The Scandinanvian 78 needs a significantly better arrangement before it's going to make sense.
Magnus the Good has been as good as gone for days now. Today, it's official, though I'll miss him. Also, Ole Rolvaage today gets disqualified on the same grounds as Roald Dahl and Carl Sandburg did previously. Because Rolvaage wrote in Norwegian, and not English, he seemed to merit more thoughtful consideration.
This brings up another sticky issue of classification. The early modern monarchs, including the mighty and famous Gustavus Adolphus. Are they Scandinavian? The question might seem perverse. Who could be more Scandinavian than the national hero of Sweden? Yet, I believe there's a good case to be made that these guys were Germans, members of Germanic dynasties which, by the early modern period, happened to rule over the Scandinavian countries. German was, I think, Christian IV of Denmark's first language; it was the official language of the Danish court, and he was a German Duke as well as a Danish king. I'm not sure about Adolphus. He was multi-lingual, and German was certainly one of his languages (as well as the nationality of his mother, and his father's mother). Was German his first, or in any sense primary, language I don't yet know.
There's no chance I will be disqualifying Adolphus on any count; he will rank very high in the 78 (though perhaps not as high as my original projection of #7). Christian IV, sadly, might conceivably go, but if so, it won't be because he wasn't really Danish. But these concerns do highlight the difficulty of pin pointing ethnicity, in the past no less than the present. I call them both Scandinavians.
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