If Daun was to be believed, Swedish shyness and self-effacement even extended to the country’s maternity wards and funeral parlors, in what have to be the most extreme examples of Nordic inhibition I have yet encountered. During childbirth, Daun says, “Swedish women try to moan as little as possible, and they often ask, when it is all over, whether

Another report, published in June 2013 by the government’s statistics department, no less, revealed that the Danes were working even less than previously thought—fewer than twenty-eight hours a week.

leading Swedish ethnologist Åke Daun put it in his book Swedish Mentality: “Before expressing one’s views on a controversial issue, one tries to detect the position of the opposite party.… Swedes seem to reflect a great deal on what they would like to say, how to say it and when, how other people might react, etc., before they actually say it—if th

The Swedish royal family’s legitimacy is even more tenuous. The current king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, is descended neither from noble Viking blood nor even from one of their sixteenth-century warrior kings, but from some random French bloke.

As we have seen, in some senses Finns are almost über-Scandinavians, with their high-context homogeneity, reticence, openness, and trustworthiness, their welfare state, and fondness for booze and salty licorice.

I had expected Iceland to be some kind of microcosm of Scandinavia. Icelanders look like Norwegians and speak Old Norse. They have a modern welfare state, high levels of education, equality, democracy, robust knitwear, and the same hang-ups about the sale of alcohol, with their government-run alcohol shops staffed by the same species of disapprovin

In 1527 the Danish king, Frederik I, proclaimed that his people should be free to worship in whichever way they pleased, “For His Grace is king and judge over life and property for his realm, not over the souls of men.” (That

This is the country that has done more than any other to define how the rest of the world sees Scandinavia: as modern, liberal, collectivist, and—kräftsvika parties aside—more than a little dull.

Perhaps more apt than likening the Swedes to frogs would be to say that they were the most diligent of worker bees, happy to toil for the good of the hive. But what made the Swedes such perfect subjects for benign totalitarianism? Historically, several factors paved the way: the alleged Viking egalitarianism; Lutheranism, with its emphasis on colle