Sources:
Christina, Queen of Sweden, at the English-language Wikipedia:
The article as it looked in June 2014 is here (archived at the Wayback Machine; the article in English was not archived in July of that year):
Christina, Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric, by Veronica Buckley, 2004
Christine de Suède et le cardinal Azzolino: Lettres inédites (1666-1668), by Baron Carl Bildt, 1899
Entry on the word "lolcow" at Urban Dictionary:
Garbo, Christina and Asperger, paper written by Federico del Monte, at Academia.edu (no publication date is given, but the earliest archive of this article at the Wayback Machine is from February 17, 2018):
Readings in Ethics: Moral Wisdom Past and Present, by Louis F. Groarke, Paul V. Groarke and Paolo C. Biondi, 2021
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Above: Kristina.
I have decided to publish, as a preview, this excerpt from a big post I have been working on since March of this year (2024), as I want to finally do a deep dive into the question of Kristina's possible autism. It is intended to be the first in hopefully a series of posts examining this theory, namely in the form of a detailed biography looking at and breaking down the monarch's life from a neurodivergent perspective, to examine what it would have been like for her/him/them to exist as a possibly autistic and neurodivergent royal, public figure and variously feminine, masculine and gender-neutral presenting person assigned female at birth in the 17th century, in a very privileged and powerful position in society, and in the Swedish and wider European culture of the time. It is an admittedly ambitious goal that is certain to unfold indefinitely and very slowly.
Before the biography proper begins, I give there a very comprehensive description of what autism is, the various ways it can present in any given person, an account of my own autism as I was growing up and how it currently presents in my case, and some examples of various other historical figures who I and/or others speculate might have been autistic themselves. Although I do realise this next is barely more than a tangent (it's an autism thing!), I also add a brief example and breakdown of another disabled person having a theory about another famous historical Scandinavian monarch possibly having had the same condition — namely the 9th century Viking warlord and king Ivar the Boneless, who is believed to have suffered from either osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bone disease), male impotence, a combination of the two, or perhaps other conditions, if his nickname is to be interpreted literally, for the sake of showing that I am not the first or only disabled person to have such a theory about a historical monarch from that part of the world. The theory about Ivar having OI originated in 1949 with the Danish doctor Knud Seedorf, who was not disabled, but it was popularised in the early 2000s by a Jordanian-British playwright and actor named Nabil Shaban, who himself suffers from the condition.
We will, of course, never know for certain whether or not Kristina was autistic, but so many contemporary accounts and descriptions of her known and confirmed traits, behaviours, personality and social approach throughout her/his/their life as well as at various stages of it — variously written by herself/himself/themself as well as by family, friends, acquaintances and strangers — point so much in that direction that we can, at the very least, entertain the notion. I hope this preview serves as an interesting introduction to this theory.
The preview:
If you go to Kristina's English-language Wikipedia page (which spells her/his/their name as Christina) and look at the very end of the section discussing the monarch's gender ambiguity and sexuality, it is written that biographer Veronica Buckley's account suggests that Kristina might have had "a pervasive developmental disorder, such as autism" due to "her low comprehension of the need for most social norms, little desire to act, dress, or do other social norms, and her preference to wear, act, and do only that which she deemed logically practical".
I first discovered this detail of the article in July 2014, almost a year after I had first learned of Kristina's existence from the 2003 "Royal Diaries" historical fiction children's or teen book about her late childhood years (written by Carolyn Meyer), and at that time the term Asperger's syndrome was used in the article in place of the word autism. Like with Asperger's syndrome, when the DSM-5 retired the vast majority of the diagnoses covered by pervasive developmental disorder in 2013, ... it integrated most of them together into the general umbrella term and diagnosis of autism or autism spectrum disorder. But I have never forgotten that suggestion, and after I finally began to research, investigate and examine Kristina's life in earnest in early 2018 (a year before I got the idea to start this blog and after two years of very sporadic, surface-level research), the more descriptions, accounts, letters and texts I have found, read and translated, the more convinced I have become of her/his/their possible autism, although it is rarely mentioned in most modern formal and informal biographies of her or retellings of her life and character, let alone explored in greater detail. The possibility has also been mentioned by Federico del Monte (circa 2018?) and by the Groarkes and Biondi (2021). …
Although I do not like or condone everything she believed and did as a ruler or as a person, which is necessarily a massive understatement for some of those things, which we will soon list, autistic people are at worst treated like such dirt by society that to see someone who was probably one of us in such a massive position of power, privilege and authority as that of a monarch in a pre-modern era, ruling over people who would have had no qualms about treating them like trash if they had been born on the opposite end of the social ladder, it makes me fervent for ourselves and even tempted to think "Look at this maybe autistic person in power, look what they can say and do for themself in their personal life that no one gets to reprimand or criticise them for like they would with us".
But no one is infallible, and it is not right or realistic to think of anyone like they are, regardless of whether they are autistic or not. I have also come to learn the darker sides of Kristina, and some of those dark sides are troubling at best and deeply disturbing at worst, and the worst of them have made me grapple with the question of how do I reconcile my personal fascination and relatability with and interest in this potentially autistic person in power with the genuinely harmful and even evil things she/he/they believed and caused? I have become a lot more critical of her as a person and as a monarch, I have to hold her accountable for those things, call her out when they come, and accept the things that I can't change even though they are bad. And it must be remembered too that being autistic, neurodivergent, mentally ill, disabled, deformed or anything other than cishet does not inherently make a person bad, creepy, cruel, dangerous, evil or "unhinged".
Kristina was and is many things: a queen, a king, a monarch who voluntarily spent most of her adult life without a crown to wear, a country to rule over, or real political power to wield; a child who from age six sincerely, wholeheartedly and of her own accord embraced having to grow up fast and mature early owing to the circumstances, time period, society and regal status she had to live in, a flawed and fallible human being; an eccentric, a lover, a friend, a mother in name only, the most famous Protestant to Catholic convert of her time, an adventurer, a constant self-discoverer; an expert horserider, swordsperson, gun-shooter and game hunter; a polyglot, a prolific art collector and patron of the arts, a peacemaker, a politician, an amateur philosopher, alchemist, astrologer, aphorist and archaeologist; a vagabonde physically, behaviourally and spiritually. All that is true, but not everything about her is admirable, because as for the most serious, harmful and disturbing of her non-fabricated vices and failings, Kristina was also a misogynist, a coloniser and an executioner.
In addition, during the final four years of her reign, she nearly bankrupted Sweden and caused serious social unrest in the country because of her financial extravagance, incomprehension, overgenerosity and wastefulness from constantly spending money on art and parties, rewarding and/or promoting both genuinely deserving and random people for their service to the Crown or to her personally, and pumping the nobility full of hundreds of new families and members to whom she then sold or mortgaged Crown lands to accommodate them. She also packed up and took many precious books, manuscripts, jewels, silverware, tapestries and paintings along with her when she left Sweden for the Continent in the days immediately following her abdication — and all this was to the point that she couldn't or wouldn't even distinguish between what was Crown property and what belonged to her personally as the monarch. She also had no interest in or intention of becoming more financially literate, which caused her personal financial difficulties and reduced her to a royal beggar for most of her life after the abdication.
Kristina also accepted, perpetuated and even internalised the misogynistic and ableist lies, half-truths and exaggerations she was told about her mentally ill and traumatised mother after being forcibly removed from her and while growing up, and she has thereby ensured that these lies, half-truths and exaggerations about her mother have been generally accepted as historical fact for almost 400 years until starting to be questioned and corrected within the past four decades.
All that is true too, Kristina needs and deserves to be held accountable for those things, and her possible autism is not the reason why she was, did or believed those bad things; although the financial difficulty for the country, to be fair, was not her fault alone, and on her part both the national and personal financial difficulties could have at least partially been the result of dyscalculia, a condition which would not have been in her personal control.
It is also just as true that Kristina has been revered and reviled by many and been made the subject of many myths, half-truths, lies, exaggerations and fabrications herself, both in life and in death. She has been called and painted as an apostate, an atheist, a sexual predator, a bisexual or lesbian nymphomaniac, a deformed man or a hermaphrodite; a petulant, whiny and melodramatic womanchild, a madwoman who was clinically insane, an egoist, a neuropath; an addict to lying to, manipulating, using and duping people who she thought could be useful to her but then ending up on the receiving end herself; but she has also been called a genius, a child prodigy, a proto-feminist (in reality she was far from it), the goddess of peace, the Minerva of the North.
Due to some isolated anecdotes and accounts of some of her behaviour — which are variously authentic, exaggerated or fabrications —, if Kristina had lived in modern times she would probably even be referred to by ableist detractors with the online slang term "lolcow", meaning a usually neurodivergent and/or mentally ill person whose gullibility, social awkwardness, eccentricities and/or emotional issues cause them to get repeatedly taken advantage of, provoked, made fun of, deceived, exploited, abused and/or harassed both online and offline for people's own twisted amusement — in other words, "milked for laughs", hence the moniker — and who more often than not turn out to themselves have genuinely disturbing, harmful and even evil beliefs, sayings, doings and incidents in their personal lives, financial struggles with frequent begging, poor hygiene, low or absent self-awareness, accountability or tolerance for criticism, "bizarre" and "erratic" behaviour in public, repeated self-destructive behaviour, and/or delusions of grandeur and a "massive ego"; but also in modern times she has been celebrated by admirers as either and variously a lesbian icon, a bi icon, an ace/aro icon, a trans icon, and an intersex icon — the LGTBQIA+ possibilities are present, convincing and very real, and the very latter of which we will discuss and examine later on in this particular post. But might Kristina truly also represent an early example of autism? To look at the evidences for that, we have to start at the very beginning of Kristina's life.
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