Svensson

Swedish reaches for this name when it needs a person with no particular identity. To say han är en riktig svensson is to call a man a typical Swede, descriptive or faintly derogatory depending on who is saying it, and medelsvensson, average Svensson, is the ordinary Swede in the abstract, what English calls an average Joe. The name earned that job by sheer weight. About 88,000 people on the Swedish population register carried it in 2021, ninth on the list of the country's commonest surnames; counting every spelling together, the total at the end of 2012 came to 101,834, of whom 101,027 wrote it Svensson, 333 Swenson, 243 Svenson, and exactly one Swensohn.

The word underneath the joke is older and sharper than the joke allows. Sven is Old Norse for a young man or a young warrior, a given name used across Scandinavia and into Estonia and Germany, and the surname does nothing to it but add the genitive -s and the word son. Anglicised, it comes out as Swanson, Swenson or Swinson. What follows is the record of four men who carried it and were not average anything: a Halland knight who fitted out privateers against the Hanseatic towns, a mining man from Falun who commanded a rebel army in Gustav Vasa's absence, a tenant farmer's son who ended as speaker of the peasant estate and godfather to a king, and a painter who took an East Indiaman to China to learn how to paint on glass.

Broder Svensson, known also as Tjurhuvud, was a knight of Halland and the son of a väpnare, Sven Toresson. The väpnare is the Swedish squire, and in the medieval scheme he was the shield- or armour-bearer of a knight: the word runs back through Anglo-French esquier, shield bearer, to the Latin armiger. A boy went into a household as a page at seven and became a squire at fourteen, responsible for his knight's horses and for keeping his armour cleaned and ready, helping him into it, and riding with him into battle. By the later Middle Ages squire had hardened into a rank of its own just below knighthood, and plenty of men who held land never went further. Broder Svensson's title says his household had gone one step up from his father's.

In the early 1430s he fitted out privateers of his own and took part in the sea war against the Hanseatic towns. He was probably held prisoner in Lübeck for a long stretch. By 1434 he was free again and sitting as a member of the Swedish council, and he was one of the men who put his name to the letters of renunciation sent to King Erik of Pomerania. That was not a gesture. It was a council formally withdrawing from its own king, in writing, over signatures that could be read back to every man who gave one.

Having broken with Erik, Broder Svensson attached himself closely to Engelbrekt, and was used by him at the siege of Varberg among other work. It is the point at which a privateer and a councillor becomes a field commander in somebody else's rising, and it lasted only as long as Engelbrekt did.

After Engelbrekt's death he fell out of favour with Karl Knutsson, whom he accused of partiality in the handing out of the fiefs. He died in 1436.

Peder Svensson of Vibberboda, sometimes written Peter, was born about 1470 and was probably a bergsman of Falun, one of the mining men of that district. He was of the Sture party during the regency of Svante Nilsson, and he served as bailiff at Garpeberget, holding the same post again under Sten Sture the Younger. That is a career built inside Dalarna rather than at court, which is exactly why it mattered when Dalarna rose.

He joined Gustav Vasa's War of Liberation and, while Gustav Vasa was away on his journey to Hälsingland, Peder Svensson took command of the rebel army and led it at the Battle of Brunnbäck's Ferry. He surfaces once more in 1527, when the Daljunker was travelling around Dalarna recruiting men during the Dalecarlian rebellions and Peder Svensson stood with Vasa against him. He was dead before 1547. In 1922 a memorial to him was raised at Hedemora.

Nils Svensson, always written i Håslöv after his village, was born in 1741 at Håslöv in Viby parish in Skåne, the son of Sven Mickelsson and Elna Larsdotter. His parents were frälsebönder, farming land held under a noble rather than owned.

In 1762 he married Nilla Olsdotter, born in 1743 in the same village, and through the marriage came to his wife's skattegård, a farm held by the farmer himself and taxed accordingly. That was a real step up from his parents' standing, and it came with local office. In the same year he was made nämndeman in Villands härad, a lay member of the district court bench; later he became häradsdomare, the district judge. In 1769 the district sent him to the Riksdag as a member of the peasant estate, and he sat again in the parliament of 1771 to 1772.

On 10 November 1778 the infant Gustav IV Adolf was christened in Stockholm, and the peasant estate stood nine godfathers at the font. Nils Svensson was one of them and their chief godfather, and Gustav III gave him a faddertecken, a godparent's token, for it. A Skåne tenant farmer's son had been placed at the christening of the heir to the throne on behalf of the whole farming estate of the realm.

At the Riksdag of 1786 the estate elected him its talman, its speaker. At the Riksdag of 1789 he sat on the Hemliga utskottet, the Secret Committee, and worked actively for the passage of the Förenings- och säkerhetsakten, the Union and Security Act, for which Gustav III rewarded him with a gold medal. He later carried through a change that put the king's family permanently on the map of his own country: his home parish stopped being Viby and became Gustaf Adolfs socken. He died there on 3 October 1815; Nilla had died in 1811, and they had one child, a daughter named Kristina. A half-length portrait of him by Martin Roth is in private hands.

Lars Lorentz Svensson Sparrgren was born in Gothenburg in 1763 and entered the Konstakademien as a pupil in 1780, taught in particular by Pehr Hilleström. In 1788 he sailed for China on one of the East India Company's ships, with the specific aim of learning glass painting; work of that kind with Chinese figure motifs is in the Nationalmuseum. He came home and took up miniature painting, and was made agré of the academy in 1794.

From 1796 he spent a long stretch in Paris. When he returned in 1803 he was a fully formed artist, took up the competition with Gillberg and Berndes with success, and was soon acknowledged the leading man in his field in Sweden. He was elected a member of the academy in 1800, made vice professor in 1805 and ordinary professor in 1810.

He painted a great many of his contemporaries and returned more than once to the features of Karl XIV, one portrait of whom, in watercolour, is in the Nationalmuseum; he is represented also at Gothenburg Museum of Art and Norrköping Museum of Art. His colour was clear and carrying without turning false or overdone, and the likeness was strengthened by the living expression he gave a sitter. Late in life he made half-figures and heads after older masters, and those turn up often enough in private collections. His self-portrait of 1800 hangs in the Konstakademien and another is in the Nationalmuseum. He died in Stockholm on 31 March 1828, having gone from a Gothenburg boy to the man Sweden asked when it wanted a face kept.