Sammendrag
Charles XII and his «carolines» play a great role in Mid-Scandinavian folklore and literature. Several authors have contributed to the literary image of the king and his men, first and foremost Johan Falkberget with his novels Eli Sjursdotter (1913) and Cristianus Sextus (1929-35). Others to be mentioned are Per Nilsson-Tannér (Bångens pojkar (1935)), Bjarne Slapgard (Frende og varg (1945)) and Kristian Kristiansen (I den sorte gryte (1955)). In recent years local traditions from The Great Nordic War have been used as a base for historical open-air theatre. On the whole all these fictions express an anti-militaristic lower-class perspective on the war, and they argue peace and reconciliation between neighbours on both sides of the border. At first sight studies of this kind of literature may seem a rather marginal form of literary critisism. But the fictional image of Charles brings light upon the formal relations between the historical novel and history writing. The boundary between these two forms of historical discourse seems to be rather open, and in the literature on Charles XII this ambiguous relation between historiography and fiction is clearly at stake from the very beginning. Thus Voltaire�s Histoire de Charles XII, roi de Suède (1731) is a work which makes a literary figure of Charles at the same time as the book is in itself a kind of «mock epic». All later literature on the «carolines» are thematically and formally in debt to this work of Voltaire, and it can also be argued that Voltaire�s book is the origin of the historical novel as a genre. Seen in this perspective the Mid-Scandinavian fictions on the «carolines» are specimens of a very central and theoretical important tradition within the history of European literature.
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