The most standard popular account of the Black Death even briefly touches Scandinavia (Kelly 2005, Cap. 12), but you are apparently not satisfied with his narrative. OK. It is not so easy to reconstruct the spread of the Black Death even in Continental Europe, however, and much more difficult for Scandinavian Peninsula, due to the problem of extant primary sources:

 

1: How the Plague came to Scandinavia

The most important (almost) contemporary written sources of this topic are in fact recorded in Iceland:

• ‘The [so-called] Lawman Annals, Year 1349: ……At that time, a cog sailed from England. Multitude of people were on board, and arrived in the harbor of Bergen. When A little of her cargo was unloaded, but then all the people on board died. Soon after the cargo from this ship had been loaded into the town [of Bergen], the town people also died. Then, the pestilence spread all over Norway and devastated so much that less than third of the people in the country could survive. The cog from England sank with cargo as well as dead men and they could not be unloaded. Many other ships also sank or driven around the harbor. The same pestilence also hit in Shetland, Orkney, Hebrides, and Faeroes Isles. The following was the shared characteristic of the pestilence: People could not survive one or two days with a sharp pain. After that, the patient bled out and end her/his life. Of this pestilence Archbishop Arne [of Trondheim/ Nidaross] and all of the canons of the cathedral chapter of Trondheim, except for one member, Lodin, was died. Abbot Olaf of [Nider-]Holm was elected as an [new] archbishop. Obituary: Bishop Torstein of Bergen, Also Bishop Guthorum of Stavanger, Bishop Hallvard of Hamar, but this pestilence did not come to Iceland’ (Storm (ed.) 1888: 275f.).

• ‘Gottshalk Annals, Year 1349: ……A large-scale and deadly pestilence came to Norway and Shetland Isles. Obituary: Archbishop Arne [of Trondheim/ Nidaross] and Abbot Þorkell of Helgafell [in Iceland: So, his death was not relevant to the Black Death, by the translator]. 7 parishes in Agder [in the bishopric of Stavanger, Southern Norway] were devastated in a short period. The bishop of Stavanger sent many of his priests, deacons, and servants there, but surprisingly, all of them also died soon. It also occurred that 80 dead were delivered to the same church in a single day in Bergen, among them 14 priests and 6 deacons were included. Obituary: Sir (herra) Bjarne, Sir Petr, and Sir Ole. Obituary: Bishop Torstein of Bergen and Bishop Guthorum of Stavanger, brother Hamund, brother Torvald, Runolf anima, and many other men in Thorlak’s ship that could not arrive in Iceland’ (Storm (ed.) 1888: 354).

 

While we cannot all of their accounts (with some exaggeration) at face value, the researchers, include Nowergian historian Ole J. Benedictow, the leading expert of the Black Death study not only for its impact of medieval Scandinavia, but also for the topic itself in global-wide scale, in principle accept their accounts. In short, the plague came from England to some towns in Norway by ship. The arrival of the plague in Bergen, narrated in the Lawman Annals above, is customarily dated to the summer [from July to September] of 1349, but Benedictow also points out the possible early arrival of the pestilence in Oslo [also from England] in late autumn of 1348, based on some documentary sources (Benedictow 2004: 149f.; Harrison 2000: 356f.). The winter climate hindered further rapid spread of the plague for a while, however, and with the coming of spring in 1349 the plague raged again across southern Norway, almost contemporary with its second ‘reinforcement’ in Bergen in Summer 1349.

 

2: From Bergen and Oslo to Arctic Norway

 

In Late Summer and Autumn 1349, the plague went north mainly in two routes (Harrison 2000: 355f.), and researchers tries to reconstruct its routes by making use of (indeed very later) narrative accounts:

• On October, it reached Trondheim, the seat of the [arch] bishopric of middle and northern Norway and killed Archbishop.
• On September and October, the inland seat of bishopric of Hamar and Valdres - Gudbrandal region was also hit by the plague.

 

On the other hand, we don’t have matching narrative and native accounts in northern Norway at all throughout the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, we have good reason to suppose that the people of northern Norway also suffered this formidable plague as well:

• The economic significance of medieval Bergen came from its hub function between the fishery in northern Norway as well as Iceland and international markets such as England and Germany, and the dried cod was the main commodity that Norway exported. As I wrote in the later part of this thread, the coastal fishery primarily for producing such export product developed along the northern coasts of Norway from the end of the 13th century, The king of Norway assigned Bergen as a staple for the dried fish, and repeatedly forbade foreign merchants to sail further north to trade directly with fisher-farmers there. In other words, Norwegian farmer-fisher in such new coastal fishery villages by themselves or their lords such as lay servant/ officers of Archbishop of Trondheim regularly conducted a seasonal trip to Bergen to trade their product with visiting merchants. Though debated, they even might have already purchased some grain there at that time, in exchange for the fish product that they were specialized in. On May 1349, even in amidst of the pestilence, King Edward III of England approved the departure of such a grain export ship to Norway (Cf. Benedictow 2004: 148f.).
• It is relatively less known fact that a flea, vector of Y. Pestis does not require rats or mice to be travelled around. it can be attached together with grain or woolen cloth and could survive at least in a month. In short, the absence of rats itself did not always hinder the rapid spread of the plague.
• During 1960s and 1970s, Scandinavian socio- economic historians struggled to calculate the demographic catastrophe caused by the Black Death based on the farm abandonment across Scandinavia. As a result of their research, we now have some good overall pictures of such farm abandonment (possibly due to the population loss), based on various late medieval and early modern land registers. On average in the whole medieval kingdom of Norway, ca. 63% of the farm that had previously been occupied got abandoned in the 14th century, and though great divergence among the area, this trend also corresponds well with the figures from northern Norway, at least to Tromsø region where the traditional cultivation limit of the Arctic was located (Moseng et al. 2007: 289-95).

 

In short, maritime trading network over the North Sea in the 14th century that connected Norway with England (as well as Germany) played an important role of spreading the plague around the North Sea, and northern Norway was integrated into this trading network as producer of the export product, the dried fish (cod).

 

3: How about Northern Sweden?

 

Concerning the further spread routes of the plague into Sweden as well as the Baltic. we don’t even have some late narrative sources as they are in Norway, so it is extremely difficult to reconstruct. It is worth noting, however, that the plague possibly came to the Baltic in autumn 1349 (in Visby, Gotland), before the possible frozen block out of the Baltic Sea in the cold winter of the 14th century and more than half a year earlier than in northern German Hanseatic cities (Benedictow 2004: 173), though the more trustworthy accounts only dated from May 1350 (Myrdal 2009: 67). The origin of the plague in Sweden must have been Norway rather than Northern Hanseatic cities, and early allusions to the plague (i.e. the sudden surge of donation charters) in the beginning of 1350 could be also seen in south-western Sweden.

 

Northern Sweden provinces also suffer from the lack of the contemporary sources even much worse than northern Norway counterparts, but archbishop of Uppsala that included the whole Norrland area [northern Sweden] was known to celebrate the special opening of the relic of St. Eric in Uppsala in 1359 to calm the anxiety of lay people down. Researchers interpret this as a possible sign of the outbreak of the Black Death also in the archbishopric of Uppsala (Harrison 2000: 407). The research project of late medieval farm abandonment in Jämtland region, bordering Norway and Sweden, shows that ca. 30-40% farm abandonment, but the desolated farms themselves tell us nothing on where the plague came from.

 

References:

• Storm, Gustav (ed.). Islandske annaler indtil 1578. Christiania, 1888.

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• Benedictow, Ole J. The Black Death 1346-1353; The Complete History. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004.
• Harrison, Dick. Stora döden: Den värsta katastrof som drabbet Europa. Stockholm: Ordfront, 2000.
• Kelly, John. The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time. London: Harper, 2005.
• Moseng, Ole G. et al. Norsk historie 750-1537. 2. utg. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2007.
• Myrdal, Janken. ‘The Black Death in the North: 1349-1350’. In: Living with the Black Death, ed. Lars Bisgaard & Leif Søndergaard, pp. 63-84. Odense: UP of Southern Denmark, 2009.