In his study of Carl Michael Bellman literary historian Gustaf Ljunggren (1823-1905) compared the Swedish poet not only to the traditional object of comnaprison, the ancient Greek poet Anacreon, but also to the Persian fourteenth-century poet Hafiz.This article revisits Ljunggren's work in light of recent discussions about world literature and the role of historical scale in literary studies. I investigate how a change of scale, in large part due to the pressures of professionalization, created many of the prevailing assumptions concerning the proper object of Swedish literary studies and its connections to the literature of other countries. In Ljunggren's work we find an interesting alternative to the view of nation and periodization that came to dominate the discipline.