Nils Collin, the last New Swede

Nils Collin (1746-1831) is a completely unknown person. He doesn’t have an English Wikipedia article, only a Swedish one. He never did anything spectacular; he was just a priest, serving his congregation faithfully until his death. So what’s so interesting about him? Well, it’s that his congregation wasn’t in Uppland, where he was born, but in Philadelphia.

New Sweden, a Swedish colonisation project along the Delaware River, only lasted from 1638 to 1655, when the colony was conquered by the Dutch. But the settlers who had come from Sweden (many of whom from present-day Finland) to America remained, and some of them moved to the area of present-day Philadelphia. That’s where they built the Gloria Dei Church which stands to this day. Priests were dispatched from Sweden to tend to the souls of the remaining Swedes well into the 18th century. The last one was Collin, who arrived at Trinity Church in present-day Swedesboro, New Jersey (then called Raccoon). In 1786 he moved to Philadelphia.

Because Collin was only 24 when he came to America as a freshly-minted graduate from Uppsala University, he would carry on the traditions of the congregation deep into the 19th century. Already when he was dispatched to America, the Swedish-speaking community must have been mostly reduced to older speakers, and at the time of his death it must have been completely gone – the originally Swedish-speaking community would have gradually shifted to English. Philadelphia being an important city in the early American Republic, one must imagine that there would have been temporary Swedish visitors in the city to whom Collin could preach, since by the 1820s there would almost certainly be no one left among his original flock who could understand him.

I don’t think it would be amiss to call Nils Collin the last New Swede, if by that one means the last person to maintain the Swedish language institutions in the former New Sweden colony. The interesting thing is both that the Swedish language would survive for so long (almost 200 years), and that just 10 years after his death, Gustaf Unonius would begin the second wave of Swedish emigration, which would grow to a far wider scale and have massive consequences for Swedish society. But that time Chicago, not Philadelphia, would be the centre of Swedishness in America.

Gunnar Björling’s 30,000 poems

According to German Wikipedia, Gunnar Björling (1887-1960), the Finland-Swedish modernist, wrote at least 30,000 poems – at any rate, that’s the number of poems by his hand kept by Åbo Akademi, the Swedish-language university in Turku.

30,000 poems. By a single man. It sounds like something out of Chinese or Indian history, a life’s work on a Mahabharatan scale. If we for simplicity’s sake assume that he started writing poems in 1900, when he was thirteen, and kept writing until his death 60 years later, he would have written 500 poems a year. More than one a day, that is. Now, writing a poem a day (or even two a day) certainly isn’t an impossible thing to do for a professional writer, at least not if you keep them short.* But to keep it up, year after year, decade after decade… It makes you think of the vastness of our human capacity.

Another interesting thing is that the Wikipedia article mentions that Björling’s father, Edvard, was a war veteran. But in which war? Finland had been at peace since 1809, when  the country was taken by the Russians. The Russification policies of the late 19th century had not yet begun in earnest, so to my knowledge Finnish military units did not have to fight in Russian wars. Otherwise the most obvious option would seem to be the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. Of course, Edvard might have served in the Russian army voluntarily, or he might have gone abroad and fought in some other war (many Swedes participated in the American Civil War, for instance). Here’s a mystery worth following up.

*Which he also seems to have done. The Swedish Nationalencyklopedin mentions that “The short poem and the aphorism are Björling’s genres.” Though the short but pithy poem, aphorism or epigram may well require more time to craft than a long but rambling poem.

Got my Mojo Working

Peps Persson, perhaps Sweden’s leading blues artist, once made a cover of Muddy Waters’ Got My Mojo Working. In Swedish, it’s called Min trollmoj funkar (on Spotify here). I’ve not been able to locate the exact year when this version was first recorded. It seems Persson first made a recording in English on the album Sweet Mary Jane, first released 1969 (or possibly the year before).

funkar is the present tense of the verb funka, meaning ‘to function; to work’. It has a somewhat informal quality. The Nationalencyklopedins ordbok (Dictionary of the Swedish National Encyclopedia) tells us that the word has been attested since 1970, and that it’s formed to the verb funktionera, ‘to function’. I wonder about that, though: it’s equally probable that it came directly from the much more common verb fungera, with the same meaning. Further, the dating is interesting: NEO, as any dictionary, can only trace words to the year when they were first put in print, but although the word may have been used in speech several years before the first written attestation, it would still sound fairly fresh by the time Persson wrote his translation, which was, if I hazard an educated guess, some time in the 1970s.

But what about the word trollmoj? We don’t find it listed in the Swedish Academy Glossar (SAOL) or in the big Swedish Academy Dictionary (SAOB). Its exclusion from the latter indicates that, among the excerpts available to the Dictionary’s edition, it’s not found more than once, if at all. It seems to be a hapax legomenon, a word coined by Persson in that particular instance. But where does it come from?

It’s evidently a compound, where the first element, troll-, in all the Scandinavian languages is a word which has to do with magic and witchcraft (apart from when it’s used on its own, when it simply means a troll). But what about the second element, -moj? Well, when I looked in the SAOL, which is supposed to be fairly definitive (especially for words beginning with T, which have been published the last years or so), it only gave one plausible hit for the word moj: “stuff, mess, scrap, garbage, (insufferable or unimportant) nonsense”. The etymology is German (High or Low). I thought that Persson had used this word, but associated it to the word mojäng (from French moyen), which means ‘thingamajig’. However, moj as given by SAOL was neuter, while trollmoj as used by Persson is common-gender. Perhaps, I thought, the association to mojäng, which is also common-gender, as well as the general meaning of “a thing which does something, which acts upon some other thing” would have led it to be regarded as common.

But I was surprised to see NEO give a much better explanation. It lists the common-gender noun moj with the meaning ‘small (technical) object’, and sets the first date of attestation to 1898. It further refers the reader to the word petmoj, which means ‘number disc on a telephone’: the first element here comes from the verb peta, ‘to poke’, and it is first attested 1931. The etymology of this moj is basically the same as for the previous word, namely Low German moie, ‘work, effort’ (SAOL on moj, ‘stuff, garbage’ seems to indicate that the etymology derives from or at least is related to some form of German, where NEO puts its foot down and categorically says that it comes from Low German specifically – though if that’s true, we should in fact expect the word to be much older in Swedish, since the number of Low German loanwords in Swedish after c. 1550 is extremely low).

It turns out that the word petmoj after all is found in SAOB, under peta. Apparently, the editors did not consider it worthwhile to insert a special article about the word moj, ‘thingy, object’ in its own right.

I should finally add that moj isn’t a part of my own idiolect – in fact, the only place where I’ve ever heard it is in Persson’s song. One must say that he’s found an unusually good (and interesting!) word with which to translate English mojo.

Transitive and intransitive verbs

For some verbs, Swedish makes a distinction between transitive and intransitive. The intransitive verb is usually strong, whereas the transitive verb is usually weak. We can take an English example to see how this works out:

lie (transitive), lay, laid
lay (intrans.), laid, lain

The Swedish equivalents are

ligga (intransitive), låg, legat
lägga (trans.), la(de), lagt

Further examples:

‘burn’

brinna (intrans.), brann, brunnit
bränna (trans.), brände, bränt

‘sit/set’

sitta (intrans.), satt, suttit
sätta (trans.), satte, satt

‘freeze’

frysa (intrans.), frös, frusit
frysa (trans.), fryste, fryst

The last verb is quite interesting, as it is only in modern times, with the rise of the freezer, that we’ve been given the ability to freeze something, rather than just freezing intransitively.

The Forest of Hours

Previously, I blogged about Selma Lagerlöf’s epic Gösta Berling’s Saga, a rambling work heavily steeped in folklore and with a touch of magic realism. Now it’s time for a fairly similar work, namely Kerstin Ekman’s Rövarna i Skuleskogen (1988, in English The Forest of Hours, 1998). The central character of the book is a troll, Skord, and the story begins sometime in the 14th century: no dates are made explicit, but we sense that Sweden is still a Catholic country, Magnus Eriksson is king, and so on. When we first encounter Skord he is very childlike: he has no ability to speak and no relation to other humans. Over time, however, he becomes increasingly human, perhaps even surprisingly so: he learns many languages, acquires a great learning in philosophy and medicine, seduces a number of women and so on. Only very rarely is his nature as a troll ever caught out. He is always able to slither away, to take to the woods, in a society where central control and disciplination is not yet so firmly established as in ours. At some points he returns to his home, the Skule forest in Ångermanland along the north-central Swedish coast line (the area which is today known as the High Coast and a Unesco World Heritage site) where he lives with the robbers that give the book its Swedish title.

You see, Skord is very long-lived. In fact, he lives well into the 19th century, a time when the changes in society are finally beginning to radically transform people’s way of life. It is no surprise that Skord passes away just as the railroads begin to be rolled out: how could he, a troll and thus ultimately an anachronism, survive in the modern world? Skord’s long life is what gives the story its frame and its epic scope: we cannot follow exactly everything that he does, but instead we encounter him every now and then, in different times and places in north European history.

What I like about this approach is that it provides a sense of cohesion and context, on many levels: we see how foreign intellectual influences, both from Christian and profane culture, penetrate deep into the Swedish forests, at the same time as the ordinary lives of people remain fairly much the same throughout the centuries. It is a picture that deserves to be painted on a broad canvas, and Ekman does precisely that.

I haven’t read the English translation, but apparently it has been awarded for its quality. That is only to be welcomed, because the text requires a good and careful translation. Two things leap to mind: firstly, the use of dialectal forms that sometimes challenge even a learned reader, and secondly the plentiful use of Latin. When translating dialectal forms occurring in a text otherwise written in Standard Swedish, the task of course is to preserve the impression that there is something odd with the forms, without making a mockery of the text or rendering it unintelligible. With the Latin forms it is the case that until the 18th century and the works of Linnaeus and the others, Swedish was not a scientific language: the Latin forms appear unaltered, their intrusion leading to Swedish-Latin code mixing. English is able to more easily absorb Latin forms: a phrase such as prima materia must remain the same in Swedish, but can be turned into ‘prime matter’ in English. The Latin forms appear less alien in English than in Swedish, both because they’re not adopted unchanged and because they’re made out of words that are domiciled in English. On the contrary, keeping the Latin forms in an English translation might provide a strange impression.

Anyway. I thoroughly recommend this book to an English-speaking audience. It provides the kind of grand narrative which is unusual in contemporary Swedish literature but which is desperately needed.

The Wall and the Books

Evert Taube (1890-1976) was one of the greatest exponents of the Swedish ballad tradition, but he also wrote poems and other literature. One of these poems he later set to music and performed in a rhythmical style slightly reminiscent of old-school rap. It’s called “Muren och böckerna” (‘The Wall and the Books’). (If you have Spotify, the link is here. Otherwise there is a Youtube version here, billed as “the world’s first rap song”.) I thought I’d provide a translation. The lyrics are taken from Dag Vag’s website, emended by me since they were slightly abridged when checked against the original.

Det var Chi-Huang-Ti, kung av Tsin
Som lät bygga den kinesiska muren
Och bränna alla böcker i Kina
Detta hände på Hannibals tid, innan Jesus var född
Det var kungen av Tsin, Chi-Huang-Ti
Kring alla kungariken han besegrat
Lät han bygga den kinesiska muren
Muren blev 2000 kilometer lång, sex kungariken blev ett
Det var kungen av Tsin, Chi-Huang-Ti
Som blev orsak till kinesiska hostan
Den svåra brandrökshostan i Kina
Hostan spreds från miljoner bål
Där Kinas böcker brann

Det var kungen av Tsin, Chi-Huang-Ti
Som lät bränna gula kejsardömets böcker
Changs och Konfutses och Laotses böcker
Kinas historia ska börja med mig, präntade Chi-Huang-Ti
Det var tretusen års kinesisk pränt
Som Chi-Huang-Ti lät bränna uppå båle
För att historien skulle börja med honom
Var och en som gömt någon bok
Blev märkt med glödgat järn
Den som blivit märkt med glödgat järn
Blev sänd till den kinesiska muren
Fick bära sten och mura stenar på muren
Var och en som gömt undan en skrift
Blev slav på Chi-Huang-Tis mur
Ja, det var kungen av Tsin, Chi-Huang-Ti
Som drev ut sin egen moder ur Kina
Han tyckte att hon var för lätt på foten
Domen stred mot kanonisk rätt
Detta var oerhört!

Det kan tänkas att Chi-Huang av Tsin
Ville stryka ut ur minnet allt förgånget
För att därmed döda minnet av sin moder
För att dräpa en enda Messias
Lät ju Herodes döda alla judebarn
Eller skall man tro om Chi-Huang-Ti
Att det var evigt liv han önskade i Kina
Och brände skrifterna för att besvärja tiden
Och sände bort sin mor för att själv bli början
Och byggde muren för att utestänga döden
Med trolleri för det finns inget slut på muren
Gick allting ut på att stänga in och därmed stänga ut?
Över liv och död, i tid och rum
Ville Chi-Huang-Ti måhända regera
Hans palats hade lika många salar
Som året har dagar, för Kinas folk
Blev detta en dyr symbol

Borges har sagt i en märklig skrift
Att skuggan av kinesiska muren
Är skuggan av en härskare som ville
Plåna ut sitt rikes hävder ur historien
Stryka tretti seklers odling bort från jorden
Bygga upp en mur omkring sej själv mot döden
Med palatsets solvarvsrum betvinga tiden
Och att den idén måhända var estetisk
En skönhetssyn av motsättning emellan
Att bränna upp och utplåna från jorden
En världskultur, att låta den försvinna
Som rök och fjun, fin aska i monsunen
Och istället bygga upp en mur kring intet
Och innanför den muren göra något
Som hette Chi-Huang-Ti, kung av Tsin
Chi-Huang-Ti…

It was Shi Huangdi, king of Qin
Who let build the Great Wall of China
And burn all the books in China
This happened in Hannibal’s time, before Jesus was born
It was the king of Qin, Shi Huangdi
Around all the kingdoms he had defeated
He let build the Great Wall
The Wall was 2000 kilometers long, six kingdoms turned into one
It was the king of Qin, Shi Huangdi
Who caused the Chinese cough
The hard fire smoke cough in China
The cough was spread from millions of bonfires
Where the books of China burned

It was the king of Qin, Shi Huangdi
Who let the books of the Yellow Empire be burned
The books of Chang and Konfuze and Laoze
The history of China shall begin with me, printed Shi Huangdi
It was three thousand years of Chinese print
That Shi Huangdi let burn on the fire
To make history begin with him
Anyone who had hid a book
Was branded with glowing iron
One who had been branded with glowing iron
Was sent to the Great Wall
Had to carry stones and brick stones on the Wall
Anyone who had hid a document
Was made a slave on Shi Huangdi’s wall
Yes, it was the king of Qin, Shi Huangdi
Who cast his own mother out of China
He thought that she was too frivolous
The sentence violated canonical law
This was unheard of!

One may think that Shi Huang of Qin
Wanted to erase all past from memory
To thereby kill the memory of his mother
To kill a single Messiah
Herod put all the Jewish children to death
Or should one think of Shi Huangdi
That he desired eternal life in China
And burned the documents to command time
And sent his mother away to make himself the beginning
And built the Wall to shut out death
By magic because there is no end to the Wall?
Was it all based on shutting in, and thereby shutting out?
Over life and death, in time and space
Did Shi Huangdi perhaps wish to reign
His palace had as many rooms
As there are days in the year, for the people of China
This was a costly symbol

Borges has said in a strange document
That the shadow of the Great Wall
Is the shadow of a ruler who wanted
To erase his kingdom’s documents from history
To wipe out thirty centuries of culture from earth
To build up a wall around himself against death
To subdue time with the annual rooms of his palace
And that this idea maybe was aesthetic:
A view of the beauty of the opposition between
Burning up and wiping out from the earth
A world culture, letting it disappear
Like smoke and dust, fine ashes in the monsoon
And instead building up a wall around nothing
And inside of that wall make something
Called Shi Huangdi, king of Qin
Shi Huangdi…

I’m not quite sure whether you can use ‘cough’ as a noun in the sense of ‘a disease which causes you to cough’ the way Taube uses “hosta”, but I couldn’t think of anything better.

Since I’ve quite recently gone to the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm and watched the amazing exhibition featuring some of the soldiers from the famous Terracotta Army, this song feels particularly pertinent.

Staffan stalledräng

As an immediate appendix to the previous post, I couldn’t help but add some clips that show more of the Saint Stephen songs. I should have added that, firstly, the horse connection is seen even more clearly by the fact that the songs are almost always referred to as “Staffan (var en) stalledräng” (‘Stephen (was a) stable boy’), and, secondly, that they’re sung during the Saint Lucy celebrations (“Lucia”) on December 13.

Both of these clips are from the annual Lucia concert in the Stockholm Globe Arena, and give some sense of what a Lucia procession can be like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9cfE4TKgJI&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svAEq90s1NE&feature=related

As you can hear, there are significant differences between the arrangements, even though the text is pretty much the same. However, this text is very different from the text in the folk song referred to in the last post.

Blue Tones

It doesn’t look like much, but on this page you can click yourselves through to pages with many Swedish folk songs, with notes and comments. (Click on the links with the phrase “Sangare”. Some of them even have MP3 files with the original recordings, most made by singers who had learned them as a part of a genuine folk tradition in the agricultural society, but some Christian songs which had been included in psalm books.

There is much interesting material. I will mention two songs. One is sung by Andreas Hoas, born 1865 in Gammalsvenskby in the Ukraine. This recording (MP3 here) is made in 1937, at which time he was probably living in Sweden (many residents of the Swedish-speaking village of Gammalsvenskby emigrated in the interwar period). The song is a choral, but there is no reference to its being included in the Church of Sweden psalm book, which makes it possible that it is a song which was simply handed down through memory. It would have been interesting to hear a profane song from Gammalsvenskby, but unfortunately none are available on this site.

The lyrics are:

Jag vill dig prisa Gud min stryka
jag vill dig evig hålla kär
I allt och framförallt dig dyrka
skall evigt bli min själs begär
Jag endast dig vill höra till
Och vet att du mitt bästa vill

We can translate this as:

I wish to praise Thee, God my strength

I wish to hold Thee dear for ever

In all things and to worship Thee ahead of all

Shall for ever be my soul’s desire

I only wish to belong to Thee

And I know Thou wilt what is best for me.

The song is fairly unremarkable, but it provides a concrete example of the width of the Swedish Sprachraum.

The second example is by Svea Jansson, born 1904, from Nötö, an island in what is today Väståboland Municipality in the Archipelago Sea of southwestern Finland. The file (MP3 here) is only an extract, but it is an interesting variation of the Saint Stephen and Herod tradition, which is found only in Britain and Scandinavia, and which is very richly represented in the Swedish folk tradition. The transcription follows a traditional pattern: many folk songs have one or two lines that return in each verse, and these are only written in the first two verses, and left implicit thereafter.

Sankte Staffan en sannerlig man
– Troen så väl uppå han
Och för vår Herres vilja pinte judan han
Och juda honon pinte
och krönte honom en sten
I Rom var han en hurtig dräng
Och ingen käre sven
Å det var Sankte Staffan

Å Staffan han vattnar fålarna fem
-Troen så väl uppå han
Herodes konungen råder över dem
– Ty vår Staffan vare vår styre och rådeman

Å Staffan han lutar sig i källon ner
Tre ljusa stjärnor såg han där neder

Å Staffan gick hem och sade därav
Tre ljusa stjärnor i källon satt

Så var där en hane både stekter och suden
Och inför Herodes konungen buren

Å är det nu sant som Staffan säger
Så flyg nu upp hane med alla dina fjädrar

Å hanen församlade fjädrarna blå
Så flög han upp både hel och god

Hanen flög upp både fattig och god
Herodes han satt sej i sorgestol

Ett bättre barn var fött i går
Och inför Herodes går konungen god

Ett bättre barn var fött till sist
Och inför Herodes konungen vist

Och huggen av Staffan hand och fot
Det välsigna barnet råder honom bot

Herodes han gick sig åt vägen fram
Där mötte han Staffan en liten man

Staffan han satt’ sej uppå en sten
Solar och månar skolte honom ren

Herodes han satt’ sej uppå en stock
Ormar och drakar rann dör opp

Å får vi int’ staffansbullan full
Så ska vi slå bondens skorsten omkull

Å kan vi inte göra bonden värre men
Så skall vi bär ut varenda en sten

Men får vi en sup slå honom väl full
Så skattar vi dig för en husbonde huld

Saint Stephen a truthful man
– Believe ye so well in him
And after our Lord’s will the Jews tortured him
And the Jews did torture him
And crowned him with a stone
In Rome he was a skilled man
And no dear boy
And that was Saint Stephen

And Stephen he waters his five horses
– Believe ye so well in him
Herod the King rules over them
– Thus be our Stephen our governor and ruler

And Stephen he leans down into the well
Three bright stars sat in the ell

Then there was a rooster both fried and boiled
And carried before Herod the King

And if it now be true what Stephen says
So fly up now rooster with all your feathers

And the rooster gathered his feathers blue
Then he flew up both hale and good

The rooster flew up both poor and good
Herod he sat himself in his seat of mourning

A better child was born yesterday
And before Herod the king walks hale

A better child was born at last
And showed himself before Herod the King

And cut ye off Stephen his hand and foot
The blessed child shall cure him

Herod he walked down the path
There he met Stephen a little man

Stephen he sat down on a log
Suns and moons washed him clean

Herod sat down on a log
Snakes and dragons there came up

And if we don’t get our Stephen’s bun full
We’ll knock the farmer’s chimney down

And if we can’t hurt the farmer any worse
We’ll carry out every single stone

But if we get a dram, fill it well up
We’ll hold you for a faithful farmer.

The text is in parts quite difficult to follow, so the translation may not be entirely correct. A couple of linguistic notes: we note that in the very first verse, there are three different forms which can all be translated with ‘him’: “han”, “honom” and “honon”. “Honom” is the standard Swedish object form of the 3rd person masculine, and “honon” is a Finland-Swedish dialectal form where the final -m has been assimilated to -n under influence from the first -n-. “Han”, however, has a more complex story to tell. Originally, it is the Old Swedish accusative, as such similar to the nominative, also spelled “han”. (I think one of them had a long vowel and the other short, but I can’t remember which is which.) In Middle Swedish as in Middle English, the datives of personal pronouns replaced the accusatives, creating the well-known subject-object distinction. However, “han” remained as an enclitic form, sometimes reduced to “‘n”, and then sometimes expanded to “en”. It seems that the use of this form has increased during the second half of the 20th century, though firm data is very hard to come by. What is certain is that modern-day users of “han”, who certainly include younger speakers, are not limited to enclitic uses of “han”. It is thus common to hear phrases like “Han har jag inte träffat på tio år” (‘Him I haven’t seen in ten years’). It is not considered acceptable in standard written Swedish, however.

The forms “judan” and “juda” I interpret as meaning ‘the Jews’. In standard Swedish today, that would be “judarna”. However, the definite plural nominative displays great variation in the vernacular dialects with regards both to the masculine and the feminine (the neuter forms tend to be a bit easier to predict), and both of these forms are to be found in dialectal use.

The word “stekter” (‘fried’) preserves the old masculine ending, which fits well with “hane” (‘rooster’). We can find further traces of the old three-gender system in the final verse: “slå honom väl full”. This can only refer, I think, to “sup” (‘dram’), and if we check in the SAOB (Swedish Academy Dictionary) we find that this word used to be masculine.

The words “int” and “bär” show apocope of a kind which is very typical of Finland-Swedish, but these forms can also be found in Northern Swedish.

A note on the content: first of all, the legend is that Saint Stephen served in King Herod’s stables when he heard of the birth of Christ and announced that a King of the Jews had been born. Herod then spoke, saying something like “If what you say is true, then the rooster on the table may speak”, at which point the rooster flew up and sang “Christus natus est”. The enraged Herod had Stephen killed, and he thus became the first Christian martyr. (In fact, though, the traditional legend of Saint Stephen of course has him killed after Jesus is dead.)

There are literally hundreds of variants on the Saint Stephen and Herod theme recorded or noted in the Swedish ballad tradition, which makes it one of the most popular themes. There is always a strong connection with horses: the second verse very often concerns Stephen tending to his five horses before daylight. This goes also for the more popular versions, such as the ones I remember singing in school. The song is also connected with the “Stephen’s ride”, where young men used to ride around the area at the crack of dawn, asking for something to drink, and threatening the farmers with retaliation if they wouldn’t give them anything. This is the theme of the last verses. It has been speculated that this custom has deep pre-Christian traditions, and that it may reflect very old Indo-European horse rituals.

On a quote by Runeberg

The majestic blog Poemas del río Wang contains a post on the Hungarian Iranologist Sándor Kégl (1862-1920). One of the tongues mastered by this polyglot was Swedish, and there is a fantastic photo of his diary of Christmas Eve 1903, showing notes made in a half-dozen or so different languages. As you can see, one of them is Swedish, and the note is as follows:

Runeberg
Ej hjelper dock min egen makt,
om ej håller om mig vakt;
så lägger jag min omsorg gladt
på honom både dag och natt.
Han sörjer för
att ondt ej rör
den själ, som honom helt tillhör.

The word Runeberg gives the source away: it is Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804-1877), Finland-Swedish poet, mainly known for his epic Fänrik Ståls sägner (‘The Tales of Ensign Stål’). The passage quoted turns out to be the final verse from the hymn “Kväll eller morgon, varje stund” (‘Evening or Morning, Every Moment’) (fulltext here). It can be given a rough translation:

But my own power does not help,
If He does not watch over me;
Thus gladly I entrust my care
To Him both day and night.
He makes sure
That evil will not touch
that soul, which fully belongs to Him.

By comparing with the Wikisource text we note that Kégl forgot to insert a “han” (‘He’) in the second line.

Kégl writes in the orthography of 1801; this is three years before the orthographic reforms of 1906, and it took a long time before they became fully accepted by all language users anyway. So we note “hjelper” instead of “hjälper”, since some words with the short /e/ phoneme (which had merged with the short /ä/ phoneme) changed their spelling in 1906. We also note that adjectives ending in -d in the common gender take the neuter ending -dt (“gladt” and “ondt”, not modern-day “glatt” and “ont”). This was also the case for past participles, and one thus distinguished between the past participle and the supine in cases such as “Jag har målat huset” (‘I have painted the house’, supine) and “Huset är måladt” (‘The house is painted’, past participle). Today, both words would be spelled “målat”.

March for Uplands Nation

At the two old Swedish universities, Uppsala and Lund, the student nations have a special position. These student societies have been compared to fraternities and sororities at US colleges, which may or may not be an apt comparison. The intolerant attitude towards alcohol on campus in the US certainly stands in stark relief to the situation for the nations, all of which run pubs and even restaurants. Norrlands Nation in Uppsala, the largest of the lot, is reputed to be one of the largest on-licence sellers of alcohol in Northern Europe.

Nations originally arose in the early 17th century as societies that were formed by people from the same province, and retain their provincial names. However, the nations often underwent splits and mergers – the instability is not surprising when one remembers that the student bodies at universities back then were much smaller than they are now. In Uppsala, the current nation system has remained pretty much the same since the mid-19th century. There are 13 nations, and until July 1st this year there was a 14th nation, Skånelandens, which existed as a legal fiction. You see, membership of a nation was compulsory until then, and so a nation was instituted which charged no fees, had no activities, and which did not give its members reciprocal membership rights at the other nations. In other words, it was a nation for students who didn’t want to be members of a nation. But since the compulsory membership (which also covered student unions at all universities, and faculty societies at the University of Stockholm) was removed, we’re down to 13 again.

I mention this partly because I do find the nations to be fascinating features of Swedish university life, but also because I remembered a song in the “song book” of my nation, Uplands Nation. At a formal dinner at a nation, you tend to have a small shot glass of akvavit (Swedish vodka flavoured with traditional herbs) and every now and then, someone proposes a drinking song. You sing the song, and take a shot. There can be quite a lot of songs, and so you need a song book, which each new member is given at the reccegasque (‘freshers’ ball’ might be a loose British English translation).

The Swedish custom of singing drinking songs is fascinating, especially those that are associated with the university culture, but the song I suddenly recalled was a different one. I can’t find it online, and I don’t have my song book with me at the moment, so I can’t tell who it was that wrote it, nor when it was written. The content and the language are definitely second half of the 19th century, though. Anyway, from memory, here is a good example of the bombastic and nationalist singing culture of late-19th century Sweden:

Marsch för Uplands nation

Uppsvearnes tåg går med makt och med ära
Genom den heliga minnenas stad
Fädernas färger var yngling ses bära
Så ridderligt stolt och så fri och så glad
Där borta i bergen står än i sin blomma
Det goda, det prövade uppländska järn
Och syns en sarmat över vågorna komma
Det lånar sig gärna till vapen och värn

Barbar, du främling, kom ej för när
De hårda, de vilda Roslagsskär!
Vänd om, fly dödens okuvade makt
För på stranden går landets ungdom vakt!

I am not going to provide anything but a very fast and loose translation:

March for Uplands Nation

The march of the Uppsvear proceeds with power and glory
Through the holy city of memories
The colours of his fathers each youth is seen to wear
So chivalrously proud and so free and so happy
Yonder in the hills lies yet in its bud
The good, the tested Upplandic iron
And if a Sarmatian is seen coming across the waves
It lends itself happily to arms and defence

Barbarian, stranger, come not too near
The hard, the wild Roslagen skerries!
Turn around, flee the unleashed might of Death
For on the shore the youth of the land keep watch!

Some comments:

(1) The term “Uppsvear” is passed over in silence by the modern Nationalencyklopedin, but presented thus in the second edition of Nordisk Familjebok (1920): “a term existing in the Swedish provincial laws, used for the Svear living in the folklands of Uppland. The name is given in contrast to other Svear, such as “södermännen” [‘the men of the south’, the inhabitants of Södermanland].”

The Svear, in turn, is the historical term for the people living around Lake Mälaren. The Swedish name for Sweden, Sverige, originally comes from a phrase “Svea rike” meaning ‘the realm of the Svear’. They are to be contrasted with the Götar (usefully rendered into English as ‘Geats’, of the Beowulf) who lived on the plains surrounding lakes Vänern and Vättern.

Uppland, stretching from Stockholm in the south almost to Gävle in the north, is a province formed in 1296 from the merger of three folklands, Attundaland, Tiundaland and Fjädrundaland, and the coastal area of Roden (today called Roslagen). If Nordisk Familjebok is to be believed, the medieval term for the inhabitants would have been uppsvear, while today they’re simply called upplänningar. The use of “Uppsvear”, then, beyond fitting with the metre, gives a highly archaic impression.

(2) The author constructs definite nouns with an adjective attribute in the “Danish” fashion, namely by DEFART–ADJ-DEF–NOUN. In Swedish the noun must also have the definite article attached at the end: DEFART–ADJ-DEF–NOUN-DEF.

Let us look at the phrase “det goda, det prövade uppländska järn”. Here, all three adjectives (god, prövad [actually a past participle], uppländsk) have the definite ending. However, in standard Swedish, this would also have to be the case for “järn”. In other words, we would have “det goda, det prövade uppländska järnet“. Swedish is apparently quite unique in marking definiteness in all three places in this way, but this omission of the definite suffix on the noun is quite common in older poetry. In this song, we also have it in the word “Roslagsskär”, which would normally take the fifth declension definite plural ending: “Roslagsskären“.

General comments: I can’t say I know which melody this march has, since I’ve never sung it. It’s not representative of the kinds of songs that are sung at nation dinners nowadays, which tend to be a lot more frivolous and alcohol-focused than this (though not without the occasional flash of poetic genius). But it does illustrate a couple of themes that are worth touching upon. Firstly, obviously, the very long history of Russophobia in Sweden. A “Sarmatian” can sometimes be taken to mean a Pole, but here it is obvious that the Russians are the target. It takes only a brief moment of reflection to realise the absurdity of the epithet “barbarian” to label a people which at that particular moment was bringing forth great literature to an amount Sweden could only dream of, but it certainly speaks of a view of the struggle between Sweden and Russia as being a battle not just between two countries, but between a country belonging to Western civilisation and one which was not.

(One is reminded of the picture below, which is an election poster from the Conservative Party ahead of the lower house elections of 1928. The Social Democrats had formed a technical alliance with the Communists, who were members of Comintern, which provided an open goal for the Conservatives to accuse them of selling out Sweden to Russia. The text reads: ‘Shall the cultural border be shifted farther westwards?’

Anyway. Another theme worth touching upon is the connection between the academic and military lives. There were shooting associations and military exercises for students at university, and from the 17th century the students had been trained in the arts becoming of a nobleman, including being able to ride and to fence. The role of the youth of the country (which I translated as ‘the youth of the land’ to emphasise that the song refers to the province of Uppland and not to Sweden as a whole) is not to become engineers, doctors or teachers, but to guard against the Russians. The students must be ready to join the struggle at any time if the Russians are coming. An academic degree is not a waste, though, since a learned young man may make a fine officer, especially if he is of noble blood.

This song is a minor work in a tradition which was once huge but which has left only a small imprint on the culture of the nation today, at least in the sense that very few of the songs that were produced during this time are still well-known, not to mention actually sung. Their actual poetic worth may not be great, but they do express the prevailing world-view in an interesting way.