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Solen glimmar blank och trind (The sun gleams smooth and round), 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. 48. It depicts an early morning on Lake Mälaren, as the Rococo muse Ulla Winblad sails back home to Stockholm after a night spent partying on the lake.
Contents
The epistle is subtitled "Hvaruti afmålas Ulla Winblads hemresa från Hessingen i Mälaren en sommarmorgon 1769" (In which is depicted Ulla Winblad's journey home from Hessingen).
Context
Carl Michael Bellman is the central figure in Swedish song, known for his 1790 Fredman's Songs and his 1791 Fredman's Epistles. 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
The song is in the key of C, in 2/4 time. It has 21 verses, each of eight lines. The rhyming pattern is ABAB-CCCB. It has a "gay dancing melody", which along with the poem gives the listener
an irresistible impression of being himself present at the song's conception; seems to catch the dashing rhythm of the vessel as it plunges through the waves, to be listening to the voice of the poet where he sits in the stern, improvising his stanza out of the raw materials of the passing moment."
The melody was a favourite of Bellman's, and is of French origin, where it had been used by Antoine de Bourbon.
The Epistle depicts a charming picture of an early morning on Lake Mälaren, as the Rococo muse Ulla Winblad sails back home to Stockholm. The song brings in Movitz the cellist, another of Bellman's stock characters in Fredman's Epistles, based on one of his friends.
The song tells the story of a boat on the way home after a night out on the island-studded lake. In the boat are the peasant girl Marjo, a tub of butter on her knees, with a cargo of the birch-sprigs that Stockholmers used to decorate their town with as a sign of returning spring, milk, and lambs; and her father, puffing his pipe self-importantly at the helm. It begins:
Reception
Students of Swedish literature are expected to study Fredman's Songs and Epistles.
Bellman's biographer, the translator Paul Britten Austin calls the poem a masterpiece, and "one of Bellman's greatest. At a stroke he created in Swedish poetry a new vision of the natural and urban scene. Fresh as Martin's. Detailed as Hogarth's. Frail and ethereal as Watteau's." While each verse paints a "finely etched picture", all together they "build up to an incomparable panorama of that eighteenth-century Stockholm which meets us in Elias Martin's canvasses." Britten Austin writes that
No one who has ever risen on an early Swedish summer morning to see the sun shining from a clear sky on the placid water and has heard or read this song, with its breezy familiar air, can ever forget it.
Britten Austin explains: "Everything occurs with apparent haphazardness. Yet each stanza is a little picture, framed by its melody. We remember it all, seem to have lived through it, like a morning in our own lives."
Epistle 48 has been recorded by Fred Åkerström, Cornelis Vreeswijk, and Mikael Samuelsson.