Generally, for Swedish exploration, check out the work of Urban Wråkberg and Sverker Sörlin.

On the issue of the place of exploration in national mythology, Sörlin, for example, writes about how polar exploration and polar science in general was tied to Swedish nationalism and the idea of the progressiveness of Sweden. (A bit like the commemorative practices surrounding science, such as the jubilees connected with people like Linnaeus and Tycho – the latter, of course, was Danish but his island Ven had become Swedish, so both Swedish and Danish astronomers could use him).

An interesting book chapter along these lines is Sverker Sörlin, “The burial of an era: The home-coming of Andrée as a national event”, in Urban Wråkberg ed., The centennial of S.A. Andrée’s north pole expedition (Stockholm, 1999).

Interesting observations about astronomy. I’ve been co-writing an article that takes a similar approach to NASA’s implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration, a project that seems to have rather dire consequences for U.S. space science.

By the way, I was wondering if you had any good references to histories of Swedish (or Scandinavian)exploration. What I’m most interested in is how different European nations mythologize their exploration activities. In the U.S., it gets attached to Lewis and Clark and the pioneer spirit of the Western surveys. Is there any kind of parallel myth in Northern Europe? Or does exploration have a different place in the national consciousness?