specimens of the literature of Sweden - tea and glögg

Swedes are notoriously heavy coffee drinkers (according to stereotype anyway) but tea does play quite a big part in Swedish culture too; and not only in the form of Lipton's Yellow Label, the brand that owns all of mainland Europe.

Particularly noticeable are the various tea mixtures that appear on sale in markets, with more or less persuasive claims to local provenance. These teas, often spicy, come into their own in winter.



1. On the left, glögg-style tea from the heaving Christmas market at Sigtuna near Stockholm. For glögg, see below!

(Sigtuna, on a branch of Mälaren, is Sweden's oldest town (from 980), and is much visited for its picturesque medieval streets. Overtaken by the rise of Stockholm and Uppsala (around the year 1300), its population had dwindled to 600 by the end of the 19th c. but has subsequently risen to >8,000, due mainly to the proximity of Arlanda airport.)

Manufacturer: Johan & Nyström (coffee- and tea- merchants), based in Tullinge, an outer suburb of south-west Stockholm (on the way to Södertälje).

Ingredienser / Ingredients: Svart te (black tea), kanel (cinnamon), apelsinskal (orange-peel), ingefära (ginger), kryddnejlika (cloves), peppar (pepper), kardemumma (cardamom), arom (flavour).

The pepper is a bit of a surprise. I wonder if the Swedish biscuits called "pepparkakor", though marketed elsewhere as "ginger thins" etc, originally contained some pepper? Our family recipe certainly doesn't.


2. The Christmas tea mixture in the centre of the photo was is by Kaffehuset i Karlstad AB, a subsidiary of the Löfbergs Lila group. (Sunny Karlstad, on the shores of Vänern, is the capital of Värmland.)

I don't need to go into Swedish here because this is an export pack. The ingredients are: Black leaf tea 79%, Fruit pieces 12% (Orange peel, Apple, Rosehip), Spices 7% (Coriander, Clove, Cinnamon), Flavour.


3. If you are looking for something a bit less big-business-ish, then that can be found too. My sister lives in Kallhäll, a suburb of Stockholm at the eastern end of Mälaren, and the third tea-packet is a product of, or rather for, that very specific place: it's "Mari and Laila's Red Kallhäll-est". In fact what Mari and Laila have done is employ the services of a company called Aftek (based in Arbrå in Hälsingland), who will mix tea to the buyer's specification and assist with its preparation for a local market (bagging, labels, etc).

This is the mixture that Mari and Laila chose to represent the essence of Kallhäll:

Rooibos te smaksatt med smultron, svartvinbär, grädde och limearom samt rosor, jordgubbsbitar och svartvinbärsblad

Rooibos tea flavoured with wild strawberries, blackcurrants, cream and lime-flavour, together with rose (-petals? -hips?), strawberry pieces  and blackcurrant leaves. 

I'm touched by something personal in this local concoction (and even more so by the fact that Miranda thought of me when she came across it). Though it's the produce of more than one country. Locality that can be preserved is a feat of commerce and imagination; a "souvenir" is an idea that belongs to the age of oil.

In June, you could easily go out behind the houses and pick a bowlful of wild strawberries that come from Kallhäll itself. But those strawberries wouldn't taste of represented essence; they'd have a different meaning.



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Anyway, let's get on to glögg, which is basically mulled wine. Of course it is fun to mix this up yourself at a party, getting half-cut from the fumes sloshing in vodka fishing out the bag of spices sloshing in more vodka and giving yourself metal poisoning from the aluminium pan.

But you can also get it ready-mixed, like the bottle on the left; this is fortified with brandy and, at an impressive 21%, is a sipping drink best enjoyed out of a dinky little glögg-glass (sort of like a shot-glass, but with a bell-rim to cradle the heat and spicy scent).

You can also get non-alcoholic glögg, like the spicy hjortron (cloudberry) mix on the right.You can either enjoy this on its own, as we Good Templars will, or beef it up with a bit of brandy, as suggested on the label.

Byron: The Corsair (1814)

Episode from The Corsair, watercolour by Eugène Delacroix (c. 1831)

[Image Source: The J. Paul Getty Museum]

The exotic location of The Corsair is clearly important, just as the location of Scott’s narrative poems is important. Byron, we are persuaded, knew the Mediterranean. 

            Flash’d the dipt oars, and sparkling with the stroke,

            Around the waves’ phosphoric brightness broke;

            They gain the vessel – on the deck he stands. (I, XVII)

The author annotates: “By night, particularly in a warm latitude, every stroke of the oar, every motion of the boat or ship, is followed by a slight flash like sheet lightning from the water.”

[We don’t know much more about it now. The effect is due to the bioluminescence of certain protozoa, mainly flagellates. It is produced only when the water is disturbed. Its function, if there is one, has not been conclusively explained.]

When Scott wrote of Scotland, he immersed us in details of myth and tradition; in his prose he would also give us a distinct local speech. Being a variety of English, it was more or less comprehensible to those readers south of the border, but it was also revelatory; for here was a different culture in full operation. Byron had no such interests as Scott’s, and besides, his own chosen locale would have meant foreign languages. Byron’s Mediterranean was more like a psychological state; a heady feeling (at least in the Northern European mind) that comprised freedom and energy, open space, and escape - from prudence, from strait-laced moral codes, from families, even from self-interest and self-preservation.  Probably the lack of linguistic community, the sense of uninvolvement, is one of the constituent factors in why this familiar dream persists. (Corsair, like Capri, Ibiza, Sirocco, etc, would eventually become the name of a car.) The waves of the Mediterranean still whisper to us: Miss the plane home.

Byron’s poem intends to be a Mediterranean structure (that’s why Canto III begins with a Mediterranean scene pilfered from an earlier poem, whose irrelevance Byron takes care to highlight). Perhaps he succeeds, though there are elements of chivalry and lachrymosity that we recognize as Northern European. The story has something of the stiff gestures of Scott’s poor attempt at exoticism, The Talisman – think of the scene where Conrad appears before the Pacha, disguised as a pious Dervise. Yet a “scene” is just what this isn’t. Byron’s poem is best approached as a kind of process without beginning or end; a humming machine, details of whose operation can be glimpsed only by looking quickly aside; in short, as a modern poem. Because of the swirls and eddies of the undisciplined verse, The Corsair is a formidable and exciting plunge into uncharted territory.

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John Keats: Endymion (1817)

[ John Keats (1795-1821) ]

Endymion (1817), written at speed and completed when the author was just 22, is a difficult poem to read. Keats himself observed (in his introduction) that there was something wrong with it; the Blackwoods reviewer agreed; and nothing is easier. But if, instead, we want to read it, we have to read hard.

                        No, I will once more raise

   My voice upon the mountain-heights; once more

   Make my horn parley from their foreheads hoar;

   Again my trooping hounds their tongues shall loll

   Around the breathèd boar... (I, 477-481)

Thus Endymion promises his sister, and one part of our attention is quickened, because what’s promised is the kind of stirring material from which narrative poems are usually made. That tolling of the word “Again”, however, is enough to warn us that these promises are vain. We have learnt that, in art if not always in life, “you can’t go back”.

                           the maid was very loth

   To answer; feeling well that breathèd words

   Would all be lost, unheard, and vain as swords

   Against the enchasèd crocodile, or leaps

   Of grasshoppers against the sun.     (I, 711-715)

I remember once writing a critique of this passage. I complained that “swords” leapt out of the page with excessive force, unsuitable as a comparison to the softness of “breathèd words”, and basically in conflict with what Keats is saying about how useless they are. However, there is a certain point to the contradiction. In Endymion the intention is to tell a story that passes rapidly beyond the tackle of swords and trooping hounds. We have to learn to give up their concreteness, and this is not made easier by Keats’ power of brief evocation; what he wants us to relinquish is (as not in Shelley) something that is well represented in the text itself, though always as images never as the material of the story. Indeed, there must be few poems so heavily loaded. 

The reader’s difficulties, I’m suggesting, arise from Keats’ commitment to a story that intrinsically turns its back on the solidest things; on ploughshares, trade, cottages and fishing-nets. (Crabbe’s Tales, and Scott’s The Antiquary, are nearly contemporary.)

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Elizabeth Hervey: The Mourtray Family (1800)

I only have Volume 3 (of 4); the original owner of my copy was a certain Lord Torrington (*see NOTE), but I picked it up in a charity shop.

Coincidentally, if you look up "The Mourtray Family" in Google Books you will also get Vol 3 only.

Volume 3 begins with the family discovering the horrendous mess that young Henry has got himself into; he has fought a duel (without seconds) over a gaming debt, and fled leaving his opponent at death's door. Mr Mourtray and his daughter Emma are gravely distressed; the comic Mrs Mourtray is also distressed but insensible to the moral gravity of the situation, she is only concerned for her son's welfare. If you're able to read the blurry scan above, you'll enjoy the irrepressible Chowles adding fuel to everyone's distress. In Hervey's book this is just funny: compare it with the scene in Mansfield Park when Sir Thomas Bertram discovers the theatricals, and when Yates keeps on talking to him about the theatre while everyone else is desperate to change the subject; the painful topic is a much less serious matter in itself, but Austen makes us feel the scene as excruciating, because we are so much more deeply aware of the betrayal and shame.

The rest of the third vol focusses on Emma and her love for Miramont; by the end of it they are married, but I'm not sure if this is the end of their story or if there are still further twists to come; the meeting with Miramont's rival Lord Clannarmon is disquieting, and we wonder if Miramont has the moral stature that Austen has taught us to expect from the hero. The most exciting scene is when Emma, staying up late, notices a flickering light from Miramont's bedroom (they are both guests at a country house). This light can only mean fire, and Emma rouses the household, saves the gentleman's life, and is rewarded by his declaration of love, though not as yet by a proposal of marriage.       

But these comparisons with Austen are a little unjust. What Hervey already turns to good account is the typically captious eye of a spirited young heroine, employed as a moral instrument that is trained on her mother and her mother's circle; or on the envy and snobbery of those friends who are more socially established than herself but less sexually attractive. It is a healthy structure on which later novelists can build. 

Elizabeth (1748-1820) was only a young child when her mother remarried. Her stepfather was the fabulously rich William Beckford Sr, who owned twenty plantations worked by slaves in Jamaica, and she must have grown up in the opulent surroundings of Fonthill Splendens in Wiltshire. William Beckford Jr, author of Vathek, was her half-brother. In 1774 she married Col. Thomas Hervey, who promptly gambled away their joint fortunes**, perhaps supplying a financial motive for Mrs Hervey's subsequent composition of half a dozen anonymously-published novels. So when the author has Mr Mourtray say about Henry, "Gaming, too, is, of all vices, that which takes the deepest root in the heart", she was writing from bitter experience.


**But see David Oakley's comment to this post.


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NOTE

It would be pleasant to think that my "Lord Torrington" was the great diarist-traveller John Byng, but he held the title for only three weeks, between his elder brother George’s death in December 1812 and his own death in January 1813. More likely this book belonged to George. (John’s famous diaries were written 1781-1794.)

And since we're talking nobility here, Elizabeth Hervey the novelist has no connection with her splendid near-contemporary namesake Elizabeth "Bess" Cavendish, nee Hervey, Duchess of Devonshire (1759-1824) - a confusion currently propagated by Wikipedia.

(2010, 2012)   

two hectic spots burned on his pallid cheeks

Acer platanoides - red on autumn leaves

I can't expect many people to be interested in this, but it interested me. These are fallen leaves from Norway Maple (Acer platanoides). Usually the autumn colours are golden yellow, but occasionally you find a leaf or three with dramatic bright-red splodges, usually towards the edge of the leaf.

If you know what causes this, please get in touch!

Acer platanoides - autumn leaf with red colour

There's bright red on the edges of these sapling leaves, too. It suggests climatic factors, doesn't it? Frostbite on extremities? Wind? But there could easily be another explanation.

Red leaf edges on Norway Maple (Acer platanoides). Frome, 3 November 2021.

Red leaf edges on Norway Maple (Acer platanoides). Frome, 3 November 2021.

Red leaf edges on Norway Maple (Acer platanoides). Frome, 3 November 2021.

Here's the same kind of thing on the extremities of a Silver Maple leaf (Acer saccharinum):

Red leaf extremity on Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum). Frome, 29 October 2021.

Red leaf extremities on Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum). Frome, 29 October 2021.

Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum). Frome, 21 November 2021.