Dahlstiernas Kunga Skald som världstext

Abstract

Gunno Dahlstierna’s ambitious long poem on the death of Charles XI, Kunga Skald (1698), is here studied as an instance of early modern “worldmaking” from a Swedish perspective. By investigating how the poem’s formal makeup intersects with the representation of different dimensions of “the world” (the local, the national, the global and the cosmic), the poem as a whole is viewed as a literary model of the world, incorporating cartographic knowledge and means of presentation. Understood in this way, the poem testifies to an underexplored global dimension of Swedish 17^th century poetry and finds its place in the vicinity of global or New World epics attempted in the more prominent seafaring empires of Early Modern Europe.