Discover Sweden : Literature (Comics / News)

The origins

It is rather original to declare that the first literary text of a country was engraved in stone, but this is true in Sweden if we refer to a monumental block of several tons discovered, somewhat by chance, in the wall of a church in 1843. It was not until twenty years later that the Rök stone recovered its vertical position, and that archaeologists began to try to decipher the hundreds of runes, miraculously preserved, that decorated five of its sides. If the text is subject to many interpretations, the last hypothesis in progress wanting that it reveals the fear of a climatic upheaval, it is not less infinitely invaluable since it is about the longest runic inscription known to date in the world, and that it shows, moreover, of a meter so elaborate that it is difficult not to qualify it as literary. Researchers agree that the block would have been engraved in the ^ninth century, that it honors the memory of a son who died in battle and that it mentions mythological elements that associate it with Viking culture.

Contrary to other countries of ancestral Scandinavia, notably Iceland, legends were transmitted in Sweden through oral tradition rather than in writing, but because of their common past it is impossible not to mention the great sagas and other eddas written in the ^twelfth and ^thirteenth centuries, especially since these works, which mixed history and myth, would later influence Swedish writers. However, the Middle Ages saw mainly the writing of legal texts which gave way, thanks to Christianity which had gradually taken root from the ^11th century onwards, to a religious literature which mainly used Latin. Thus, Petrus de Dacia, born on the island of Gotland around 1235, is remembered for his correspondence with the German beguine Christiana de Stommeln, who suffered from the stigmata at the age of 15, and for whom he wrote a Life of the Blessed Virgin of Christ. In the same mystical lineage, St. Brigid of Sweden (1303-1373) left Revelations, transcribed and published in Rome in 1455 by the monk Peter, prior of Alvastre, and distributed as far as France under the title Les Prophéties merveilleuses de sainte Brigitte. Churchmen also sometimes indulged in a so-called secular genre, like Thomas Simonsson (1380-1443) whose last stanzas of his poem Engelbrektsvisan, known as the Song of Freedom, have remained famous and resonate by their historical theme with the medieval chronicles then very popular. The oldest surviving example is Erik's Chronicle, which remained anonymous but was certainly composed around 1325. Written in free verse that seeks simple rhyme rather than poetic purity, it tells the story of Prince Erik Magnusson. Other chronicles will sing in the same way the praises of certain crowned heads.

If Catholicism was an important trigger, Protestantism, which appeared at the beginning of the ^sixteenth century with the arrival in power of Gustav ^I Vasa, marked another shift, although it was more in form than in content. The era did not favour the development of a rich cultural life, nor of an education accessible to the greatest number of people, as the difficulties encountered by the famous University of Uppsala, which saw the closure of its chairs not dedicated to theology and the departure of its students, notably to Germany, seem to confirm. However, two brothers - Olaus and Laurentius Petri - were to give a translation of the Bible into Swedish at the request of the king (1541), which would lay the foundations of a modern language, quite different from the Old Swedish used in the Middle Ages, and even more so from the precursor Norse. At the same time, another fraternal duo, Johannes (1488-1544) and Olaus (1490-1557) Magnus, were interested in the history of the country, the first in Historia de omnibus Gothorum Sueonumque regibus, a work in which he referred to the theories of Nils Ragvaldsson, archbishop of Uppsala in the ^fifteenth century, which was published in Rome in 1554; the second in Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus which was also published in the Italian capital the following year. They then laid the foundations of a theory, Gothicism, which would have the Swedes be the descendants of the Goths.

National literature

Georg Stiernhielm seems to embody the perfect synthesis of these two currents that experiment with research on language and the affirmation of a national identity. Born in 1598 and raised in the Bergslagen region, his studies led him to live in Germany and then in the Netherlands before returning to his native land where he devoted himself to linguistics. If some of his theories suggesting that Old Norse was the origin of all languages have since been contradicted, his dexterity in the art of hexameter - verses of six feet inspired in their form by Greek and Latin standards - will lead him to be proclaimed the father of Swedish poetry, especially for his masterpiece Hercules. This long epic poem, some of his ballet librettos, as well as texts written during the reign of Christine of Sweden, who had ennobled him, are now available in French translation from Les Belles Lettres.

The country was then asserting itself on the international scene and literature was experiencing a real renaissance. This was all the more true when the following century, in the so-called Age of Enlightenment, saw the birth of two men of great stature. The first was Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), an ingenious philosopher and scientist, author of The Book of Dreams, who was often compared to Leonardo da Vinci. The second was Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795), a songwriter whose taste for caricature and parody made him a soul brother of Anacreon, and who left Fredman's Epistles to posterity. In the ^18th century, literary and artistic academies flourished, as well as circles, such as the one held by the poet and translator Anna Maria Lenngren. Without diminishing those of England or Denmark, the French influence predominated and became a source of inspiration, for example for Olof Dalin (1708-1763) who launched the weekly Svenska Argus and caused a sensation with his first tragedy, Brynilda.

However, it was under the aegis of Germany that Sweden embraced Romanticism, certainly on the initiative of a pastor's son who became a professor of philosophy, Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom, born in 1790 in Östergötland and died in 1855 in Stockholm. In 1807, he founded an artistic society, L'Aurore, and launched a magazine, Phosphoros, which gave its name to a current of thought. His Romanticism will take root in the midst of texts by other authors, and will blossom in his collection Blommorna(The Flowers) which resonates with the work of Novalis, and in his poems collected under the title Lycksalighetens Ö(The Island of Bliss).

The period also saw the reappearance of Gothicism under the pen of Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783-1847), but he took on new guardian figures, as suggested by the title of his poem The Vikings, which he published in the first issue of the journal Iduna, created by the Götiska förbundet, an association founded in 1811 with the avowed aim of rediscovering "the spirit of virility and freedom of the old gods. Geijer eventually abandoned nationalism in favor of liberalism, and left his History of the Swedes unfinished. His colleague Esaias Tegnér (1782-1846), who had revived the genre of the saga with the one devoted to Frithiof published in 1825, turned fully to religion after he had been appointed bishop. The picture would not be complete without mentioning the phenomenal work of Carl Jonas Love Almqvist (1793-1866), who was the first to address the issue of gender equality in Sara (1839), one of his many novels, this theme was later developed by Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865), who wrote Hertha (1856), a landmark work that led to the amendment of the marriage law two years later and initiated her feminist activism.

Modernists and contemporaries

In the middle of the century, in 1849, one of Sweden's greatest writers was born. His play Mademoiselle Julie, acclaimed far beyond the country's borders, also evokes the relationship between a man and a woman, and was published in 1888, along with Années de pèlerinage et de vagabondage by his future great rival, Verner von Heidenstam. Complex and tortured, August Strindberg exploited the symbolist vein after having explored naturalism, and in so doing became an emblem of both the modernist and Swedish expressionist movements. This prolific writer is best known for his theater, of course, but also for his semi-autobiographical texts(Le Plaidoyer d'un fou, published by Sillage, or Inferno in Gallimard's L'Imaginaire). Equally famous, especially among children, was her near-contemporary Selma Lagerlöf, who gave her first cry in 1858. An embodiment of the regionalist movement, she wrote Nils Horlgersson's Wonderful Journey Across Sweden, which is still available in many versions, with varying degrees of illustration. In 1910, she also became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, at the dawn of a new century that promises to be much darker, as suggested by the work of a writer held in high esteem by the Swedes, Hjalmar Bergman (1883-1931), who is unfortunately hard to find in French translation. Obsessed by the gulf between dreams and reality, a subject that preoccupied him as early as Solivro (1906), he continued his exploration of the human psyche and its mechanisms in some twenty novels, notably Markurells i Wadköping (1919) and Clownen Jac (1930). The same force animated the work of Pär Lagerkvist (1891-1974), future Nobel Prize winner in 1951, who was partly discovered by Stock. Barabbas was hailed by the greatest, and his cruel tale Le Nain forever shapes souls.

The inter-war period was marked by a new awareness of societal problems, in the pure vein of realism: writers from proletarian backgrounds shared their feelings, as did their leaders, Eyvind Johnson(Écartez le soleil, Dolorosa, Le Roman d'Olof, etc.) and Harry Martinson(Même les orties fleurissent, Il faut partir, La Société des vagabonds, etc.), who together won the Nobel Prize in 1974. This new-found lucidity was to stay with authors such as the late Stig Dagerman (1923-1954), whose quasi-journalistic writings, and Per Olov Enquist (1934-2020), whose well-documented approach led to remarkable novels published by Actes Sud(Blanche et Marie, Le Livre des paraboles). In 1945, Astrid Lindgren published Fifi Brindacier, which quickly became a classic of children's literature. Poets, for their part, allowed themselves other aims, such as Gunnar Ekelöf, who tasted surrealism, Erik Lindegren, who fell in love with music, and Göran Tunström, who flirted with magic realism.