68 THROUGH THE FIELDS WITH LINNAEUS 



has been carefully restored. He walked up on the 

 right-hand side, where eight steps lead to the raised 

 chancel, examining the monuments, placed tablet-wise 

 in niches, of an architect and a king and queen,. 

 These look early in date, though, the inscriptions having 

 been tampered with, one cannot be precise about it. 

 Carl was afraid of being shut in the church, so he hurried 

 past the old carved-wood stalls round the choir, by the 

 bay where the model stands of the building as origin- 

 ally planned, and through the archway facing this 

 bay, where niched winged figures stand on grotesque 

 animals, which have a Byzantine look, doubly strange 

 in Sweden. These sculptures still bear traces of their 

 former colours. The great square pillars of the nave ? 

 and the great rounded pilasters with their chamfered 

 capitals, are as imposing as the best Norman work in 

 France. Carl did not then enter the mighty crypt, lighted 

 by ten windows and supported by twenty-four pillars 

 c the most beautiful and majestic part of the church ' 

 which forms a ground-floor storey to the high-raised 

 chancel : all of which reminds one of St. Denis, near Paris. 

 Here are the colossal images of the giant Finn and his 

 wife, said by legend to have built the church. These 

 are huge stone figures clasping the great columns, which 

 also have chamfered or sculptured capitals. The story 

 read to Carl, later, when he had time to think about it, 

 as if the old Scandinavian pagan heroes were buried in 

 this crypt on the establishment of Christianity : or as 

 if in 1080 the powers that then were in Scandinavia 



