A chronicle of the Thirty Years' War, The Canteen Maiden Courage and Her Children (1939), was written by Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) while in exile in Sweden. The first production of the play took place in 1941 in Zurich. The literary prototypes for Brecht's heroine were the canteen maid Courage from the novel Contra Simplex (c. 1669) by Hans Jacob Christoffel Grimmelshausen (c. 1622–1676), and the canteen maid Lotta Svärd from the poetic epic The Tales of Fenric Ståhl (1860) by the Finnish poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804–1877); however, there are no direct parallels with either these characters or the events of these works in Brecht's play.