This book gives a survey of the text structure of mediaeval Swedish historiography written in Latin and in Old Swedish. Four different types of texts are considered, namely (1) lists of kings, (2) annals, (3) rhymed chronicles, and (4) prosaic chronicles written in a scholarly manner.

Characteristics common to all the historiographical texts are: They are mainly concerned with actions (and mostly actions of specific kinds such as 'be in power', 'go to war', 'kill' or 'travel'), and only to a very small degree with events or static conditions. Those involved in the actions are to a very large degree individual, male officials from the upper social classes, passive roles may be played also by collectives, sometimes referring to lower social classes. The syntax is simple, also in the Latin texts, without any remarkable amount of embedded clauses or adnominal phrases.

The main differences between the texts is their use of pragmatic explicity (esp. in recording causal connections), their communicativeness (involvement of the text producer and the text consumer), and their use of direct and indirect speech (esp. in pragmatic purposes).