The ball game in Johannes Schefferus Lapland. Fragments of Nordic early modern early modern sporting life with a view towards Iceland and the British Isles

Abstract

Sports historians have argued that the type of ball games common
in the British Isles, which were practiced by two teams and
in which the ball was driven with sticks towards predetermined
goals – i.e., hurling, shinty, bandy and hockey – were never played
in early modern Sweden. By highlighting descriptions of ball
games in Johannes Schefferus’s The History of Lapland (1674), a
source previously ignored by sports historians, this article challenges
such a claim. One of the games described by Schefferus has
some similarities with the violent stick-and-ball game known in
Icelandic sagas as knattleikr. Even greater similarities (such as the
start of the game with a face-off and the goals consisting of lines
on the short edges) emerge when the game is compared with the
Scottish game of shinty. Thus, pre-modern Scandinavia does not
appear to have been as isolated in terms of sports and games as
has been suggested by Swedish sports historians.