Swedes (tribe)

The Swedes, in Swedish svear and in Old Norse svíar, were a North Germanic people of early medieval Scandinavia whose homeland lay around Lake Mälaren in what is now central Sweden. Together with the Geats and the Gutes of Gotland, they are counted among the groups from which the modern Swedish nation grew, and the country itself takes its name from them.

The Roman historian Tacitus, writing his Germania in AD 98, described a people he called the Suiones, usually taken to be the Swedes. He presented them as a powerful seafaring nation whose ships had a prow at each end, ruled by a king with unusually strong authority. A runic inscription on the Kylver Stone of the fourth century may be the first local mention. In the sixth century the historian Jordanes listed two Scandinavian peoples, the Suehans and the Suetidi, both thought to refer to the Swedes; he said they were known for fine horses and that the Suehans supplied black fox furs to the Roman market. Most scholars derive the name from an ancient root meaning "one's own", so that it originally meant something like "our own people".

The Swedish heartland lay in eastern Svealand, especially Uppland, and very early also took in Västmanland, Södermanland and Närke around the Mälaren basin, then a bay full of islands. It remains one of the most fertile and densely settled parts of Scandinavia. Gamla Uppsala was the main religious and political centre, where the king led the great sacrifices, or blóts, to the Norse gods. A network of royal estates, later known as the Uppsala öd, supported the king and his household until the thirteenth century. According to the sagas, above all Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, the Swedish kings traced their line back to the god Freyr. Some historians question whether the name first belonged to the people of Uppland alone or was used for all the peoples of Svealand.

Anglo-Saxon writers also knew the Swedes. The poem Widsith names Ongendtheow as their ruler, and the epic Beowulf describes wars between the Swedes and the Geats under kings of the Scylfing dynasty, including Ongentheow, Ohthere, Onela and Eadgils. Kings with similar names appear in Scandinavian tradition, and they may have been historical figures, though this cannot be proved. In the ninth century the traveller Wulfstan named Blekinge, Gotland and several neighbouring districts as lands subject to the Swedes.

During the Viking Age the Swedes looked mainly eastwards across the Baltic. The Frankish Annals of St Bertin record that envoys calling themselves Rhos, who visited the emperor Louis the Pious around 838, turned out on questioning to be Swedes. Scholars generally hold that the Rus', who gave their name to Kievan Rus', came from coastal eastern Sweden, and that their name is linked to Roslagen and to an Old Norse word for rowers. Swedes also made up much of the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine emperors: almost all the so-called Varangian runestones, raised for men who travelled east, are found in Sweden.

In the eleventh century Adam of Bremen described the Sueones as a people whose kings depended on the will of the assembly, or thing. Over the following centuries the Swedish kings extended their rule over the Geats of Götaland, a process finished only in the thirteenth century, and is seen by some historians as the birth of the kingdom of Sweden. The name could then be used for the Geats as well. In modern Swedish the older word svear survives mainly for the historical tribe, while svenskar is used for all Swedes today.

Our maps label the territory of the Swedes on the 400, 500, 600 and 700 maps, covering central Sweden and also a large area of what is now Norway, a broad estimate for a people whose borders are not known. On the 800 map the region is drawn instead as the lands of the Norsemen.