Author Archives: Camden Xiang

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →