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Liksom en Herdinna, högtids klädd (Like a Shepherdess, dressed for a solemn feast), is one of the Swedish poet and performer Carl Michael Bellman's best-known and best-loved songs, from his 1790 collection, Fredman's Epistles, where it is No. 80.
Contents
The epistle is subtitled "Angående Ulla Winblads Lustresa til Första Torpet, utom Kattrumps Tullen" (Concerning Ulla Winblad's pleasure-trip to Första Torpet, outside Kattrump Tollgate).
The Epistle is a pastorale, starting with a near-paraphrase of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux's French guide to the construction of pastoral verse.
Context
Carl Michael Bellman is the central figure in Swedish song, known for his 1790 Fredman's Epistles and his 1791 Fredman's Songs. He played the cittern, accompanying himself as he performed his songs at the royal court.
Jean Fredman is a fictional character and the supposed narrator in Bellman's epistles and songs, based on a real watchmaker of Bellman's Stockholm. The epistles paint a picture of the demimonde life of the city during the eighteenth century, where strong drink and beautiful "nymphs" like Ulla Winblad create a rococo picture of life, blending classical allusion and pastoral description with harsh reality.
Song
Epistle 80 is dedicated to the poet and founder member of the Swedish Academy, Johan Henric Kellgren. The song has six verses, each of 8 lines. The rhyming pattern is ABAB-CCDD. The music is in 6/8 time and is marked pastorale. The source melody is unknown.
The song starts with a near-paraphrase of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux's classic L'Art Poetique, a guide on the construction of pastoral verse:
Telle qu’une bergère, au plus beau jour de fête,
De superbes rubis ne charge point sa tête,
Et, sans mêler à l’or l’éclat des diamants,
Cueille en un champ voisin ses plus beaux ornements;
The first verse of the epistle runs:
Reception
Bellman's biographer, Paul Britten Austin, describes the song "with its almost religious invocation of a shepherdess, 'clad for some solemn feast'" as "more lovely in Swedish" than in Boileau's French. He comments that in the Epistle, Bellman depicts the countryside just north of Stockholm like a Constable painting, with "Mark how between meadows all awry/the Cot to the lake descends... Where farmer heavy on staggering wheel/Makes haste to his hearth and evening meal". However he finds "quintessentially Swedish" the mood of high summer, with a swallow flying into the room, the cock crowing outside, and the bell of the village church ringing steadily. Everything is perfectly innocent until the last verse, when "Ulla, flat in the face of all Boileau-esque canons of what is permitted in a pastoral and forgetting all new-found respectability, falls into bed with her cavalier, both having drunk too much."
The Epistle has been translated into English by Eva Toller. It appears on the 1969 studio album Fred sjunger Bellman by Fred Åkerström, re-released on CD in 1990, and on Mikael Samuelsson's 1990 Sjunger Fredmans Epistlar.