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The history of Geography in Sweden.

Article Excerpt
By Northern Lights: On the Making of Geography in Sweden. By ANNE BUTTIMER and Tom MELS. xix and 214 pp.; ills., bibliog., index. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2006. $99.95 (cloth), ISBN 075468114.

Although neither Anne Buttimer nor Tom Mels is originally from Sweden, both have spent more than a decade there and are prominent members of Sweden's geographical community. Anne Buttimer, former chair of geography at University College, Dublin, Ireland, and former president of the International Geographical Union, has had close connections with Lund University since the early 1970s. During the 1970s and 1980s she held various positions at Lund, including as a Fulbright fellow and a researcher with the Swedish Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The association of Tom Mels, originally from Utrecht, Netherlands, is more recent. He completed his doctorate in geography at Lund in 1999, and since then he has been on the faculty of Sweden's Kalmar University. Given the authors' shared non-Swedish origins and outlooks, as well as their immersion in the world of Swedish academia, they offer a rare outsider/insider look at the development of Swedish geography.

Buttimer originally began this project in the 1980s, but only recently, with Mels's collaboration, was it completed. Mels' contributions include finishing touches and supplementary sections on the period since the 1980s. Prior to the publication of this volume no comprehensive history of Swedish geographical studies up to the present had existed. Herman Richter's detailed history, Geografiens historia i Sverige intill ar 1800 (Geography's History in Sweden until the Year 1800 [1959]) chronicled this history only up through the eighteenth century. Staffan Helmfrid provided an overview of the twentieth century in his chapter on "A Hundred Years of Geography in Sweden" (in Swedish Research in Human Geography [1999], edited by B. Ohngren, 19-56).

The main emphasis of Buttimer and Mels's book is on human geography. Since human and physical geography were divided into separate disciplines at Swedish universities in 1950, treatment of physical geography has been somewhat tenuous. In some places it is unclear whether "geography" is meant as a synonym for "human geography" or as a cover term for human and physical geography considered together.

This history of geography is nevertheless written in a humanist vein, adopting much the same refined, personal style that graces W. R. Mead's many writings on the historical geography of Scandinavia, such as his 1972 article on "Luminaries of the North" (Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, No. 57: 1-13). The reference in the subtitle to the making of geography in Sweden tells us, however, that...