Bellman:

Today we remain in Sweden, but skip a generation in order to look at a figure who represents another aspect of one of the consequences of the Enlightenment: the emergence of popular culture in an urban environment. First let’s delineate the cultural environment:

After 5 decades of parliamentary domination, the age of freedom cam to a close as the system became more and more corrupted. It was in this environment of weak central authority that Linneas wrote of a system of divine revenge and Swedenborg established himself as a window between the spiritual and natural realms. In 1772, the young king Gustav III re-establsihed the absolute power of the monarchy in a coup d’etat. Gustav was an enlightened despot after the model of the French King Louis XVI, the sun King, and established a court that sponsored a flowering of high culture. Gustav not only established and supported cultural institutions, but was a meaningful writer of plays and Operas. He established a distinctly French influence in the court both on the level of style and substance. French was the court language and French neo-classicist poetry with its strict meter and platonic bent dominated the world of Swedish official culture. Gustav established the Swedish Academy, the state Opera, built out the state theater, and poured money and energy into the University of Uppsala. It is in this environment that Carl Michael Bellman (1740-95) rose to prominence.

Bellman seems to be an anomaly in the cultural life of Gustavanian Sweden. While other poets were writing idealistic love poems comparing women to the movements of the planets, Bellman was writing a series of songs that depicted the world of the bacchanal: he created a world inhabited by musicians, alcohol saturated characters of assorted professions, and prostitutes. These characters were depicted in Fredman’s Epistles, a reference to the epistles of saint Paul and they were all members of a bacchanalian order where pleasure and death were their constant companions. Bellman depicted the world of the streets and the taverns without apology or moral injunction. His wa the world of the god of wine, of intoxication, and the pleasures of the body in a world that highlighted the transience of existence.

There is a long tradition that connects the writing of poetry to a celebration of wine. In the greek tradition we have Anakreon, from the Roman, Horace, and from the norse, we only have to recall the story of the origin of poetry from Snorri’s prose Edda. But in the northern tradition, the re-emergence of poetry that celebrated intoxication in the 1600’s produced no significant body of literature as these songs were occasional and never saw the printing press. In the early 1700’s there there emerged hand-written song books that began to celebrate Venus, Bacchus and the like. The emergence of a salon culture and the building out of a public sphere geared towards a more hedonistic life opened the door for Bellman. At first he was soundly rejected by the order of high culture. He was considered to be superficial and he wrote of himself in his autobiography published in 1794:

“I am a man of litlle depth of vision, and do not question why the sun sets or the earth spins. What I value is that I mean no harm to any living creature—love infinitely the noble man, and with undying passion women and little obedient children, eat according to my appetite a bit at a time and well—Sunday white cabbage—Thursday pea soup, Saturday herring.”

Despite his gesture towards his own lack of pretension, Bellman was the son of a professor of rhetoric and poetry, his mother was the daughter of a priest who was also a member of parliament. He was educated at home by a tutor who taught him several languages and the art of writing verse. His earliest poetry was religious in nature and moralistic in tone. He debuted in 1757 when he was only 18 with a didactic work entitled: The teachings left by a father for his son. He followed up with the 1760 Thoughts on the immorality of girls, and the Moon. He received a position in the state bank at this time and continued to publish mediocre religious poetry. His social situation changed a few years later. His parents run into trouble and leave Stockholm. He runs into debt and flees to Norway in 1763 to escape his creditors. He returns shortly and loses his job. He becomes the poet of the bacchanal. He begins to acquire local fame. He becomes “Bellman”. Bellman started his Order of Bacchus in 1766. This was a play on the contemporary noble orders of his time incorporating a satiric version of the solemnity of their ceremony. Named where Knights of the order of Bacchus with ritualistic aplomb. At the end of the 1760’s, he wrote the collection from which we read, fredman’s epistles. The central figure, fredman had died from alcohol and poverty in 1767. Fredman had fallen from being a highly respected craftsman, a clockmaker. He then became an infamous figure in the local saloon life. In the earliest epistles, there are quite a few biblical allusions , but by the end the references are classical and old norse. The pairing of freya and Bacchus is significant—a local goddess of love with the imported god of intoxication.

In the early 1770’s he draws the attention of the King, the aforementioned Gustav III who establishes the Bellman lottery to insure his support. The king started his support in 1772, establishing the Bellman Lottery in 1776. He died in 1795.