Consolidation of Sweden

Modern historians noted that a millennium had passed between Tacitus and more in-depth and reliable documented accounts (or notices of contemporary events relating to Sweden by Frankish and German writers) of Swedish history.

The work of Birger Nerman (1925), who argued that Sweden held a senior rank among the existing European states at the time represents a nationalist reaction to the academic historiography, with the latter taking a critical or cautious view of the value of old layers of sources of history[3] especially if these documents and traditions are unsupported by any direct traces, any footprint of events and social or political conditions in the archaeological records, buildings, coinage etc.

[4] In both poems, an Ongentheow (corresponding to Angantyr in Icelandic sagas) is named as the King of the Swedes, and the Geats are mentioned as a separate people.

These names of peoples living in present-day Sweden, the Anglo-Saxon references and now lost tales they were attached to must have travelled across the North Sea.

Nineteenth-century scholars saw the unification as a result of a series of wars based on evidence from the Norse sagas.