Makemakean
Mr Makemean
- Pronouns
- Logical, unlike those in German
Faces of Nordic Reunification
View attachment 10119
Greetings!
So I see you’ve met Professor Iivari? My sincere apologies...
Oh, yes, of course I know he’s brilliant. One of the most clever men in the three kingdoms, the grand principality, and the four duchies, but he can be unhinged… his mind all over the place. Rather arrogant. Quite annoying.
If I may introduce myself, then, I am Johan Sigvard Qvarn, Professor of Eloquence at Stockholm Radical University and Secretary-General of the Commission on Elections at the Royal Tabulation Bureau. You wouldn’t guess it from my accent, of course, but I’m actually originally English. I was actually born in Middlesex! Father and me came over in ‘17. Back then, the family name was Mill, and I was born John Stuart. Father was very keen on fitting in into his new country, and so Swedified our names.
You know, in my (relative) youth, I was actually quite active in the radical wing of the Cap party! I twice stood as a candidate for the Riksdag in Stockholm! Didn’t come anywhere near winning, of course, but what do you expect if you’re running in Stockholm on a platform of abolishing the guild system? No, no, now my days as a partisan hack are long since over, and I am just a simple, humble civil servant with an interest in the statistics of elections.
On election night, I’ll be baby-sitting two young tablemasters over at the Palace of Statistics, and operate the Magnificent Suleiman as the results come in. I hope they haven’t oversold you on how interesting this election night will be. For a variety of reasons, no party can gain anything near a majority of seats, and we have a pretty good idea of what will happen everywhere. It will be quite a boring event, I fear, with nothing unexpected to be expected to happen.
Well, yes, I suppose it kind of is a truism to say that I do not expect something unexpected to happen, but you get what I mean...
Anyway, you’re still welcome to come!
Some quick notes here.
Due to the author's particular fondness for the place, Stockholm Radical University (Radikala Högskolan i Stockholm) is basically meant to be UCL-but-in-Sweden, the idea being that Jeremy Bentham and some other English radical intellectuals in his circle emigrating to Sweden in the late 1810s on account of a government crackdown on radical and liberal thought, and they end up founding the Radical University in the 1820s. Kind of like how UCL was founded as a university for non-conformists in OTL, so too here there is a connection to frikyrkliga, with the institution basically having gotten off the ground thanks to a large donation by an industrialist who had converted to the Methodist faith.
The particular position of Professor of Eloquence is meant to be the English translation of Professor i Vältalighet, which used to be a reasonably common title you could hold at our Swedish universities in the 17th century and originally meant something along the lines of "Professor of Rhetorics", but which eventually died out as interest in rhetoric as a subject worthy of study in itself died out. Nowadays, it only exists officially in the position of the Skyttean Professorship at Uppsala.
In this timeline, Professor of Eloquence has come to be kind of a catch-all term, something that universities give to people who for one reason or another are worth having around as tenured faculty, and who is knowledgeable enough in a number of fields to be a useful contributor, but not necessarily sufficiently knowledgeable in any one of them to merit a professorship in that field on its own, or whose field of study is just generally difficult to pin down. In Americanese, it would be something like "Professor of Undeclared", or an academic version of "Minister without Portfolio".
If you visit Stockholm Radical University in the 1860s, you are likely to see Professor Qvarn running around a lot in the Mathematics Department, History Department, and Economics Department, but not actually being tied to any one of them.
The Radical University is located somewhere in the eastern part of Kungsholmen, which seems reasonable as the entire island basically was undeveloped until the late 19th century OTL, and so would have been a place where they could get cheap property.