Nils Keder and the royal collections in Stockholm
The eighteenth century witnessed the rise of the great institutional collections in Scandinavia and few were as important in this development than Nils (Nicolas) Keder (1659–1735). Educated in Uppsala University, Keder embarked on an European tour before returning to his native Sweden. He was then asked to take on the challenge of organizing the Swedish royal collections, which Charles XI (1655–97), King of Sweden, had brought together: namely part of Queen Christina of Sweden’s numismatic collection which had been sold at Amsterdam, and also newly acquired collections such as that of Jacob Gyldenclou (1636–92), which focused on ancient Roman coins.
Nils Keder, De argento runis seu Literis Gothicis insignito, quod delineatum in Camdeni Britannia Anglice nunc loquente & ampliata literato exhibetur orbi, sententia Nicolai Kederi … (Leipzig, 1703), frontispiece.
Keder was not working alone – other members tasked by the king with developing the royal coin and medal collections were Count Carl Wrede, Johan Gabriel Sparwenfeld (1655–1727), and Elias Brenner (1647–1717), but of these only Brenner was a numismatic devotee and it was Keder who really made his mark in publicising the contents of the Swedish royal collections across Europe.[1] He did so by printing a series of relatively short accounts on either a single coin or specific groups within the collections and luckily many of these publications were bought by Edward Worth (1676–1733).
Keder’s first publication was a study of a coin found at Sigtuna, north of Stockholm, which he wrote about for Nova literaria maris Balthici et Septentrionis.[2] Sigtuna was an important site for it was here in the later tenth and early eleventh century that Sweden’s first coins were minted. Worth did not acquire this text, nor did he buy Keder’s next work on coinage which he believed to be from the reign of Margrete I (1353–1412), Queen of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Instead Worth purchased a text by Keder on something much closer to home: Keder commenting on silver coins in William Camden’s celebrated Britannia: Worth had the 1722 edition of this famous work: Britannia: or a Choriographical Description of Great Britain and Ireland, together with the Adjacent Lands Written in Latin by William Camden and translated into English with additions and improvements by Edmund Gibson, 2 vols (London, 1722). Here, Keder was beginning to focus on coins from the Viking Age, a topic which would become a preoccupation of his later works.
Nils Keder, Runae in nummis vetustis div quaesitae tandemque ibidem feliciter inventae. Seu De nummis runicis commentatio Nicolai Kederi … (Leipzig, 1704), title page.
Keder’s next tract concentrated on a recent acquisition: runic coins found in Östergötland in Southern Sweden. As Malmer notes, the inclusion of a coin with the inscription ‘Magnus Rex’ helped Keder date the hoard to the eleventh century.[3] Magnus Olafsson (d. 1047), also known as Magnus the Good, had become King of Norway in 1035 and King of Denmark in 1042. As the title page of this work demonstrates, Keder was keen to draw attention to his official role as ‘Gothicarum Collegij Assessoris’.
Nils Keder, Nummi aliquot diversi ex argento praestantissimi: nempe decem Olai Sueci, unus Anundi Carbonarii, ac unus Haquini Rufi, Sueciae Regum; nec non unus Suenonis Bidida Barba, Daniae Regis; omnes tellure Suecicâ olim absconditi, nuperque casu in apricum prolati, nunc autem Heliconiadum choro submissè dedicati à Nicolao Kedero (Leipzig, 1706), title page.
Two years later he produced a more extensive work, again discussing recent finds. They were, as Malmer states, sensational, for they were the oldest finds to date and included silver coins from Olof Stötkonung (c. 980–1022), King of Sweden, his son Anund Kolbränna (c. 1008–50), and one from Sven Tveskägg (Svein Forkbeard d, 1014), who had ruled Denmark from c. 986 and who was briefly King of England in 1014 before his death – his son, Cnut the Great (c. 995–1035), would establish a short-lived North Sea Empire, comprised of his lands in Denmark, Norway, and England.
Nils Keder, Nummorum. in. Hibernia. antequam. haec. insula. sub. Henrico. II. Angliae. Rege. Anglici. facta. sit. juris. cusorum. indagatio. per. Nicolaum. Keder. … Accessit catalogus nummorum Anglo–Saxonicor. & Anglo–Danicor. musei Kederiani (Leipzig, 1708), plate I.
Malmer suggests that this work on Viking coinage in Ireland before the invasion of Henry II (1133–89), King of England, may have been in response to the publication of Sir Andrew Fountaine’s Numismata Anglo-Saxonica et Anglo-Danica illustrata – which Worth owned as part of his copy of George Hickes’s Linguarum vett. septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archaeologicus (Oxford, 1705). Keder focused on Ireland and depicted some of the earliest coinage known to have been minted in Ireland – coins by Sitriuc Silkbeard (Sitric, Sigtryggr Ólafsson Silkiskeggi) (d. 1042), King of Dublin. As the first coin in the above plate demonstrates, he also reproduced a coin of Sitriuc Silkbeard’s father, Amlaíb (Óláfr) Cuarán (d. 981), who in turn had been a son of Sitriuc Cáech (Sigtryggr) (d. 927). An image of the same coin, which had been minted in York in the early 940s, had already been reproduced by the Irish antiquarian Sir James Ware in his De Hibernia & antiquitatibus ejus, disquisitiones (London, 1658), p. 153 – and Worth owned this work also.
Nils Keder, Nummus aureus antiquus atque perrarus, Othinum, ceu probabile est, eiusque sacrorum ac mysterior. signa et indicia exhibens; e museo Nicolai Kederi …, cum huiusce commentatione editus (Leipzig, 1722), title page.
Following his knighthood in 1711 Keder’s publication rate lessened and his next work did not appear until 1722. It was a seminal work about the ‘Odin’ coin (which formed part of Keder’s personal collection which included Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, English, German and Russian coins along with Roman coins), and the work included a poem by Elias Brenner’s wife Sophia Elisabeth Brenner (1659–1730), the noted poet.[4] Much of Keder’s time in the 1720s was taken up with preparing a second edition of Elias Brenner’s Thesaurus nummorum Sueo-Gothicorum which had first appeared in 1691. The 1731 second edition proved to be a seminal work, a fitting tribute not only to Elias Brenner but also to the scholarship of his friend and colleague Nils Keder: Thesaurus nummorum Sueo-Gothicorum : studio indefesso Eliae Brenneri L. annorum spatio collectus, secundum seriem temporum dispositus, atque e tenebris, cum commentatione in apricum prolatus ; accessit ejusdem auctoris Libellus de nummophylaciis Sveciae : de scriptoribus rei nummariae Svethicae, atque de thesauris, seu variis vetustorum nummorum cumulis, passim per Sveoniam fortuito casu repertis (Stockholm, 1731).[5] Brenner aimed to provide a catalogue of Swedish coinage from the reign of Olof Skötkonung to his own time, including, as Haidenthaller notes, true-to-size illustrations.[6]
Text: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library, Dublin.
Sources
Haidenthaller, Ylva, ‘Collecting coins and medals in 18th-century Sweden’, Artium Quaestiones, 34 (2023), 111–37.
Malmer, Brita, ‘Nicolas Keder’, Svenskt biografiskt lexicon [accessed 26 July 2026].
Sundquist, Torbjörn, ‘Nicolaus (Nils) Keder’, Svensk Numismatisk TIdskrift, September (2020), 117.
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[1] Malmer, Brita, ‘Nicolas Keder’, Svenskt biografiskt lexicon [accessed 26 July 2026].
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Sundquist, Torbjörn, ‘Nicolaus (Nils) Keder’, Svensk Numismatisk TIdskrift, September (2020), 117.
[5] Worth did not acquired this work.
[6] Haidenthaller, Ylva, ‘Collecting coins and medals in 18th-century Sweden’, Artium Quaestiones, 34 (2023), 123.