.

Through blood.

Through the Vanir.

Through a fourteen-year-old girl staring at a chessboard and seeing the next move before anyone else has made it.

Max finds the old world beneath the snow.

Eline finds it inside memory.

And in Uppsala, memory is everywhere.