The Brides of Midsummer

By Vilhelm Moberg

For centuries, people have celebrated every Midsummer's Eve at an ancient spring near a small Swedish village. On that special night, when unmarried men and women dance and some unusual activities are permitted, the Bridal Spring has special powers.

Vilhelm Moberg introduces four musicians on the last day that each one will ever know: a curmudgeonly fiddler from the 1930s, a sad and conscientious key-harp player from the plague era of 1711, a ne'er-do-well who plays the flute in 1545, and a goat-horn blower from prehistoric times who, like the others, only seeks happiness with a woman. Binding their stories together is the voice of the Bridal Spring itself, tart and grudgingly compassionate—and slow to reveal its secret.

Each progression backward in time reflects Moberg's rich knowledge of folklore and shows the changes in everyday life in Sweden's past. First published in 1946, before the Emigrants novels, The Brides of Midsummer is a complex, compelling journey through the arc of human life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780873519359

Vilhelm Moberg

Vilhelm Moberg was born in Småland, Sweden. His most famous work is a series of four novels--The Emigrants, Unto a Good Land, The Settlers, and Last Letter Home, all published in Sweden between 1949 and 1959, chronicling one Swedish family's migration to Minnesota in the mid- to late nineteenth century--a story that mirrored some of the author's own relatives' lives.

Book preview

THE SPRING

Iam water. I am the beginning. I was before the oaks, the grass, and the flowers. I was before the beasts that graze the grass. I was before hovering wing and scurrying foot. I was before the birds, the bees, and the bumblebees.

I was before sorrow and gladness. I was before the tears and the laughter. I was before the song, the music, and the dancing. I was before the torment, the suffering, and the anguish here on earth. I was before mankind.

From earth’s darkest, innermost recesses flow my veins, known to no one. Yet, here, I surface at the foot of the hill. Here, I reflect the crowns of the oak trees and follow the generations of man throughout the world.

I am the spring. I am the beginning.

Time I

I, ANDERS ERIKSSON, OLD SPELMAN:¹

Every Midsummer’s Eve, I play my fiddle on the hill where the oak tree stands and where the villagers have raised their pole to see Midsummer’s Day in. My place is inside this old hollow oak, where a board has been nailed up to serve as a seat for the spelman. Here I sit with my fiddle, deep within the ancientness of the rotting oak, playing so the young can dance.

For over forty years, I’ve played on Midsummer’s Night at the oak hill. In my younger days, I would allow myself to act hard-to-get when they would ask me to bring my fiddle to play for them all through the night as they awaited Midsummer’s Day. I was the only spelman then—there was no one else they could ask. Now, I get asked out of habit, and only at Midsummer. Other spelmen have cropped up, able to play other instruments. Now, it’s the accordion they want. The fiddle is no longer the undisputed master. My fiddle is too old, my tunes are too old, I myself am too old now; I’m over sixty. There are younger spelmen. Now, all they want me for is to relieve some young stripling accordion player. So, once a year, at Midsummer, they’ll put up with a bit of fiddling. I dare not play hard-to-get any more. I’m no longer indispensable. I am soon to be discarded, no longer the obvious king of the spelman’s throne in the hollow oak tree.

Here on the hill of the oak tree, in our old cutting field, we have welcomed Midsummer for as long as anyone can remember. A better gathering spot than this haying field of ours is not to be found in our land. The soil is rich and fertile with all the flowers and grasses you could imagine, and all around stand the old oaks, forever unchanging as I’ve known them to be for as long as I’ve lived. These trees are stationary, patient, ponderous, slow to grow up and just as slow to wither. The same hollow wherein I sit and play tonight is where I used to crawl in as a boy for a game of hide and seek; that’s how long the oak’s old age lasts. And here, among the big oak trees, at the summit of the hill, the ground is even and flat, the floor spread there by God for the feet of the dancers. In the field at the bottom of the hill, there flows a spring where the dancers can drink their fill after working up a sweat and a thirst from their twirling. When I cease playing, and if people’s merrymaking stops for just one single moment, I can hear the purling of the spring.

Still, I’d rather take myself and my fiddle to other dances. Here, on the hill of the oak tree, I’ve never felt that real fiddler’s joy. I’ve played at crossroads, in barns, at open-air dance floors and play-grounds, and experienced that perfect sense of everything working in harmony. But here, in our mowing field, my hands feel clumsy; the fiddle strings feel harsh and uncooperative. Maybe it’s something I’m imagining—I’m often fooled by my tendency to imagine things. Maybe the truth is that I simply know too much about this place. I know the truth about the soil where the young are dancing tonight. I know the secret of the hill with its oak tree.

It’s my imagination that conjures up these pictures from the past before my eyes. The young know nothing, or wish to know nothing—they care nothing for stories that happened hundreds of years ago. I am about the only one to know about this place.

Though I know the secret of the hill and the oak tree, I come here once every year to play the night through. These days, this is the one and only time they’ll want my playing. This is the bitter, humiliating truth—this is the only time of the whole round year when I get to play for the dancers. I’ve been trying to keep from admitting it to myself for as long as possible, but this is how things stand with old spelman Anders Eriksson.

It used to be a well-known fact that my fiddle made a good partner to the dancing. My tunes were treasured for their fine sense of rhythm. It’s true I don’t know many dance tunes: three waltzes, four polkas, three hambos, one shottish, and one polka-mazurka. But these tunes, I know them well, backward and forward. I’m so familiar with them that I can play them asleep in my bed. I learned these pieces as a boy; I played them better and better as time went on. I was comfortable with them, I entrenched myself in my tunes, and that’s how I ended up not trying any new ones. And they will do for a whole evening of dancing—once I’ve played through all twelve of them, so much of the evening has gone by that I can simply strike up the waltz I started with and let the rest follow in the same order. And these pieces that I’ve played thousands of times, for thousands of dancing couples, played through my entire youth, as a grown man and now at the beginning of old age, they’re named after me—this is Anders’ waltz, Anders’ hambo and Anders’ polka. These tunes are well known; but people won’t dance to them any more except on Midsummer’s Eve. We have younger spelmen now.

At times, I’ll simply play the tunes to myself. It happens when I sit in the dreary loneliness of my little cottage. And it’s almost sure to happen when I’ve brought a liter of brandy home with me. And I play for no one but myself.

It’s as green and lush now as ever here in our haying field in summer, and the night is as bright as it ever gets where we live. And with all this greenery, and with this daylight, the difference between youth and old age melts away before one’s eyes. It’s enough to make me wonder what old age is. I start wondering where the years are, my own years that are gone, and I wonder where are the years that will be. The leaves on the oak branches and the light from the sky that glows over them are ageless. The lush grass of the cutting field, soon to be mowed, is just like last year’s grass, the year before that, and all the summers that passed before, they have no age. And the spring that runs down over the slope in its runnel, she has no age; she sings her water song as it has been sung all through time …

So, here I sit playing my fiddle on this board someone nailed up inside the oak that has no age, on this eternal Midsummer night. And I ask myself, how long have I been sitting here? I ask myself if it isn’t for more than forty Midsummer nights, if I haven’t been playing here for as long as the spring has kept tinkling and cascading her water down her furrow?

From up here in the oak tree, I have a good overview of fields and meadows. Over the green stripes of the field boundaries, the path runs up here to the hill, and between the squares with their tall rye and low oats, I see the stragglers, boys and girls, approaching on foot. The autumn rye is in full bloom and manhood at Midsummer, its ears giving off that smell somewhat reminiscent of a female in heat that drives men mad. Midsummer’s Night is made pregnant with bread—bread steaming and ready for the ovens. Tonight, the rye is foaming.

I am playing my old dip waltz. It takes limber knees to dance it. That one isn’t for those of us whose limbs have acquired the stiffness of old age, not for men like me. But in my younger years, I was considered a fairly nimble dance partner. At least, the girls told me I was a good leader. A good ear for rhythm is the hallmark of a spelman, that’s like saying two and two makes four, but that doesn’t always mean that one who can play is also a good dancer. I know some seasoned spelmen who can’t take one step on the dance floor and simply would never be able to learn.

After the dip waltz, I want a sip from my flask. Inside my pocket, I grope for it. I’ve inherited it from my father. There is a flower painted on the glass of the flask—I’m not sure what kind it’s supposed to represent—and below that, some printed words: your health, my brother! Those are comfortable, friendly words to see on a brandy flask—words of comradeship—they give you the feeling you’re not drinking alone. They are good and welcome words for me, who almost always must drink alone—at least of late. As I uncork the flask, it’s as if I saw my father open his long-bearded mouth and snort for the draft—that sound of contentment. I imagine that men who lived before him and perhaps drank from that same flask are with me in my little cottage as I take a swig. Through the years, I have derived much solace from what was inside the bottle, but those four words on the outside have brought me consolation as well.

I bring the flask to my mouth a few times. I greet all those who drank from it before me: your health, my brother!

My flask has already been refilled for this Midsummer watch. The brandy is my entire spelman’s wages.

After the sip of brandy, I take some time tuning my fiddle. The strings are unwilling; I can’t quite recognize them. They seem bent on not producing the sound I want, but a sound all their own. Maybe it’s the night dampness that causes it.

Now, I’ll play the piece that garnered me the most praise in my youth, the Bökevara Polka. I’ve named it after the village where I first heard it at a dance pavilion. In order to keep it in my head, I kept whistling it all the way home. I kept on whistling it until my chest grew quite ragged with exhaustion. Once I was home, I couldn’t go to bed until I’d learned to play the new polka on my fiddle. I hadn’t lost one single little bar of it; it was all there in my head. My playing woke up the whole house. Father got up and shouted and hollered and threatened. The way he was made, music was torture to him, be it from an accordion, a fiddle, a guitar, a pump organ or psalmodikon, he said it cut him like knives. But further back in time, there were supposedly spelmen in my family; I’ve been told we had one who played the fela,² as it was called then. At that hour before dawn, I was aware of nothing but the new polka. It was summer and, before I knew it, the sun poured in, gilding the dirty floor of my chamber with its glow. At last, Father came in and punched me hard a few times, making my earlobes smart and burn and my ears ring for days afterward. But I had learned that polka, there wasn’t a glitch anywhere, I knew it from start to finish. By then, I was able to go to bed happy. I was in such good spirits that morning I can’t remember ever feeling anything like it. My ears kept ringing and whooshing after Father’s wallops, but inside my head, there played quite a different song.

The Bökevara Polka—oh, it can put some life back into any human body, be it ever so deeply buried in the mire of lumbering stodginess. With that polka, I believe my fiddle could move a skeleton to lift its bony knuckles, at least for an inch or so. It smarts the skin like the crack of a whip; it cracks like the whip itself. At the turn following the first repeat, it bursts into a driving, sizzling frenzy: Crack! Crack! Then, even the old folks standing around the walls watching the dancers can be seen moving their feet, then even the lame and crippled start stamping and wiggling their toes. There isn’t a God-made man or woman who can bear to sit still then. Ah, with that polka, I have succeeded in playing many a young and lusty couple into exhaustion, dripping with sweat. Then, the couple might go outside to cool off, maybe to kiss and cuddle for a while. One or two young ones may have caught a chill afterward, maybe even pneumonia. My fiddle and the Bökevara Polka have, in all likelihood, been the death of some young lad or lass. It is all part of good dance music and the strange puzzle that makes up our lives. Oh, it is a fine polka, that one!

Sure enough, droplets of sweat are running down my forehead as I finish the Bökevara Polka and lower the fiddle from beneath my chin. The strings keep vibrating for quite a while afterward, though no bow is touching them. They tremble as if completely exhausted from driving the dancers round the maypole. Mine was the instrument that whipped the many couples round and round down in the grassy field. For a short while, the young ones in the prime of their growing have been forced into obeying my fiddle.

I take a few more swigs from my flask. I’ve already finished my own Midsummer brandy—I’m now drinking my spelman’s wages. Your health, my brother!

My brothers always told me I was careless of myself and would, therefore, never reach old age. I never believed them.

I was the eldest of five children, but I was never drawn to farming, so our family homestead was given to my two youngest brothers to share. I built myself a small cottage on the least arable share of the land. That’s where I’ve stayed ever since, earning my living from this and that. In our village, I am the man folks will hire for the odd jobs. I am skilled in such things that require delicate hands and a light touch. For my basic upkeep, a few things were given to me from my childhood home. I’ve suffered neither cold nor starvation. And whenever I could afford to, I sent for a liter of brandy.

They were right: I have been careless of myself, yet here I am, an old man.