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SWEDISH HABITS

Five suggestions for the next hyped Swedish lifestyle trend

Foreign media have a habit of picking up any seemingly obscure Scandinavian tradition and proclaiming it a new lifestyle trend. Now that friluftsliv, lagom and fika have all been covered, here are The Local's tips for the next strange Swedish concept to promote abroad.

Published: 25 May 2023 05:28 CEST
Updated: 24 June 2023 08:51 CEST

Five suggestions for the next hyped Swedish lifestyle trend

A student in Lund at Valborg celebrations embodying the spirit of 'supa'. Photo: Johan Nilsson/TT

We’ve all read them.

Articles in international media introducing people outside of Scandinavia to new “lifestyle trends”. It started with us being told to buy candles and fluffy slippers so we could practice hygge, then guides to decorate our homes in the supposed “style of lagom“.

Then we were told that taking a coffee break or a fika is somehow the route of Swedish happiness (to be fair, I am often happier after eating cake), given a checklist for Swedish death cleaning to get rid of clutter for future generations, and told to stand up for ourselves by practising Finnish sisu.

Now, the next big Scandinavian trend appears to be… the gökotta?

A gökotta, if you weren’t aware, is an old Swedish tradition of waking up early on Ascension Day to go and sit in a forest and try and hear a cuckoo.

I’ve lived in Sweden for a few years now and have never actually heard of anyone doing this – I think it’s only really practised by birdwatchers and churchgoers, if at all – but this hasn’t stopped various international media claiming that Swedes practise this lifestyle trend from Ascension Day to Midsummer.

With Scandinavian lifestyle trends becoming increasingly more obscure, we thought we’d provide our own examples for marketing executives and publishers everywhere to help push the Scandinavian brand abroad.

Extra points if they use letters that don’t exist in English, aren’t actually practised by anyone in Scandinavia, are not directly translatable, or are especially difficult for non-Scandinavians to pronounce.

1. The Swedish art of supa

This Swedish tradition is commonly practised by Swedes from their teenage years onwards, especially around big public holidays such as Midsummer, Easter and Christmas.

You’ll need to commit to this lifestyle trend, testing your body to its limits as you consume large amounts of alcohol – brännvin or akvavit are the most authentic choices, although any kind of alcohol will do – while you activate your brain by trying to remember the lyrics of drinking songs with increasingly incomprehensible subject matter.

The sign that you’ve encompassed the true spirit of the supa is when you find yourself in a trancelike state dancing around a maypole pretending to be a small frog with your friends and obscure relatives of your Swedish partner, who you only met a few hours previously.

You may recognise some elements of supa from your home country – there is no direct English equivalent, but a few translations could be “to drink yourself paralytic”, “to get smashed” or the more formal term “to binge drink”.

Of course, supa is not for everyone – it does result in the somewhat less aspirational states of illamående (nausea) and bakfylla (hangover) – so we won’t judge you if you’d rather give this lifestyle trend a miss.

Swedes practicing patience and zen in the queue for Systembolaget before the Easter holidays. Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT

2. Experience patience, zen and part-time teetotalism with the Systembolaget lifestyle trend

Closely related to the art of supa mentioned above, you can practise Swedish patience and restraint with the Systembolaget lifestyle trend.

By willingly subjecting yourself to the structure of opening hours, carefully crafted through years of Swedish teetotalism, you will learn discipline, patience and the stress that only those rushing to pick up a bottle of wine on their way to a party before Systembolaget closes have known.

This can be a bit difficult in other countries which do not have a state-owned alcohol monopoly, but to get into the Systembolaget spirit if you live abroad, you just need to not buy alcohol between the hours of 10am and 7pm on weekdays or 10pm and 3pm on Saturdays.

What about Sundays, you may be wondering? Well, true observers of the Systembolaget lifestyle abstain completely from buying alcohol on Sundays and public holidays.

You can even brush up on your anger management skills as you attempt to buy a few beers or a bottle of wine on an obscure public holiday like Epiphany, Ascension Day or All Saints’ Day, or when you forget your ID ten minutes before closing and the cashier refuses to serve you, despite the fact you’re well into your 30s.

Finally, relish the opportunity to develop your skills of innovation and ingenuity as you find yourself in the kitchen on a Sunday making a recipe which calls for a glass of wine, only to discover that you forgot to pick some up at Systembolaget before it closed the day before.

A passive-aggressive note in its natural habitat, the laundry room. (“Whoever washed their clothes last night: clean up after yourself!”) Photo: Mats Andersson/Scanpix/TT

3. Tap in to the Swedish tradition of konflikträdsla

Another Swedish tradition ready for export is the lifestyle trend of konflikträdsla, or “fear of conflict”.

To get into the konflikträdsla spirit yourself, wait until your neighbour does something annoying. Are they holding a loud party and haven’t turned their music down one minute past curfew? Do they smoke on their balcony? Your first instinct may be to address the issue with them directly, but this is not the Swedish way.

Use this instead as an opportunity to tap into your most primal emotions such as anger, irritation and exasperation, then, instead of releasing this buildup of emotion in an angry outburst, use the ancient art of letter-writing to channel your feelings into arga lappar (angry notes) directed at the object of your fury instead.

The best way of experiencing arga lappar in the wild is to visit your closest laundry room or tvättstuga, use the tumble drier and neglect to remove the dryer lint. You may need to do this a few times, but after a few weeks you’ll soon find a note framed as a friendly reminder (which is probably not all that friendly) by an exasperated neighbour who you have driven to quiet but maddening rage with your actions.

A word of warning, though. Your neighbours will hold a grudge if you do this and they are unlikely to ever forgive you, so this should not be attempted if you ever want to be in their good books again.

A Swedish apartment stairwell as it should be… empty. Photo: Christine Olsson/TT

4. Hone your sense of perception in your Swedish apartment stairwell

If you have managed to irritate your neighbours to the point of them putting up arga lappar directed at you, this next Swedish lifestyle skill could be a good one to learn.

This lifestyle trend is the skill of avoidance, undvikandet, the Swedish art of doing everything possible to avoid having to greet your neighbours in the stairwell or, indeed, acknowledging their existence in any way.

Use undvikandet as a chance to heighten your senses of sound and sight to near-superhuman levels, as you become an expert at identifying movement in your building’s stairwell before you leave your apartment.

Before you learned the skill of undvikandet, you may have just left the apartment whenever you felt like it, regularly alarming your Swedish neighbours by acknowledging their existence with a hej hej as you passed by.

Now you carefully look out of your door’s peephole before venturing into the unknown, listening out for footsteps on the stairs before opening your door so you time your departure to avoid any unexpected ambushes.

Happy Friday! Time to eat so much sugar you feel sick, then avoid the stuff for another week. Photo: Johan Nilsson/TT

5. Indulge yourself with the Swedish art of fredagsmys

Our final Swedish lifestyle trend will help you gain control over your instincts and desires, improving your willpower as you practise restraint for five days a week by avoiding sweets or unhealthy snacks, only to give in to your primal urges and eat a week’s worth of unhealthy food in one sitting come Friday.

Akin to intermittent fasting, you can eat virtuously from Sunday to Thursday, then buy the largest bags of snacks or pick and mix you can find on a Friday evening and feast (frossa) on them until you go to bed on Saturday.

Sure, any dietary benefits throughout the week may be outweighed by giving into your hedonic urges when the weekend rolls around, but don’t let that stop you.

Member comments

Andrea - 26 May 2023 at 16:35 CEST

Lovely article Becky! 😀
I hope the compoundwordthing will not be the next scandiswedishlifestyletrend

Become a Member to leave a comment.

The Swede, the Dane and the Norwegian: who's the butt of Nordic jokes?

In Sweden, they’re Norgehistorier (“Norway stories”), in Norway Svenskevitser (“Swede jokes”). The Danes tend to reserve their Aarhus-vittigheder for people from the country’s second biggest city.

These jokes are the equivalent of Irishman jokes in England or Polish jokes in the US. Indeed, they’re very often the exact same jokes with just the nationality changed.

According to the Swedish folklorist Bengt af Klintberg, rather than having roots deep in history, these particular jokes are of a surprisingly recent vintage, the relic of a trend that swept the world in the 1970s.

“This was an international joke fad that started actually in America,” he told The Local. “The American ‘Polack jokes’ spread to Europe, and in England, they were talking about Irishmen, in France, Belgians, and in Germany, about people from Austria. Very often the neighbouring country is accused of being stupid, and both the jokers and the the victims know that this is not true. You should not take them seriously.”

Who do Europeans joke about the most?
– pic.twitter.com/aDfbnLt9X9

— Amazing Maps (@Amazing_Maps) October 26, 2016

The joke war

When these jokes started becoming popular in the early 1970s, tabloid newspapers picked up on the fad, with the Expressen newspaper reporting at the start of 1975 that “all the jokes now are about crazy Norwegians”, and printing a number of examples.

Norway’s Verdens Gang (VG) tabloid responded by asking readers to send in jokes about Sweden, and Expressen hit back by declaring a so-called Vitsekriget.

“They called it a ‘joke war’ between Sweden and Norway,” af Klintberg remembers. “Everybody felt it was quite all right to tell jokes about stupid Swedes and stupid Norwegians, because we all knew that we are neighbours and we like each other, and that this was just some sort of teasing.”

It was a high-profile, if short-lived, cultural phenomenon.

VG collaborated with Expressen to have its readers’ Svenskevitser published in Sweden. Expressen collected a list of 1,000 Norgehistorier which it sent to be archived by the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, while the equivalent museum in Norway archived 300 Svenskevitser.

On May 30th, 1975, Arve Opsahl, the Norwegian actor and comedian appointed as “general” to lead the Norwegian side, signed a peace agreement with the comedian Jan “Moltas” Erikson, who represented the Swedes, officially ending the hostilities.

The jokes, however, lived on. While perhaps not as common as they were in their heyday, schoolchildren in both countries still learn them, and you can find online lists of Norgehistorier and Svenskevitser, and children’s books full of favourites (see here and here).

The Swedish folklorist and artist Bengt af Klintberg. Photo: Atlantis Bokförlag

Examples of Svenskevitser

Here are some examples of (typically quite unfunny) Svenskevitser and Norgehistorier, with an English translation.

Hvorfor har svenskene med seg en bildør i ørkenen?

slik at de kan åpne vindue viss det blir varmt.

Why do Swedes always take a car door into the desert?

So that they can wind down the window if it gets too hot.

Det var en gang en svenske som var ute og kjørte bil da en nyhetssending kom på radioen.

Reporteren: Vi melder om at en bil kjører mot kjøreretningen på E6 i nord-gående retning.

Svensken: ÉN?! Det er jo flere hundre av dem!

There was once a Swede out driving a car when there was a warning sent out on the radio: We are warning that there is a car driving in the wrong direction on the E6 in a northbound direction.

One? exclaimed the Swede. “There are bloody hundreds of them!”

Examples of Norgehistorier

Vad kallas smarta personer i Norge? Turister

What are clever people called in Norway? Tourists.

Två norska poliser hittade en död man framför en Peugeot

Hur stavar man till Peugeot?

Jag har ingen aning. Vi lägger honom framför en Fiat i stället!

Two Norwegian policeman found a dead man in front of a Peugeot.

“How do you spell Peugeot?” says one.

“No idea,” says the other. “Let’s leave him in front of a Fiat instead.”

The Swede, the Dane, and the Norwegian

There’s a variety which combines all three Scandinavian nationalities, a little like the “Englishman, Irishman and a Scotsman” jokes popular in the UK, with the Norwegian the butt of the joke in Sweden and the Swede in Norway.

Sometimes these, like other Norgehistorier or Svenskevitser, settle with characterising the neighbouring country as stupid, like this one:

Det var en gang at en svenske, danske og en nordmann var ute i skogen og gikk tur. Nordmannen var døv, dansken var blind og svensken var lam fra livet og ned og satt i rullestol. Etter en stund kom de til en magisk grotte i skogen, der hver og en av dem kunne få oppfylt ett ønske. Først gikk nordmannen inn. Etter en stund kom han ut og utbrøt lykkelig: “Gutter, jeg kan høre!” Etter ham gikk dansken inn og kom ut like fornøyd: “Gutter, jeg kan se!” Sist men ikke minst trillet svensken inn. Etter en stund kom han ut og ropte: “Kolla grabbar, nya hjul!”

A Swede, a Dane and Norwegian were out hiking in the woods. The Norwegian was deaf, the Dane blind and the Swede disabled and in a wheelchair. They came to a magical cave where each of them could make one wish. First the Norwegian went in. “Lads, I can hear!” he exclaimed. Then the Dane. “Lads, I can see!” Then finally, in went the Swede. After a while he came out and shouted. “Look guys, new wheels!”

But they can also sometimes refer to national stereotypes, such as this one, which is used in the introduction of Joking Relationships and National Identity in Scandinavia, an article on Scandinavian jokes published by Copenhagen University sociologist Peter Grundelach.

“Two Danes, two Finns, two Norwegians, and two Swedes are shipwrecked and cast upon a deserted island. By the time they are rescued the Danes have formed a co-operative, the Finns have chopped down all the trees, the Norwegians have built a fishing boat, and the Swedes are waiting to be introduced.”

Grundelach took the joke from The Scandinavians, a book by Time Magazine correspondent Donald S Connery, who explains the joke (which shows signs of Danish origin) as follows:

“Among the Scandinavians themselves…it is popularly held that the Danes are fun-loving, easygoing, shallow, shrewd, not altogether sincere and not inclined to too much exertion; the Norwegians are sturdy, brave, but a little too simple and unsophisticated…the Swedes are clever, capable, reliable, but much too formal, success-ridden and neurotic.”

Jokes on real national stereotypes

The Scandinavians was published in 1966, so that joke predates the Joke War by nearly ten years, and according to af Klintberg, the relatively few jokes Scandinavians made about each other before this time tended to build on stereotypes, such as that Norwegians are ridiculously nationalistic (which annoyed the Swedes and Danes, who had both controlled Norway in the past), Danes are workshy and pleasure-seeking, and Swedes are uptight and moralistic.

“They dislike the Swedish for being the big brother in the Scandinavian context and also that always try to be a moral example,” af Klintberg says about the Danes. Swedes on the other hand, he adds, tend to slightly envy the Danes for being more fun-loving.

“We talk about ‘the Danish smile’, det danske smil,” he said. “And this shows that the Swedes sometimes would like to be a little more like the Danes, who do not take alcohol as seriously as we do.”

On the other hand, Danes, with their more continental habits of alcohol consumption, once laughed at Swedes for rolling about drunkenly after coming off the boat from Malmö or Helsingborg.

“What’s the difference between Swedes and mosquitoes?” goes a Danish joke Grundelach cites in his article. “Mosquitoes are only annoying in the summertime.”

Danes and Swedes’ jokes about the Norwegians tend to revolve around their excessive national pride, and also around their simplistic, literalistic use of language.

“A joke that was told already at the turn of the last century is about a Norwegian who comes to Copenhagen and looks at the Rundetårn [a famous round tower in the city], and he walks around it and then says: ‘In Norway, we have towers that are much rounder’,” af Klintberg reports.

Literalistic language

Finally, both Danes and Swedes joke about what they see as the overly literalistic compound words which they imagine exist in Norwegian, with a collection of words in skämtnorska, or joke Norwegian, sometimes expressed in joke form, such as this Danish example, which literally translates the lim in Limfjord, the fjord in northern Jutland as “glue”:

Hvad kalder nordmændende Limfjorden? Klisterkanalen.

“What do the Norwegians call the Limfjord? The glue canal.”

Danes and Swedes both like to claim tongue-in-cheek that the Norwegian word for shark is kjempetorsk, which means “giant cod”, or that the word for “popcorn” is eksploderende majs, literally “exploding maize”.

For af Klintberg, this is a way to hit back at the efforts writers such as Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson made at the end of the 19th century to establish Norwegian as a literary language separate from Danish.

“There has been a language war in Norway. The goal was to have a real Norwegian language, not a language that was a kind of dialect of Danish.”

So, finally, why does no one joke about the Danes?

In his article, Grundelach, points out the strange asymmetry in Scandinavian humour, that while the Norwegians and Swedes joke about each other, and the Danes a little about both Swedes and Norwegians, no one seems to joke much about the Danes.

As a Dane, he could have argued that his own people were more respected or liked. But he instead comes to the opposite conclusion, citing a survey from 1990 showing that Norwegians and Swedes tended to prefer one another to the Danes.

“These data indicate that Norwegians and Swedes feel mutually closer than they do to the Danes, and this may at least partially explain the reciprocal (symmetrical) nature of the joke-telling between the two countries,” he explains. “Denmark seems to be a less significant country for the other two nations, which may explain why there are few jokes about the Danes.”

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