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The New Testament in English and Swedish

Collection:

Librarian's note:

This is a book to ponder over. Not because it's the New Testament (though there's centuries of material to ponder over in that regard already), but because of how this was an obviously used New Testament. This wasn’t a fancy decoration on the shelf to show piety, but a real working Bible, which offers a treasure-trove of questions that might never be answered.

The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s bilingual: each page is split in two, with the left column being in English and the right in Swedish, lined up side by side.

It is also quite beautiful, with a glossy black embossing that’s soft to the touch. It’s comfortable in the hand, and the pages have maintained a crispy edge that I can only describe as delicious when flipped through. Though not a Christian, I read through the Bible with a family member, and am often willing to puzzle through the dated language of this copy for its sensual qualities than the bloated behemoths I’ve been gifted.

On the inside are notes written using a dip pen. The front cover contains a list of family members (Mother, Father, ???), their deaths and births, while the inside page contains notes in Swedish, possibly in two different handwritings, save for the line It is best that God is with us! written in English. There is also the name Julia! written in the top right corner in pencil.

The handwritings are beautiful… but so beautiful that I struggle to make out what it says with my poor, rusty Swedish. Ditt ord är mina fötters, it seems to say on the first line with a beautifully looping curved “D” – “Your word is my feet.” That doesn’t seem quite right.

The page after contains a list of labeled numbers. I happened to ask an actual Swedish speaker years ago what the numbers meant, and he said the owner of the Bible had recorded the population of various religions: Protestants, Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Muslims, etc. Must've taken ages.

Other notes on the title page and back pages are covered with more script that I find equally beautiful, yet more illegible Swedish.

You might assume that the owner of this New Testament was Swedish-speaking. Oh contrair – nearly all of the underlines taking place within the text itself in orange pencil are on the English sides. Besides the line of English written within the cover, there’s also a line written in that orange pencil on the Swedish title page: This is the best guide through life.

I have one clue that the (one of the?) Swedish writer and English writer are the same person: they both choose to write their a’s and d’s by means of a circle, then lifting the pen/pencil to do a separate stroke for the right-hand line, rather than completing the whole letter in one stroke as I was taught to do. It lends to the confusion when deciphering, since the line often doesn’t touch the circle. But perhaps this is how they were writing those letters in those days.

Tucked in the pages of the Gospel of Mathew, specifically within Chapter 21, when Jesus is confusing people with his parables, is a small piece of a newspaper in English:

Kentucky has 14,000 square miles of coal fields; Pennsylvania, 12,630 miles; Great Britain, entire, 11,850 miles; and England, alone, 6,039 miles. The wealth of Pennsylvania is largely due to the development of the coal in that State, and the importance of England in the industrial world is due to a similar cause. What Kentucky needs is not the abolition of its geological survey, but an extension of the work.

This is clearly what the clipper was trying to clip out, and not the cut off account of paper companies in Philadelphia on the other side.

Another fragment tucked in the pages, in the Book of James, is a folded piece of paper, seemingly the return-address corner of an envelop, labeled “J. A. Eklund.” The top of the book, written against the pages, seems to be the same name, though spelled "Æklund".

Could this Bible at one time have been owned by Johan Alfred Eklund, a Swedish bishop and hymn writer born in the 19th century? It’s not outside the realm of possibility, but then again, few Swedish names are truly unique to one person. And how did it get to a Finnish countryside museum? And why the English-language newspaper clipping? Should this really be in my posession?

Whoever they were, the owner of this book probably couldn’t imagine someone would be puzzling over their notes over 100 years after the fact in the U.S., and writing out their thoughts on it for the world to read on the internet.