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Valborgsmässoafton

Walpurgis Eve

169 sentences · 14 notes

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  1. 1

    There is a day nearly as eagerly awaited by all the children in Dalarna as Christmas Eve, and that is Walpurgis Night, when they are allowed to light fires out in the open.

    Detitden · pronoun, neuter, singularexpletive with finns
    finnsthere isfinnas · verb, present, indicativemain verb of the sentence
    enaen · determiner, common gender, singulardeterminer of dag
    dagdaydag · noun, nominative, common gender, singularsubject of finns
    somthatsom · pronounsubject of efterlängtad

    Three of this key's four examples ('som om far skulle...', 'för just som han stod...', 'som de är borta') are actually the conjunctive 'as'/'while' use, not the relative pronoun 'that/which' shown by 'länstolen, som blev köpt...'. The glosser's original senses list (that/who/which) omitted the dominant 'as' reading entirely.

    ärisvara · auxiliary verb, present, indicative, activecopula linking to efterlängtad
    näranearlynära · adverbmodifies efterlängtad

    Type lumps the positive, comparative, and superlative forms of nära.

    nognearlynog · adverbmodifies efterlängtad
    likaequallylika · adverbmodifies efterlängtad
    efterlängtadeagerly awaitedefterlängtad · adjective, nominative, common gender, singularrelative clause on dag
    avbyav · prepositionpreposition marking barn
    allaallall · determiner, pluraldeterminer of barn
    barnchildrenbarn · noun, nominative, neuter, pluraloblique complement of efterlängtad
    iini · prepositionpreposition marking Dalarna
    DalarnaDalarnaDalarna · proper nounmodifies barn
    somassom · subordinating conjunctionintroduces the clause of julaftonen
    julaftonenChristmas Evejulafton · noun, nominative, common gender, singularin apposition to barn
    ochandoch · conjunctionlinks the coordination
    detitden · pronoun, neuter, singularsubject of valborgsmässoaftonen
    ärisvara · auxiliary verb, present, indicative, activecopula linking to valborgsmässoaftonen
    valborgsmässoaftonenWalpurgis Nightvalborgsmässoafton · noun, nominative, common gender, singularcoordinated with finns
    dåwhendå · subordinating conjunctionintroduces the clause of få
    detheyde · pronoun, nominative, pluralsubject of få
    fåbe allowed tofå · verb, active, infinitiverelative clause on valborgsmässoaftonen
    tändalighttänd · adjective, nominative, pluralmodifies eldar
    eldarfireselda · noun, nominative, common gender, pluraldirect object of få
    uteoutsideute · adverbmodifies få
    iini · prepositionpreposition marking fria
    detaen · determiner, neuter, singulardeterminer of fria
    friafreefri · adjective, nominative, singularoblique complement of få
  2. 2

    For several weeks beforehand, boys and girls think of nothing but gathering fuel for the Walpurgis fires.

  3. They go into the forest to pick up dry branches and pinecones; they gather shavings from the carpenter and kindling and bark and gnarled logs from the woodcutter.

  4. They go every day to the shopkeeper to beg for old crates, and if someone has managed to get hold of an empty tar barrel, he hides it as his greatest treasure and dares not bring it out until the last moment, just before the fires are to be lit.

  5. The slender rods used to prop up peas and beans are in great danger, and so are all the old, wind-toppled fences, all the broken tools, and all the hay-drying poles that have been left lying forgotten out in the field.

  6. 3

    When the remarkable evening comes, the children in every village have piled up a great heap of twigs and brushwood and everything else that will burn, either on a hill or down by a lakeshore.

  7. In some villages there is not just one bonfire gathered, but two or three.

  8. It may well have happened that the boys and girls could not agree on the fuel-gathering, or else the children who live in the south end of the village wanted the fire on their side, and this the ones who live at the north end could not accept, so that they had to arrange a fire of their own.

  9. 4

    The piles are usually ready in good time in the afternoon, and after that all the children go around with matchboxes in their pockets, waiting for darkness.

  10. It stays light dreadfully long in Dalarna at this time of year.

  11. When the clock strikes eight, it has hardly begun to grow dusk.

  12. It grows cold and raw to stand outside waiting, for it is still only early spring.

  13. From all cleared and open ground the snow has thawed away, and in the middle of the day, when the sun stands high in the sky, it can feel quite warm, but there are still deep drifts left in the forests, ice covers the lakes, and toward night it sometimes turns many degrees cold.

  14. That is why it can also happen that one fire or another gets lit before it is truly dark.

  15. But it is only the smallest and most impatient children who rush things in that way.

  16. The older ones wait until it has grown dark enough that the fires can really show themselves.

  17. 5

    At last the right moment comes.

  18. Everyone who has brought even the tiniest stick to the pile is present, and the oldest boy lights a bundle of straw and pokes it in under the heap.

  19. At once the flames begin to work, the brushwood hisses and crackles, the thinnest twigs turn glowing red, the smoke billows up, black and threatening.

  20. Then at last the flame forces its way up from the top of the bonfire, tall and clear, rises several meters into the air all at once, and can be seen over the whole district.

  21. 6

    When the children in a village have got their own fire truly going, they take time to look around.

  22. There, one fire is burning, and there another is burning, and now one is being lit on the hill and one right at the top of the mountain!

  23. They all hope that their fire will be the biggest and brightest, and they are so afraid that it will not outshine the others that, at this last moment, they rush home to the farms to beg mother and father for a few more scraps of board and firewood.

  24. 7

    When the fire has been burning a while, the grown-ups and the old people come walking to look at it.

  25. But the fire is not only splendid and bright — it also spreads a good, fine warmth around itself, and this tempts them to settle down on stones and tussocks around it.

  26. There they sit and stare into the flames, until one of them hits on the idea that they ought to boil a little coffee, since there is such a fine fire.

  27. While the coffee pot is bubbling, it happens that someone starts telling a story, and as soon as the first one has finished, another takes up right away.

  28. 8

    The grown-ups think mostly about the coffee and the stories.

  29. The children think about making the fire burn high and burn long.

  30. Spring has come along so wretchedly slowly this year, with the ice breaking up and the snow melting.

  31. It would surely be good if they, with their fires, could give it a little help.

  32. Otherwise it seems unthinkable that it should be ready in time with budding and leafing out.

  33. 9

    The wild geese had settled down to sleep on the ice of Lake Siljan, and since a horribly cold draft came from the north, the boy had been forced to creep in under the white gander's wing.

  34. But he had not lain there long before he woke at the crack of a gunshot.

  35. He slid quickly out from under the wing and looked around, thoroughly frightened.

  36. 10

    Out on the ice near the geese it was completely still.

  37. However much he peered and scanned, he could not see any hunter.

  38. But when he looked toward land, he saw something so strange that he thought it must be some kind of ghostly vision showing itself, something along the lines of Vineta or the phantom garden at Stora Djulö.

  39. 11

    During the afternoon the wild geese had flown back and forth several times over the great lake before they could decide where to land.

  40. While they flew, they had shown him the great churches and villages that lay along the shores.

  41. He had seen Leksand, Rättvik, Mora, Sollerön.

  42. The villages nearest the churches were as large as small towns, and he had marveled that it was so built up here in the north.

  43. The whole region had seemed to him bright and smiling, far more than he had expected.

  44. He had not noticed anything that was grim or frightening.

  45. 12

    But now, in the dark of night, a long garland of tall fires blazed along these same shores.

  46. He saw them burning low at Mora at the north end of the lake, on the shore of Sollerön, in Vikarbyn, on the heights above the village of Sjurberg, on the church point at Rättvik, on Lerdalsberget, and so on, on points of land and hills all the way toward Leksand.

  47. He could count more than a hundred fires, and it was utterly impossible for him to understand where they had come from, unless there was witchcraft or sorcery involved.

  48. 13

    The wild geese had also woken at the shot, but as soon as Akka had cast a glance over the shore, she said: »It's the human children, playing.»

  49. And at once she and the other geese tucked their heads under their wings and dozed off again.

  50. 14

    But the boy stood and looked at the fires that decked the shore like a long row of golden jewels.

  51. He was drawn to the light and warmth just as much as a little moth, and he wanted very much to go closer, but he did not know whether he dared leave the geese.

  52. He heard shot after shot, and once he understood that there was no danger, he was drawn by these too.

  53. It seemed as though they were so joyful over there by the fires that laughing and shouting was not enough for them — they had to take up their guns and shoot as well.

  54. And now they sent up rockets by a bonfire that was burning on a hill.

  55. There they had a great fire, and it stood high up, but that was not enough.

  56. They wanted it grander still.

  57. Clear up into the sky of heaven it should be seen how joyful they were.

  58. 15

    The boy had approached the shore quite slowly, but then he was reached by some singing voices.

  59. Then he began to run toward land.

  60. This he simply had to be part of.

  61. 16

    Far in at Rättviken an immensely long steamboat pier runs out from the shore, and at the very end of it stood a group of singers, singing out over the lake in the late night.

  62. It was as though they meant that spring, like the wild geese, was sleeping out on the ice of Siljan, and they wanted to wake it.

  63. 17

    The singers began with »I Know a Land Far Up in the High North», and then came »In the Lovely Summer, When the Ground Rejoices, by Dalarna's Two Broad Rivers», then »The March Goes to Tuna», »Manhood, Courage, and Bold Men» and last of all »In Dalarna I Dwelt, In Dalarna I Dwell».

  64. It was all songs about Dalarna.

  65. On the steamboat pier no fire was burning, and the singers could not see far around them.

  66. But with the notes, the image of their land rose up before them and before all who heard them, brighter and lovelier than if it had been broad daylight.

  67. It was as though they wanted to plead with spring: »Look, such a land, lying and waiting for you!

  68. Will you not come to our aid?

  69. Will you let winter go on exercising its tyranny over such beautiful country?»

  70. 18

    As long as the song lasted, Nils Holgersson stood and listened to it, but when it ended, he hurried toward land.

  71. The ice was gone farthest in at the bay, but this stretch was so shallowed with sand that he could still make his way safely to a fire that stood right at the edge of the shore.

  72. He crept up with great care, close enough that he could see the people who sat and stood beside the fire, and hear what they said.

  73. And once again he began to wonder what it was he was seeing and to ask himself whether it was not merely a vision.

  74. He had never before seen people dressed in this fashion.

  75. The women had black, pointed hoods on their heads, little white sheepskin jackets, rosy kerchiefs about their necks, green silk bodices, and black skirts with a front panel striped in white, red, green, and black.

  76. The men had round, low-crowned hats, blue coats with red-edged seams, yellow leather breeches that reached to the knee and were fastened with red, tasseled garters.

  77. He did not know whether it was simply the costumes, but he thought the people looked altogether different here than elsewhere, much more stately and distinguished.

  78. He heard that they were talking with one another, but for a long while he could not understand any of it.

  79. He remembered the fine costumes his mother kept in her chest, which no one had ever cared to wear, and he wondered whether it was not some sort of folk from olden times he had chanced to see, some of those who had not walked living upon the earth for a hundred years.

  80. 19

    But this was the kind of thing that only flitted through his head and was gone again at once, for he could see well enough that these were real people standing before him.

  81. It was because the people by Siljan had, in speech and dress and custom, preserved more of what is past than people had done elsewhere, that he had come to think this way.

  82. 20

    The boy soon noticed that those sitting by the fire were talking about old times.

  83. They told how things had been for them in their young years, when they had had to walk long roads out to other provinces to earn bread for their homes through their labor.

  84. He heard several stories, but the one he remembered best afterward was what an old woman had lived through.

  85. 21

    MYR-KERSTI'S STORY.

  86. 22

    »Father and mother had a small farm in Östbjörka, but we were many siblings, and times were hard, so that when I had turned sixteen, I had to go out into the world from home.

  87. We set off then, some twenty young people from here in Rättvik.

  88. It was on the 14th of April, 1845, that I went to Stockholm for the first time.

  89. For provisions I had a few loaves of bread and a shoulder of veal and a little cheese.

  90. Twenty-four shillings was my entire travel fund.

  91. In the knapsack I had packed the rest of the food I had been given, and sent it on ahead with a carting farmer, along with a change of work clothes.

  92. 23

    So all twenty of us set off on the road to Falun.

  93. We used to walk three or four Swedish miles a day, and we reached Stockholm in seven days.

  94. That was something quite different from sitting oneself on the train, as the girls do now, and simply riding there so absurdly comfortably in eight or nine hours.

  95. 24

    When we came into Stockholm, people called out to one another: ’Look, here comes the Dala Regiment!’

  96. It sounded, too, as if a whole regiment had come marching by, when we walked along the streets in our high-heeled shoes, in which the cobbler had driven no fewer than fifteen great nails.

  97. It did happen that several of us stumbled and fell, because we were unused to the cobblestones.

  98. 25

    We put up at a Dala lodging house called »The White Horse», which stood on Stora Badstugatan on Söder.

  99. The people from Mora lodged on the same street, in a house called »The Great Crown».

  100. Now it was urgent, I must say, to find something to earn, for only eighteen shillings were left of the twenty-four I had brought from home.

  101. One of the other girls said I should go to a cavalry captain who lived near Hornstull and ask for work.

  102. I got to stay with him and was to dig and plant in his garden for four days.

  103. Twenty-four shillings I was paid as a day's wage, and I had to feed myself.

  104. I had money to buy only a little, but the family's small daughters, who saw how poorly off I was, ran in and begged food for me in the kitchen, so that I did get to eat my fill.

  105. 26

    Then I came to a lady on Norrlandsgatan.

  106. There I had poor lodgings, and the rats took both my hood and my kerchief and gnawed a hole in my knapsack, so that I had to mend it with an old bootleg that I was given.

  107. There I had work no longer than fourteen days, and after that I had to walk home again with two riksdaler left over.

  108. 27

    I took the road by way of Leksand and stayed a couple of days in a village called Rönnäs.

  109. There I remember the people cooked gruel from coarsely ground oatmeal with husks and chaff mixed in.

  110. They had nothing else, and it had to do in those days of famine.

  111. 28

    Yes, that year was not much to boast of, but I had to toil even harder the next year.

  112. You see, I had to set off again, for otherwise there would have been nothing to live on back home.

  113. I got to go along with two girls to Hudiksvall, and it was twenty-four Swedish miles there.

  114. The whole way we were forced to carry the knapsack on our backs, for now we had no ride.

  115. We had thought we would find garden work, but when we arrived, the snow lay deep everywhere, so that no such work was to be had.

  116. So I went out into the countryside and begged so prettily at the farms that they would give me something to do.

  117. Dear me, how tired and hungry I was before I came to a farm where I got to stay and card wool for eight shillings a day!

  118. But then, later in the spring, I got to work in the gardens in town, and there I stayed on into July.

  119. But then homesickness grew so strong that I set off for Rättvik.

  120. I was only seventeen then, mind you.

  121. I had worn out my shoes, so that I had to walk twenty-four Swedish miles barefoot.

  122. But I was glad in my heart all the same, for now I had a whole fifteen riksdaler saved up, and for my little brothers and sisters I brought along some hard wheat buns and a paper cone of sugar lumps that I had saved up.

  123. For whenever someone gave me coffee with two lumps of sugar besides, I always kept one back.

  124. 29

    Here you sit now, girls, and don't know how you ought to thank your God, who has made better times for us.

  125. It was so that one lean year followed another in those days.

  126. All the young people of Dalarna were forced to travel away to earn money.

  127. The next year I went — it was 1847 — to Stockholm again and got work at the Stora Hornsberg garden.

  128. There were several of us girls, and now we had somewhat better wages, but we still had to save all the same.

  129. We gathered up old nails and bones in the garden plots and sold them at the rag shop, and with the money we bought those stone-hard hardtack loaves they baked for the soldiers at the crown bakery.

  130. At the end of July I went home again to help with the harvest.

  131. That time I had thirty riksdaler saved up.

  132. 30

    The next year I again had to go out to earn.

  133. That time I came to Stallmästargården outside Stockholm.

  134. That summer there was a field maneuver on Lagårdsgärdet, and I was sent by the innkeeper to serve at a kitchen he kept in a great supply wagon.

  135. Never will I forget, though I should live to be a hundred, that time I got to blow tunes on the herding horn out there on the Gärdet for King Oskar the First.

  136. And he sent me a whole two riksdaler as a reward.

  137. 31

    Then for several summers running I was a rowing girl on Brunnsviken and rowed between Albano and Haga.

  138. That was my best time.

  139. We had the herding horns with us in the boat, and sometimes the passengers took the oars themselves, so that we could play for them.

  140. When the rowing season ended in the autumn, I went up into Uppland to thresh at the farms.

  141. Toward Christmas I would usually come home with as much as a hundred riksdaler.

  142. And besides, I had earned grain from the threshing, which father later fetched home in the winter sledding.

  143. Yes, you see, if my siblings and I had not come home with our coins, there would have been nothing to live on.

  144. For the grain from our own land was mostly gone by Christmastime, and in those days people grew only a little potato.

  145. So one had to buy grain from the shopkeeper, and when the rye cost forty riksdaler the barrel and the oats twenty-four, one really had to manage carefully.

  146. I remember that we several times gave away a cow for a barrel of oats.

  147. We baked oat bread with finely chopped straw in it in those days.

  148. It was not easy to swallow that straw bread, I must say.

  149. One had to drink water between every bite, to get it down.

  150. 32

    So I kept on wandering off like that right up until the year I married, and that was 1856.

  151. You see, Jon and I had become sweethearts in Stockholm.

  152. And I was a little fearful in my heart, when I went home each year, that the Stockholm girls would turn his thoughts away from me.

  153. They called him »handsome Myr-Jon» and »the fine fellow from Dalarna», that I knew.

  154. But he carried no falseness in his heart, and when he had saved enough, the wedding took place.

  155. 33

    Then there was joy and no sorrow for some years, but it did not last long.

  156. In 1863 Jon died, and I stood alone with five small children.

  157. But it did not turn out so badly for us after all, for by then times had begun to grow better in Dalarna.

  158. Now there was plenty of potatoes and plenty of grain.

  159. It was a great difference from the old days.

  160. I tended the small plots of land I had inherited myself, and I had a cottage of my own.

  161. So year followed year, and the children grew up.

  162. They are well off now, those of them who are still living, thank God!

  163. They cannot really imagine how scarce bread was for the people of Dalarna when their mother was young.»

  164. 34

    The old woman fell silent.

  165. While she had been speaking, the fire had burned low, and now everyone stood up and said it was time to break up.

  166. The boy set off out across the ice to look for his traveling companions, but as he ran alone in the darkness, a verse he had just heard sung from the pier sounded in his ears: »In Dalarna I dwelt, in Dalarna I dwell, amid poverty still faith and honor…

  167. Then there was something he could not remember, but the end of the song he did remember: »They have mixed their bread with bark, not seldom, yet mighty lords have found their support among the poor men of Dalom.»

  168. 35

    The boy had not entirely forgotten all that he had heard about the Sture family and Gustav Vasa, and he had always wondered why they should have sought help especially among the men of Dalarna, but now he could understand it.

  169. For in a land where there were such women as the old one back there by the fire, the men, surely, must be quite impossible to get the better of.

The particulars

The text
Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige, Selma Lagerlöf. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.
Translation
Public-domain Swedish (Lagerlöf, d. 1940; published 1906–07). English translation © 2026 1732 Studios, LLC.
Words
Every word of the text, by letter.
Data
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Two whoopie pies and a pine. An inside joke.