A feature documentary on Runsa in Ed parish, Upplands Väsby: from the Migration-period hillfort and Viking runestone, through Ebba Brahe's baroque castle and the Ankarcrona estate, to the statare who worked the land.
On a headland where Lake Mälaren narrows, the water has always decided things. For fifteen hundred years, whoever held this rock held the strait, the farms, and the people who worked them. [pause] This is Runsa.
Climb the height above the manor and you stand inside a fortress. Around the year four hundred, in the age of migrations, a war-lord built a stronghold here: a stone wall three hundred metres long, eight houses on terraces, and a great hall. People lived behind that wall, watching the water.
Below the fort, on the slope toward the water, they buried their dead. One grave is a ship of stone, fifty-six metres long: twenty-eight boulders raised like a hull driving north, with thirty-three smaller graves around it. The people of the stronghold sent their dead to sea [pause] without ever leaving the shore.
Runorna lät Ragnvald rista. Han var i Grekland, han var krigarföljets hövding.
By the church road in Ed stands a boulder the locals called the King's Stone. A man named Ragnvald raised it for his mother, and carved on it who he had been: a commander of the Varangian Guard, the elite who served the emperor in Constantinople. He had been to Greece, and to Byzantium, [pause] and come home to a farm in Uppland.
Runsa first appears in writing on the twenty-ninth of July, 1313. A man named Sigmund Keldorsson sells three öresland of land here to the Archbishop of Uppsala. The parchment survives in the National Archives, and its Latin still names the place: [pause] Tres oras terre in Runusum. [pause] Three plots of earth in Runsa.
For two centuries the estate lay under the archbishop's table, until the Reformation pulled church land to the crown. Then, in the age of Sweden's empire, King Gustav II Adolf granted Runsa to his great field marshal, Jakob De la Gardie, and to De la Gardie's wife, [pause] the famous Ebba Brahe.
The couple hardly lived here. It was Ebba Brahe, as a widow, who raised the castle that still stands, in the early 1670s. The art historian Gustaf Upmark put it plainly: she outlived her husband [pause] by no less than twenty-two years, until 1674, and it was almost certainly she who built it. The design is credited to the baroque architect Jean De la Vallée.
In 1695, Runsa entered the great atlas of the realm. In Erik Dahlberg's Suecia antiqua, the castle appears in copper, clean and proud, under a single carved word: [pause] RVNSA.
Twelve years later, a surveyor named Jacob Braun walked the fields with chain and compass. In the early summer of 1707 he drew Runsa's lands in ink and watercolour, every field, meadow and building, under the title Geometrisk Charta öfwer Runsa. It is the oldest detailed picture of the estate, made a generation before the family that would hold it for the next three centuries.
The admiral Theodor Ankarcrona died childless. But his widow, Catharina Beata von Schoting, did something that bound the family to this place for good. In 1753 she made Runsa, the estate of Boserup in Skåne, and the family's house in Stockholm into a fideikommiss: an entail that could never be sold or divided. From then on, Runsa passed from heir to heir.
For a century and a half the holders followed one another: cavalry captains, majors, a chamberlain, and a line of proprietors who all carried the name Theodor. On old days the chamberlain Theodor Ankarcrona lived at Runsa, the newspapers said, busy with farming and husbandry, the master of nine and a quarter mantal of land.
In 1875 the proprietor Sten Wilhelm Theodor Ankarcrona married an actress, Hilma Tengmark. She left the Stockholm stage for the castle on the headland [pause] and became Hilma Ankarcrona of Runsa.
One of the strangest turns in the family's fortune begins with a hunting accident. In January 1866 a very young man, Hugo Tham of Österby, rested during a hunt with his hand over the muzzle of his loaded gun. As the papers told it, one of his dogs [short pause] made a few joyful leaps in front of its master, and trod on the cock. [pause] The shot went off, straight through his hand.
The wound turned septic; gangrene set in; days later he died. On his deathbed, Hugo Tham left two million riksdaler to his half-sisters, the Ankarcrona ladies at Runsa. And so, through a dog's joyful leap on a winter hunt, [pause] the daughters of Runsa became millionaires.
In 1899 the holder of the entail, Sten Johan Theodor Ankarcrona, died abroad in Germany, only forty-nine years old. Runsa passed to his son Teodor, still a boy, a minor. The great estate was now run by a steward and a household of servants [pause] for a master not yet grown.
Above all the drama, Runsa was a workplace. Every census between 1880 and 1930 counted sixty to a hundred and twenty people on the estate. A head gardener, Adolf Andersson, kept the gardens for thirty years. A smith, Sven Petersson, kept the forge for twenty. There was a foreman, a forester, a coachman, [pause] and a fisherman.
Most were statare: contract labourers paid in kind, with families, recruited from across Uppland and Södermanland. They stayed for lifetimes. In 1899 the Patriotic Society gave medals for long and faithful service to five of them, the longest at sixty-six years on the same estate, handed out by the widow of the just-buried master [pause] at his funeral in Ed church.
But the water that made Runsa was also its most dangerous neighbour. On New Year's Day, 1862, four young people crossed the frozen Skarven to a dance on the far shore. Driving home before dawn, they went straight into a hidden hole in the ice. Three were pulled out. The maid Johanna Löfström [pause] died just after she was lifted from the water.
Twenty-six years later, just before Christmas, three young men rowed across the lake to fetch the holiday liquor. On the way back, between Tärnsund and Roparudden, the boat capsized. Only one was saved, pulled out frozen and senseless. Knut Åberg and Herman Elsberg, both about twenty, [pause] drowned.
Fire and disease stalked a farm of timber and straw. In 1877 the croft Kojan burned. In 1912 a barn at Nibble burned to the ground in a night of fires the locals were sure had been set by vagrants. And in the autumn of 1899, anthrax broke out among the cattle, until the estate could at last be declared, in the words of the official notice, [pause] free from anthrax.
And there was the well. In July 1898 a young labourer, Axel Wålander, was roofing a well on the home farm when he lost his balance hauling up a basket of gravel, and fell. He broke a leg, took inner injuries, and died days later in the cottage hospital. The newspaper gave it a headline that needed no other words: [pause] Well-work that costs human life.
By then Runsa had become a legend in its own right. In 1913 a socialist paper mocked a writer who had turned a giant said to live in the old fort into a forefather of the Ankarcronas, a family, it sneered, that as late as the 1700s lay hidden in the herring trade. Of all the heroic verse, it said, there remained only the giant Runse, sitting up in his fort, rubbing his hands, muttering that [pause] there is still grit in the Ankarcrona boys.
The castle still stands on its headland, almost unchanged since Ebba Brahe's day: a private home now, closed to the road. Above it, the wall of the old fort still rings the hill. Fifteen hundred years of war-lords, owners, servants and labourers have come and gone. The water still narrows at Runsa. [pause] And the records remember them all.