Accession Oscar II became King on 18 September 1872, upon the death of his brother,
Charles XV who died without an heir. At his accession, he adopted as
his motto Brödrafolkens väl /
Broderfolkenes Vel ("The Welfare of the Brother Peoples"). His
coronation as Swedish monarch was celebrated in
Storkyrkan in Stockholm on 12 May 1873, and his
coronation as Norwegian monarch two months later in the
Nidaros Cathedral in
Trondheim on 18 July 1873. The office of
Prime Minister of Sweden was instituted in 1876.
Louis De Geer became the first head of government in Sweden to use this title. The most known and powerful first minister of the Crown during the reign of Oscar was the conservative estate owner
Erik Gustaf Boström. Boström served as prime minister in 1891–1900 and 1902–1905. He was trusted and respected by Oscar II, who had much difficulty approving someone else as prime minister. Over a period of time, the King gave Boström a free hand to select his own ministers without much royal involvement. It was an arrangement (unintentional by both the King and Boström) that furthered the road to parliamentarism.
Science and the arts 1898 A distinguished writer and musical amateur himself, King Oscar did much to encourage the development of education throughout his dominions. In 1858, a collection of his lyrical and narrative poems,
Memorials of the Swedish Fleet, published anonymously, obtained the second prize of the
Swedish Academy. His "Contributions to the Military History of Sweden in the Years 1711, 1712, 1713", originally appeared in the Annals of the academy, and were printed separately in 1865. His works, which included his speeches, translations of
Herder's
Cid and
Goethe's
Torquato Tasso, and a play,
Castle Cronberg, were collected in two volumes in 1875–76, and a larger edition, in three volumes, appeared in 1885–88. His Easter hymn and some other of his poems are familiar throughout the Scandinavian countries. His work on
Charles XII of Sweden were translated into English in 1879. In 1881, he founded the world's first
open-air museum, at
Bygdøy, located next to his
summer residence near
Oslo (then known as Christiania). In 1885, he published his
Address to the Academy of Music, and a translation of one of his essays on music appeared in
Literature in May 1900. He had a valuable collection of printed and manuscript music, which was readily accessible to the historical student of music. Being a theater lover, he commissioned a new opera house to be built by
Axel Anderberg for the
Royal Swedish Opera which was inaugurated on 19 September 1898. It remains as the home of that institution. Oscar II once told playwright
Henrik Ibsen that his
Ghosts was "not a good play". As he was dying, he requested that the theatres not be closed on account of his death. His wishes were respected. Oscar was also particularly interested in mathematics. In 1887, he set up a contest, to be awarded on the occasion of his 60th birthday in 1889, for "an important discovery in the realm of higher mathematical analysis". The contest listed four potential areas of research, one of which was the
n-body problem in
celestial mechanics, relevant to the stability of the
Solar System.
Henri Poincare, a professor at the
University of Paris, won by submitting an entry showing that even the 3-body problem was unstable, the seminal result in what is now called
chaos theory. King Oscar II was an enthusiast of Arctic exploration. Along with Swedish millionaire
Oscar Dickson and Russian magnate
Aleksandr Mikhaylovich Sibiryakov, he was the patron of a number of pioneering Arctic expeditions in the 1800s. Among the ventures the king sponsored, the most important are
Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld's explorations to the Russian Arctic and
Greenland, and
Fridtjof Nansen's Polar journey on the
Fram. Oscar was also a generous sponsor of the sciences and personally funded the
Vega Expedition, which was the first Arctic expedition to navigate through the
Northeast Passage, the sea route between Europe and Asia through the
Arctic Ocean, and the first voyage to circumnavigate Eurasia. ==Death==