The Brides of Midsummer

by Vilhelm Moberg, Gudrun Brunot (Translator)

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 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.

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

Vilhelm Moberg was a Swedish journalist, author, playwright, historian, and debater best known for his Emigrant series of novels about Swedish emigrants to America. He also wrote other novels and plays and also participated in public debates about the Swedish monarchy, bureaucracy, and corruption. Among other works are Raskens (1927) and Ride This Night (1941), a historical novel of a 17th-century rebellion in Småland acknowledged for its subliminal but widely recognised criticism against the Hitler regime.

A noted public intellectual and debater in Sweden, he was noted for very vocal criticism of the Swedish monarchy (most notably after the Haijby affair), likening it with a servile government by divine mandate, and publicly supporting its replacement with a Swiss-style confederal republic. He spoke out aggressively against the policies of Nazi Germany, the Greek military junta, and the Soviet Union, and his works were among those destroyed in Nazi book burnings. In 1971, he scolded Prime Minister Olof Palme for refusing to offer the Nobel Prize in Literature to its recipient Alexander Solzhenitsyn – who was refused permission to attend the ceremony in Stockholm – through the Swedish embassy in Moscow.

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brisk, moving series of vignettes around celebrations in Sweden, going back from about a century ago to a plague around two centuries earlier, then another couple of centuries when Catholics found refuge in Smaland against the Protestant king during the Reformation, and then to an indeterminate pagan scene when a group is under threat by seen and unseen forces. Vilhelm Moberg conjures up the inner thoughts and outer actions of four musicians, all on the same hill on St John's Eve of summer's solstice. You care about each, as they confront their memories of love, longing, deprivation, and despair. A quick read, rewarding as Moberg peers into the vexing presence of deity and mortality, honestly and unflinchingly. I wish he'd have written more novels about earlier times in his homeland, at least given his relative few works translated into English so far.

[Evelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. This book was surprisingly really interesting and intriguing. Because of the way it is written, I only actually understood like half of the meaning of each paragraph, but that was enough for me to want to keep going. The concept of 4 different stories happening in the same place but in drastic different times is very interesting to me and is something I think about often. I recommend!

[Viktor Karlsson · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5.

[Teri Donovan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting read. I found the regression through time an intriguing twist.