Writings of L. G. Kumlien and the evidence of several Swedish gymnastics

Swedish gymnastics, systematized by Pehr Henrik Ling (1776-1839) at the Stockholm Central Institute of Gymnastics (CIG), spread throughout the world, at least until the last decades of the 20th century, especially from the circulation of individuals trained at the CIG. Among them was Ludvig Gideon Kumlien (1874-1934), a Swedish doctor-gymnast who graduated from the Stockholm Institute, who moved in 1895 to Paris, France, where he carried out different actions to promote Ling's gymnastics, among them publishing handbooks. What do these handbooks reveal? Can we assert that the gymnastics promoted by Kumlien is Ling's gymnastics? Or that it is the same gymnastics he learned at CIG? In contact with a culture different from his own, does Kumlien alter the gymnastics he learned? Thus, this article aims to understand which gymnastics Ludvig Kumlien has promoted in his handbooks. To do so, we mobilized as sources the handbooks written by Kumlien and his partners and newspaper reports from the countries in which his writings circulated. By analyzing Ludvig Kumlien's guidebooks, we observed that the gymnastics he divulged in French territory were transformed through contact with a new culture, becoming new gymnastics, different from that proposed by Ling and taught in the CIG.