Primeval and scenic: ways of seeing Swedish national park forests as arenas for experiences enabled by the Swedish Tourist Association’s yearbooks (1886–2013)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article extends insights into the discourse on Swedish forests as arenas for experiences by unravelling, making visible, and problematizing how ways of seeing such forests have been constructed over time. This is investigated concerning the Swedish national parks, which have offered tourists experiences of forest milieus since the early 1900s. Representations in the Swedish Tourist Association’s yearbooks published between 1886 and 2013 are analyzed to get hold of ways of seeing. Through the analysis, two ways of seeing are identified: 1) primeval national park forests as arenas for experiences, and 2) scenic national park forests as arenas for experiences. Primeval forests are represented with old, wild, pristine, and inaccessible qualities, offering tourists experiences of forests far away from humanity, where time has remained still. Scenic forests are constructed to have aesthetic, grand, and calming qualities that create feelings among tourists of being in a beautiful, outstanding, and safe place. Both ways of seeing contain traces of romanticism, which indicates that they represent and communicate meanings of the Romantic movement of the late 1700s and early 1800s.