The Emblem Texts at Tådene, Västergötland

Abstract The church of Tådene in Västergötland is home to a series of painted panels dating from the early 1700s. Before their restitution to the church in the 1960s, the panels were stored in a mausoleum, putting them beyond the scrutiny of scholars. This obscurity helped conceal the fact that the panels constitute the most sophisticated surviving programme of emblems to be found in any church in Sweden, remarkable in scale, scope, and invention. This article presents for the first time the source of the emblems at Tådene, and argues that a factor in the programme’s success is the role played in the composition of the poetic texts added to the emblems, and that, moreover, the author of these interventions was one of Sweden’s leading literary figures of the Baroque, Johan Runius. Not only was Runius resident in the parish of Tådene at the time when these panels took form, but his literary production in these years mark his only known attempts at the emblem genre. Through the confluence of date, place, and style, the article suggests that the texts of Tådene’s emblems merit investigation as lost poems dating from an early stage of Runius’s short career.