Swedish Nobel Day

On 27 November 1895, in the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Alfred Nobel signed a will so short and so audacious that the lawyers who later read it were not at all sure it could be enforced. In a few handwritten paragraphs he gave away almost his entire fortune, made from dynamite and armaments, to fund annual prizes for those who had done the most good for humanity. He died a little over a year later, on 10 December 1896, at his villa in San Remo on the Italian Riviera. That date is now Swedish Nobel Day: the evening, each December, when laureates in white tie and floor-length gowns gather in Stockholm to receive a gold medal, a diploma and a sum of money from the hand of the Swedish king.

The will that nearly failed

Nobel’s will was a problem before it was a triumph. He had named no institution to administer the prizes, left his estate scattered across several countries, and bypassed his own relatives, some of whom contested the document. The young engineer Ragnar Sohlman, named as one of two executors, spent years liquidating Nobel’s holdings, sometimes moving cash and securities discreetly to avoid French inheritance claims. The Nobel Foundation was finally established in 1900, and the first prizes were awarded in 1901, five years after Nobel’s death. Had the will been overturned, one of the most influential ideas in the history of philanthropy would have died with him.

The man behind the prizes

Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm in 1833 and grew up partly in Saint Petersburg, where his father ran a manufacturing business. He was a chemist by training and a relentless inventor, holding 355 patents over his lifetime. His great breakthrough came in 1867, when he found that the dangerously unstable explosive nitroglycerine could be tamed by absorbing it into a porous earth called kieselguhr, producing the mouldable, transportable substance he named dynamite. It made him enormously rich and reshaped mining, tunnelling and warfare alike.

There is a much-repeated story that Nobel resolved to endow the prizes after reading his own premature obituary. In 1888 his brother Ludvig died, and a French newspaper, confusing the two, ran a notice headed “Le marchand de la mort est mort” — “The merchant of death is dead” — condemning Alfred for growing wealthy by inventing ways to kill. The anecdote is widely told but poorly documented, and historians treat it with caution. What is certain is that Nobel, a man who wrote poetry, spoke several languages fluently and corresponded with the Austrian peace campaigner Bertha von Suttner, was preoccupied with how he would be remembered.

Five prizes, two cities

Nobel’s will named five fields: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and the pursuit of peace. It also made a remarkable instruction: while the science and literature prizes were to be awarded in Sweden, the Peace Prize was to be decided by a committee chosen by the Norwegian parliament, the Storting, and presented in Oslo. At the time, Sweden and Norway were joined in a political union, dissolved peacefully in 1905, and the division has endured ever since. To this day the Peace Prize is handed over in Oslo City Hall on the same 10 December as the Stockholm ceremony.

A sixth award, the prize in economic sciences, was not part of Nobel’s will at all. It was established in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank, the Sveriges Riksbank, in Nobel’s memory, and is awarded alongside the others. Purists still insist it is not, strictly speaking, a Nobel Prize, a small annual quarrel that the laureates themselves rarely seem to mind.

Different institutions decide each prize, a structure Nobel set out himself. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences selects the laureates in physics, chemistry and economics; the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm chooses the medicine laureate; the Swedish Academy, a body of eighteen members appointed for life, awards the literature prize; and the Norwegian Nobel Committee decides the Peace Prize in Oslo. The deliberations are famously secretive, and the nomination archives are sealed for fifty years, so the full record of who was considered, and rejected, only emerges decades after the fact. Those archives have since revealed some startling near-misses and omissions — Mahatma Gandhi was nominated for the Peace Prize five times and never received it, a gap the Norwegian committee has effectively acknowledged as a failure.

How the day unfolds

The day’s centrepiece is the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall, where the Swedish monarch presents the medals and diplomas to the laureates in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and economic sciences. Protocol is exacting: each laureate steps forward as their citation is read, receives the medal and diploma from the king, and bows three times — to the king, to the bust of Alfred Nobel, and to the assembled audience. It is followed by the Nobel Banquet in the Blue Hall of Stockholm City Hall, a meticulously choreographed dinner for around 1,300 guests. The menu is composed afresh each year and guarded as a state secret until the food appears, and the evening ends with an elaborate dessert procession, the lights dimmed as waiters carry the parfait down the grand staircase to music. The hall is decorated with flowers sent each year from San Remo, the town where Nobel died.

The seating, the cutlery and the porcelain are all part of the ritual. The Nobel Foundation commissioned a complete bespoke service of china, glass and silverware for the banquet’s centenary period, and the chairs, tables and gold-edged plates are stored and reused each year. After the dinner, guests move upstairs to the Golden Hall for dancing beneath its glittering mosaics. The whole production is televised live across Sweden and followed with the attention other countries reserve for royal weddings or cup finals — a national evening in which a small country dresses up to honour, by name, the people it has judged to have done the most for the world.

If the Stockholm Nobel ceremony is the most intellectually weighty December occasion in Sweden, it shares the calendar’s mood of midwinter ceremony with other Scandinavian observances; the candle-lit procession of Swedish Lucia Day falls just three days later, on 13 December, and the two together bracket the darkest week of the Swedish year in light and ritual. The Nobel banquet is, in a sense, the formal midwinter counterweight to the country’s other great communal feast, the long bright outdoor revelry of Swedish Midsommar — one held in white tie under chandeliers, the other in flower crowns around a maypole, the two poles of the Swedish year.

Why it carries such weight

The Nobel Prizes shape how the world understands excellence. To be a laureate is to join a lineage that includes Marie Curie, who won in both physics (1903) and chemistry (1911); Albert Einstein, honoured in 1921 not for relativity but for the photoelectric effect; and Martin Luther King Jr, who received the Peace Prize in 1964 at the age of 35. The awards direct public attention and money towards discovery, literary art and the often thankless labour of peacemaking. That a small northern country, every December, presides over what amounts to a global verdict on human achievement is itself remarkable, and a measure of how completely Nobel’s gamble paid off.

The prizes have not been without controversy, and Nobel Day is as much a moment for argument as for celebration. The literature prize in particular has provoked decades of debate over who was overlooked — Tolstoy, Joyce, Proust and Borges all died without it — and the Peace Prize has at times been awarded to figures whose later actions embarrassed the committee, or withheld in years when no candidate seemed worthy. The science prizes face their own structural quirk: each can be shared by at most three people, an increasingly awkward rule in an age when major discoveries are made by large collaborations, and the awards go only to the living, so a death before the December ceremony can quietly rewrite history. These tensions are part of what keeps the day in the news; a prize that provoked no disagreement would be a prize nobody took seriously.

Fun facts

• Nobel held 355 patents in his lifetime, and the dynamite that funded the prizes was patented in 1867 after he stabilised nitroglycerine using a type of porous earth.
• The Peace Prize is the only Nobel awarded outside Sweden, in Oslo, a quirk dating from the Swedish-Norwegian union that existed when Nobel wrote his will in 1895.
• A French obituary in 1888 reportedly branded Nobel “the merchant of death” after confusing him with his late brother Ludvig, though the story is hard to verify.
• The economics prize is not a true Nobel: it was created by Sweden’s central bank in 1968, not by Nobel’s will, and is formally the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”.
• Marie Curie was the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, and the gold medals have occasionally been smuggled, dissolved in acid and re-cast to hide them from invading armies.

A closing reflection

What is striking about Nobel Day is how much of it rests on a single act of imagination by a man who never saw it happen. Nobel could not have known whether his prizes would be claimed by charlatans or geniuses, whether the Peace Prize would honour reconcilers or be mocked for its choices, whether the whole edifice would survive his quarrelling heirs. He simply wrote down a generous idea and trusted the future to administer it well. Every December, when the lights dim over the Blue Hall and the dessert is carried down the stairs, that wager is honoured again, a reminder that a legacy is not what you leave behind but what you dare to set in motion.