Writing from the court of Gustavus Adolphus in 1620, Cromwell's puritanical ambassador to Sweden, Bubtrode Whitelocke, painted a dreary scene of what he could discern through the drizzly, leaden gloom of a five-hour Swedish November day … roads little more than rivers of mud, primitive strip farming, millions of acres of seemingly endless solemn pine forests, log shacks mortared with moss, a dismal diet of “boiled, roast or fried cow,” and nearly universal, perpetual intoxication.

If Ambassador Whitelocke had returned to Sweden at the dawn of the twentieth century he would have had little difficulty recognizing the place.