The place where Birger Jarl died on 21 October 1266, named by the Erikskrönikan and never securely identified since.
Jälbolung is the place where Birger Jarl, the jarl who ruled Sweden for his son, died on 21 October 1266. The Erikskrönikan, written some sixty years later, gives the name and the date; no other source adds to it, and no settlement called Jälbolung survives on any map.
The usual placing, offered with reservations rather than confidence, is Lung bo in Västergötland — one of the old bon, an early administrative division of the province. Lagmanstorp in Longs parish, just outside Vara, is the site most often named. Neither can be proved, and the article that claims otherwise is guessing.
In 1920 the philologist Hjalmar Lindroth read the name as two parts, Jälbo and Lung: a settlement called Jälbo, with the district name Lung attached to distinguish it from the other places of that name. The construction is a common one — the Husby names work the same way, and Uppland and Västmanland hold several Järlebo and similar forms. Birger’s son Bengt, later duke and bishop, sold inherited land in Lung, which fits a family holding in the district.
Jälbolung is not Bjälbo. Bjälbo lies in Östergötland, was the seat of Birger’s family — the House of Bjälbo, which the later sources call the Folkungs — and is where he was born about 1210. The two names look alike and the archive itself once confused them: this article previously illustrated the death place with a photograph of Bjälbo church, in the wrong province.
Birger was the dominant figure in thirteenth-century Sweden without ever being its king. He became jarl in 1248, and when his son Valdemar was elected king in 1250 he governed in his name, first as regent and then alongside him, styling himself duke of the Swedes and the Geats. He led the campaign into Finland that Swedish tradition calls the Second Crusade, and later tradition credits him with founding Stockholm about 1252.
He died at Jälbolung in October 1266, and was carried to the Cistercian abbey of Varnhem for burial. The grave slab there, the Mechtild stone, covers him with his second wife Mechtild, who died in 1288, and his son Duke Erik, who died in 1275. It is the one place connected with his death that a visitor can still stand in.
Birger’s death ended the arrangement that had held Sweden together for sixteen years, and his sons fell out almost at once: Valdemar kept the crown until his brother Magnus, later called Ladulås, took it from him in 1275. The House of Bjälbo ruled Sweden for another century.
Jälbolung itself survives only as a word in a chronicle. It is a reminder of how thin the medieval Swedish record is: the death of the man who governed the kingdom is fixed to a day and not to a place, and the best modern scholarship can offer is a district and a candidate farm.