At the end of the fourteenth-century manuscript of Guta saga (Cod.Holm. B 64) a younger hand has added three annal-like entries relating events which post-date the original Gotlandic narrative. e scribe of these annals can be identi ed as David Bilefeld, the Danish-born priest and later superintendent on Gotland in the late sixteenth century, during the period of Danish rule.
A closer look at the annals, which are written in Latin, shows that an even later hand has changed a few key words. In the rst entry, for example, Bilefeld’s danis ‘Danes’ has been changed to suecis ‘Swedes’, regarding those responsible for building the fortress in Visby, Gotland’s largest city. is re-writing of Gotlandic history mirrors the political situation of the seventeenth century, when Gotland was ceded to Sweden by Denmark as a part of the Treaty of Brömsebro, 1645. For the history books that followed, this marked the return of Gotland to Sweden, allowing the northern kingdom to establish its national narrative in the spirit of seventeenth- century Gothicism.
This paper discusses who may have been responsible for changing Bilefeld’s text at the end of Guta saga, how these changes play into the larger socio-political history of Eastern Scandinavia, and how seventeenth-century Gothicism played a role in the historiography of Medieval Gotland.