Sliding with Slania in Sweden

1980: Swedish Comic Strips (Design - Rune Andreason)

Here comes Bamse the brown bear. Not only is Bamse the kindest bear he is also the world's strongest bear.  What is his secret?  Well like all bears he loves honey but the one he eats is magic honey prepared by his grandmother and called thunder honey (dunderhonung) which gives him his strength.  First published in 1966 and created by Rune Andreason he is still having adventures today.  The speech bubble is saying it is good (to go skiing) with friends but also with small friends. Here are some more friends going cross-country skiing with a four legged small friend

1970: Around the Arctic Circle (Design - Svenolov Ehrén; Engraver - Czeslaw Slania)

The stamp is captioned vitta vidder - white plains or white horizons and the artist Svenolov Ehrén (1927-2004) created 64 stamps in his career, four of which form part of this Arctic Circle set.

1970: Around the Arctic Circle (Design - Nils Nilsson Skum; Engraver - Czeslaw Slania)

The scene portrayed is a drawing by the Sami Reindeer herder Nils Nilsson Skum (1872-1951) who created about 3000 drawings on reindeer herding and the Sami life. In the 1930s a number of harsh winters with heavier snow than usual resulted in reindeer numbers crashing and like many Sami in this difficult decade he abandoned reindeer herding.  Nils became an artist full time and a couple of hundred of his drawings appear in the books Sami Village (1938) and Tending Reindeer published posthumously in 1955.  Now I go to an era when Nils was just a boy and living far away from a big city where

1971: Old-time Christmas

skaters were zooming over Mälar bay, Stockholm.  The city is situated on 14 islands where Lake Mälaren meets the Baltic Sea so I imagine there are lots of possibilities for skating.   The picture is a woodcut of 1867 by K A Ekwall

Here everyone is arriving in the Swedish countryside for the early service on Christmas Day in the 1870s and the artist August Malmaström pictures a fine set of horses and sled. The stamps are from a booklet of 10 stamps of 5 different designs each in a single colour engraved by Czeslaw Slania,

The Sunday Stamps II prompt this week is the Letter S - here for Sweden, skiing, skating, sled and Slania - slide over to See It On A Postcard for more on the Letter S