Uppland

• 1. Introduction

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  Uppland, a historical province on the eastern coast of Sweden, holds a record that no other place on earth can claim: the highest concentration of runestones in the world. As many as 1,196 inscriptions in stone survive here, left by Vikings who once called this coastline home. That single fact raises an obvious question. Why here? What made Uppland the kind of place where people felt compelled, again and again, to carve their marks into rock?

  The answers reach from the age of the Vikings all the way to the Swedish Reformation, from a coastal archipelago called Roslagen to the lecture halls of the oldest university in Sweden. Uppland produced Carl Linnaeus, Anders Celsius, and Ingmar Bergman. It shelters Drottningholm Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and Sigtuna, a town established around AD 980 and recognized as Sweden's oldest. It also holds a borderline with Finland on a small uninhabited island in the Baltic Sea that is, by any measure, one of the stranger facts in Scandinavian geography.

• 2. A Land of Runestones

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  Many of the Vikings who carved those 1,196 surviving stone inscriptions came from Roslagen, the coastal archipelago that forms Uppland's seaward edge. Roslagen gave its name to the word "Rus," which some historians connect to the early name for the people who settled what became Russia, a trace of how far these coastal Swedes ranged.

  Within Roslagen, the province was historically divided into units called skeppslag, a word that roughly translates as "ship district." The rest of Uppland was carved into hundreds. These were working administrative divisions once, but today they carry no official function. What remains is the stone. Runestones standing in fields and churchyards across the province represent a density of Viking-age commemoration found nowhere else on earth, and the coast at Roslagen is where a large share of those Viking carvers began their journeys.

• 3. Sigtuna and the Weight of Age

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  Sigtuna was granted its city charter around the year 990, making it Sweden's oldest town by a wide margin. The runner-up, Stockholm, received its charter in 1252, more than two and a half centuries later. Uppsala was chartered in 1286, Norrtälje in 1622, and several others followed across the centuries, with Solna receiving its designation as recently as 1943.

  Uppsala University, founded well before several of those towns received their charters, carries the title of Sweden's oldest university. Uppsala itself sits at the heart of the province's intellectual and religious life. It is the seat of the only archbishop of the Lutheran Church of Sweden. Before the Protestant Reformation, that same archdiocese operated within the Roman Catholic Church, and the shift left its mark on the landscape in stone: the medieval Uppsala Cathedral, where many Swedish royals are buried, still stands in the center of the city.

• 4. Famous Residents

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  Carl Linnaeus, who gave science its system for naming all living things, was either born in Uppland or lived there for a significant part of his life. Anders Celsius, who gave the world its most widely used temperature scale, shares that connection. So does Ingmar Bergman, the filmmaker whose work is still studied in cinema schools around the world. St. Bridget of Sweden, a mystic and one of the patron saints of Europe, is also counted among those whose lives intersected with the province.

  Gustav Vasa, the king who broke Sweden free from the Kalmar Union and established the Vasa dynasty, rounds out a list that is striking in its range. A filmmaker, a botanist, a physicist, a king, and a medieval saint, all linked to the same patch of eastern Sweden. The province that shaped them also shaped the armorial symbol that represents it: a coat of arms granted in 1560 depicting a globus cruciger, the orb-and-cross emblem of Christian kingship, which was later adopted as well by Uppsala County in 1940.

• 5. Castles and World Heritage

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  Drottningholm Palace carries UNESCO World Heritage status alongside the archaeological site of Birka, a Viking-age trading town whose name once rang across the trading networks of northern Europe. Skokloster Castle and Salsta Castle add to a landscape that Uppland residents summarize in a phrase: the province of "castles, ancient remains and runestones."

  Uppsala Castle completes that circuit of notable structures. The province's historical stature was formally recognized in its ranking as a duchy, and the ducal coronet sits atop its coat of arms to this day. Among the dukes and duchess of Uppland, Prince Sigvard held the title from 1907 to 1934. Prince Gustav held it earlier, from 1827 to 1852. And at the province's outer edge, on the small uninhabited island of Märket in the Baltic Sea, Uppland shares a short and unusually shaped land border with Åland, the autonomous Finnish province, a cartographic oddity that quietly closes the distance between Sweden and Finland.