24 | June | 2013 | ferrebeekeeper

The Crown for the Hereditary Prince of Sweden

So, I wish I could explain this better, but here are the crowns of the princes and princesses of Sweden. These images come from the amazing website Official and Historic Crowns of the World and Their Locations which is an amazing resource for all things crown related. Evidently each Swedish prince and princess had their own crown made based on a standardized template. The effect of all these nearly identical and yet subtly different crowns is rather remarkable–like a beautiful treasure-based version of one of those “spot the difference” games which one sees in the comics pages. Yet somehow it all seems excessive: couldn’t they just have reused one crown (is the one on the top an original?) and spent all of that sweet crown money on weapons research and mentally-ill Strindberg plays? Hmm, now that I say that aloud it occurs to me that actually redundant pointy princely crowns might have been the right way to go…