WITH its cobblestone streets, vibrant intellectual community and relaxed ambience, Lund is an archetypal college town in Sweden’s southernmost county of Skane (pronounced SKOH-nah). Surrounded by farmland and rolling fields, the town — founded sometime around 990, when the region was still part of Denmark — is thick with history, both modern and ancient, making it an ideal overnight visit from Copenhagen.

If you talk to a local — and you will, since everyone from the aproned woman behind the bakery counter to the spiky-haired philosophy student is eager to explain the town’s history in flawless English — you’ll hear that Lund was founded by the Viking Sweyn Forkbeard. (By some accounts, Forkbeard, one of Denmark’s kings, also founded Copenhagen, which is less than 40 minutes away across the Oresund strait.)

But if you talk to a local butcher, you’ll get a different history: Lund was built on sausage, sometime around 1960. That sausage is lundaknake, a pungent type of pork and beef knackwurst made only here, and only by Holmgrens & Company. The story goes that when industry was blossoming in the region in the second half of the 20th century, owners and laborers alike more or less survived on the stuff, which has a gamey, smoked flavor and makes an audible snap when you bite into it.

For 11 kronor at the food market, Saluhallen (Martenstorget 1), you can try lundaknake yourself — warm, plain and wrapped in paper for a proper grip. Saluhallen, which opened in 1909, feels like a Swedish cousin to the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. Check out the cheese seller Osthuset for a soft cheese made from the milk of goats or Jersey cows. The Tant Elsa Getost (Aunt Elsa Goat Cheese), for example, has a classic, somewhat stinky aroma (that’s a good thing), with gestures of salt and sweet butter that go perfectly with the strong rye flavor of dark knackebrod, a hard Swedish flatbread.