Thraldom in the North: A Leaf from the Oldest History of the Swedish Working Class

Sommarin, Emil, 1874-1955Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.9
Word count
40K words
Chapters
4

Tags

Foreign Language Books World History Working ClassNordic HistoryHistorical ReappraisalSlaverySwedish SocietySocial HistoryClass IssuesOppression and ResistanceInstitutional CritiqueAcademic Study

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Träldomen i Norden: Ett blad ur den Svenska artbetsklassens älsta historiaAuthor: Sommarin, Emil, 1874-1955,Language: Swedish, Class: HT: Social sciences: Communities, Classes, Races, Release Date: Jan 21, 2018

Editor's review

This book is a monograph by the Swedish scholar Emil Sommarin on the early history of the Swedish working class, focusing on thralldom (träldom) in the Nordic countries—a social form often overlooked—and tracing its relationship to the origins of the Swedish laboring class. As a free Project Gutenberg eBook, it preserves the original work's scholarly framework and historical narrative, making it a useful supplementary reading for Nordic social history, class history, and economic history. Readers are advised to understand it against the broader context of medieval Nordic social structures, and to note the author's own historical context and terminological differences. It is not long, and is suited to close reading in sections with note-taking—especially for readers with research interests in Swedish-language sources or Nordic history, as a primary reference rather than an introductory general history.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and introduction first to grasp the author's definition of “träldom” before entering the main text.
  2. Read alongside a general history of the medieval Nordic world, comparing the book's arguments with their historical context.
  3. Excerpt key terms and quotations for later verification against Swedish-language primary sources.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4

FAQ

Do I need to know Swedish to read this book? The original is in Swedish, and Project Gutenberg provides the Swedish electronic text. Readers without Swedish will need translation tools or to consult related English-language scholarship; otherwise the barrier to understanding is considerable.
Is this book suitable as an introduction to Nordic history? Not really. It is a specialized study of thralldom within the early history of the Swedish working class, and assumes some background in Nordic social history. Beginners should start with general histories.
What should I keep in mind when reading the electronic edition? This is a public-domain eBook, laid out mainly as plain text. A reading app that supports dictionary lookup and annotation is recommended, to help verify Swedish terms and record argumentative threads.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Sommarin, Emil, 1874-1955 Author

Emil Sommarin (1874–1955) is a foreign author about whom relatively little biographical information is available. The library currently holds only one of his works, Träldomen i Norden: Ett blad ur den Svenska artbetsklassens älsta historia. Judging from the Swedish title, the book discusses slavery in the Nordic region and traces the early history of the Swedish working class; the title may be rendered as “Slavery in the North: A Page from the Earliest History of the Swedish Working Class.” Because public information is limited, Sommarin's other experiences, positions, and academic background cannot be reliably established, and his writing style and influence remain to be further verified. On the available evidence, the book is a specialized study in social and economic history or institutional history, focusing on the historical circumstances of the lower classes and laboring groups, and it offers some reference value for understanding early Nordic social structures.