The biggest Nordic land ranks fifth on the human development scale
Sweden covers 450,295 square kilometres with about 10.6 million people—the largest and most populous Nordic country and Europe’s fifth-largest by area. A constitutional monarchy with a 349-member Riksdag, it ranks fifth on the Human Development Index and has been inhabited since around 12,000 BC.
Stretching from 55°N to 69°N, Sweden has a range of climates, yet 88 percent of its people live in towns and cities, which occupy only 1.5 percent of the land. Density averages about 25 people per square kilometre, with most living in the south and centre. The name goes back to an ancient root meaning one's own tribe; Sverige means realm of the Swedes and first appears, in an older form, in Beowulf. Finnish and Estonian instead say Ruotsi and Rootsi, after the Rus' of coastal Uppland who also named Russia.
Tacitus described the Suiones in 98 AD as a powerful people whose ships had a prow at each end, and Jordanes later praised their fine horses and black fox pelts. Swedish Vikings from the eighth to eleventh centuries headed east, down the Dnieper to Constantinople and as far as Baghdad; the Byzantine emperor Theophilos recruited them as the Varangian Guard, and they are credited with founding Kievan Rus'. Birka on Björkö, founded around 750, linked the Baltic to Byzantium and the Abbasids until it was abandoned about 975.
Kings are usually counted from Erik the Victorious and Olof Skötkonung, who ruled Svealand and Götaland together in the tenth century. Saint Ansgar preached Christianity in 829, though paganism lingered into the 1100s. Feudalism never took hold outside the Danish-held southwest, so farmers stayed largely free, and Magnus Eriksson abolished slavery and serfdom in 1335.
The Black Death killed a third of the population between 1349 and 1351, and numbers did not recover until the 1800s. Sweden left the Kalmar Union in 1523, became a Baltic great power after entering the Thirty Years' War, and lost Finland to Russia in 1809. It joined the EU in 1995 and NATO in 2024.
Source: Sweden
