The Manly Sacrifice: Martial Manliness and Patriotic Martyrdom in Nordic Propaganda during the Great Northern War

The battle of Narva on 20 November 1700 stirred up an abundant flurry of Swedish war propaganda. The furious, blizzard-swept battle, in which the army of King Charles XII managed to defeat a numerically superior Russian adversary, was celebrated in a plethora of poems, war ballads and pictorial representations. Central and local authorities throughout the Swedish empire organised processions and religious ceremonies to spread the word of the military victory to the King’s subjects.1 Yet the battle of Narva also took a heavy death toll, on both the Swedish and the Russian sides. A few weeks after the battle, the royal printer Salig Wankifs Enka in Stockholm published a written memorial for the fallen Swedish soldiers: Memorial in Honour of the Brave Swedish Killed and Wounded under His Royal Majesty’s own Venerated Command . . . .2 The publication was flowery and somewhat muddled. At its core was a list of Swedish casualties: 667 dead and 1,247 wounded. The private soldiers appeared as anonymous numbers, whereas officers were listed with their names and detailed descriptions of their wounds. Apart from the listed casualties, the publication was made up of bombastic lyrical passages celebrating the sacrifice of the fallen soldiers. Here was an explicit dimension of ars moriendi – guidance in the principles of the Good Death. It was emphasised that the dead Swedes, unlike the Russians, had ‘gained their lives, led their lives and lost their lives’ as ‘Evangelical Christians’. As the Swedes had in this way been properly prepared, there could be no doubt that ‘their souls live(d) with God’. According to the anonymous writer, the memorial was intended to console the bereaved families. However, as in the funeral sermons of the same period, the dead soldiers were simultaneously used as exempla, moral role-models for the living.3 In the same way as the martyred Swedish warrior king Gustavus Adolphus, whose ‘bloodstained shirt’ was invoked in veneration, the soldiers had sacrificed their lives for a higher purpose. They had died for their fatherland and were therefore blessed with immortality. Thus, they addressed their grieving kin with a direct message: ‘If you ever loved us, do not deny us the honour that is our due’. This article examines the conceptualisation of state violence in government propaganda for domestic consumption in Sweden and Denmark during the period of the