Salve. En medeltidssaga

About a week ago the twitter account Svensk Historia tweeted about the Nordic king Erik of Pomerania. I retweeted it saying it always makes me think about the Swedish children's show Salve from 1997. This was read by a host at the Swedish radio music show Klassisk morgon and we started talking about the show and its music. Later that day I was contacted by the producer and they wanted me on the show, so this morning I made my radio debute. It can be heard here but since it is in Swedish and since I have much more to say than I had time for on the show, I thought I would make a blog post about it as well. One of the characters, Katarina Örnfot, has her own post in my My Heroine series. It can be found here and I will try not to repeat myself too much.

I was 12 years old when Salve was first broadcasted and already a history nerd with a massive interest in knights. So this was really the perfect show for me and I started recording it on tape every morning already from the start. A year later, the show was cut down to an eleven episode long TV series which was then made into two VCRs and later on also to a DVD. (And of course I have both and yes, I do still watch the DVD from time to time.)

The plot revolves around Nils Svensson who normally is from 1997. He travels to the Swedish town Kalmar to celebrate the 600 jubliee of the union between all the Nordic countries set up by Danish queen Margaret that normally goes by the name The Kalmar Unionen. He tries to call his mother with his mobile phone, but the display just says 1397. He tries it anyway and gets transported to Kalmar 1397. There he befriends Katarina who is the daughter of a knight and works in the bathing house helping the elderly women Rodwy. Later on he becomes a squire to the rather clumsy knight Rosenstråle. The new 15 year old king, Erik (of Pomerania) is bored in the castle and runs away, out into town and becomes a friend of Nils and Katarina as well. At the end he is officially crowned king.

I cannot over-estimate how much this show has meant to me! It really is historical fiction at its best. It has an overarching frame that is the happenings in Kalmar in 1397 and there also seems to be a structure of what and how they wanted to convey facts. This makes the show take the facts seriously, but is not too serious in how they teach the children making it fun to learn. They had question times where children wrote in questions about the Middle Ages to the show, but most of it was told through the fictive plot. The fact was more showed (or played) into the viewers than taught into them.

Nils is the character through whom the viewers learn and just like me during the time I watched Salve, goes from a rather stereotypical image about knights, to learning a great deal about the period itself. What I find to be one of the best aspects about his character is the fact that he is never seen as stupid like is so often the case with characters the viewers are supposed to learn through in TV shows in general and children's shows in particular. Nils just does not know so much about the Middle Ages when he gets to 1397 because he is from 1997 (The scene before he time travels in the beginning of the first episode also has him imagining a rather stereotypical picture about how he, as a knight, saves a princess from a dragon.).

I have already talked about Katarina, but I cannot stress enough how great she is as a female character. She is not reduced to a steretypical medieval woman or a tomboy who gets to play knight. Neither is she overshadowed by the boys. She is independent, complex and colourful and certainly no damsel in distress.

Based on how popular the show was, I was sad to not see it getting more of a follow up than a shortened version in the autumn the year after. I think it would have been so perfect to make a winter holiday show (or a julkalender) so we could see how the people during the Middle Ages celebrated christmas and handled the colder climate of the season.

I rewatch the show from time to time and even though it is a bit childish from time to time and there are some plotholes, I can overlook its flaws because it is aimed at children and it shows how much fun you can have with real facts. It does still hold up extremely well, 20 years and a master's degree in archaeology later. It had me interested in the Middle Ages as a time period and I am still building on that knowledge in my work as an archaeologist today.