Mew gulls, Anabaptism

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SEAMEN'S SPOILER

"June night never comes," wrote Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson, in his youth a sailor. Poetry floods over me this light, balmy, early summer evening, on a boat leaving Gottskär in northern Halland province.

The heavens have landed in the sea. Or else the Kattegat between Sweden and Denmark has become a galactic lagoon, a tranquil gleam, shimmering pink, along the Milky Way. We're on our way to Sweden's very first lighthouse site, ceded by the Danes in the Treaty of Brömsebro in 1645. Its setting is perhaps more remarkable and beautiful than others and it is also by far the most dangerous -- the terror of skippers in days gone by. A spoiler with treacherous reefs, shallows and sharp rocks that once caused at least two shipwrecks a year, sometimes even in calm weather. Thus also a place where bale fires were lit, logs burning in the dark to warn seafarers.

Geologically, the island is an end moraine, given a designer touch on the seabed by the most recent glacier when it receded more than ten thousand years ago, leaving debris shaved from the rock: blocks, boulders, gravel, sand. With land elevation, the tip of the ridge finally became visible perhaps around the time of the birth of Christ. It is still just a thin strip, like a mirage in the trembling heat of summer, a raft adrift towards the horizon.

You can tie up here only if the wind is slack. If there's a westerly blow, those ashore on Nidingen risk a stay of several days. ...

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So my mind is back in Sweden again, thanks to these two books (above and below). Copies of West Coast: Sweden's Ocean Front, previously used to fill bookshelves in the showroom, were being given away by IKEA in Bristol. I found the volume of Strindberg's history plays in the bookshop beside the cafe at Bodiam Castle. Net outlay £1, unless you also take into account the lost income while I'm filling my mind with books instead of working.

In Sweden, but not in Swedish. The coffee-table book (photos by Tore Hagman, text by Stefan Edman) was translated into North American by Kim Loughran (hence "mew gulls", which I had to look up; in the UK they are known as common gulls), and the Strindberg plays are mostly translated by C. D. Locock (one by Joan Bulman) (1931).

I always feel a bit remiss, reading Swedish books in English; I miss learning, for instance, that the Swedish word for lighthouse is "fyrplats". This isn't the way to become competent in Swedish. As it happened my sister Miranda was in that Bodiam cafe, over from Stockholm; and how I admired her growing ease with "fastighetsforeningen" and all the other words you learn from being there. It's been an unprecedented three years since my last visit.

But still, here I am, at any rate virtually, in Nidingen (an island off the coast of Halland), and in Strängnäs (cathedral town on Lake Mälaren (to the west of Stockholm).

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I suppose coffee-table books are considered a lowly form of literature. Stefan Edman writes as an efficient journalist, seasoning his lyricism with lovely quotations and well-chosen scraps of history and geology. Perhaps he over-writes a little, but that's because this is the first page. I don't quite know what the milky way, that wintry sight, is doing in this evocation of early summer.

But all these judgements are rebutted by a single reflection, "He's doing it, and you're not." Edman's boat is certainly afloat, Nidingen here we come! And after all he has some admirable successes too: from far out to sea, the sudden close-up of "logs burning in the dark"; and the gradation of that sea's work in "blocks, boulders, gravel, sand".

"Seamen's spoiler", "a spoiler with treacherous reefs"... This sense of "spoiler" -- presumably, a hazard close to a sea-lane -- is unknown to the OED, and I can't find any examples on the internet either.

Harry Martinson, "June night never comes". In Swedish, the line is "Juni natt blir aldrig av", from this poem:


Nu går solen knappast ner,
bländar bara av sitt sken.
Skymningsbård blir gryningstimme
varken tidig eller sen.

Now the sun hardly goes down
just dims its light
the end of dusk becomes the grey of dawn
neither early nor late

Insjön håller kvällens ljus
glidande på vattenspegeln
eller vacklande på vågor
som långt innan de ha mörknat
spegla morgonsolens lågor.

The lake holds the evening's light
gliding on the mirror of water
or wavering on the waves
that long before they have darkened
reflect the morning sun's fires

Juni natt blir aldrig av,
liknar mest en daggig dag.
Slöjlikt lyfter sig dess skymning
och bärs bort på ljusa hav.

June night never comes
it's most like a dewy day
veil-like it lifts its twilight
and is borne away on the bright sea


Bale-fire. A large bonfire. In older usage, a funeral pyre (e.g. Beowulf's). Later, often a beacon or signal fire, a usage popularized by Scott in the Lay of the Last Minstrel.

And yet you wish to sow the seeds of civil war. 'Tis a godless act!

Gert. Nay, now that you have the knife in the flesh, cut! Then the body may be saved.

Olof. I shall denounce you as a traitor to your country!

Gert. You should not do that -- you who have this day irretrievably broken with the Church! Besides --

Olof. Speak out, Gert! You look like Satan at this moment!

Gert. You shall share my secret; make what use of it you like! The King goes to Malmö today; two days later Stockholm will be in revolt!

Olof. What do you say?

Gert. Do you know Rink and Knipperdollink?

Olof (horrified). The Anabaptists!

Gert. Yes! Why are you so surprised? They are merely a pair of bourgeois louts. A furrier and a grocer, who deny the use of baptism to a soulless child, and are simple enough to object to deliberate perjury extorted from an irrational creature.

Olof. There is something more, surely?

Gert. What could there be?

Olof. They are possessed!

Gert. Of the Spirit, yes! It is the storm calling through them! Take heed if you come in its path!

Olof. It must be stopped! I shall go to the King!

Gert. Olof! You and I should be friends! Does not your mother live in Stockholm?

Olof. You know she does!

Gert. Do you know that my daughter Kristina is living with your mother?

(from Act I of Master Olof, by August Strindberg, trans C.D Locock, 1931.)

This was Strindberg's first major play, written when he was only 23, in 1872. It wasn't performed until 1881. (In the meantime Strindberg had kept rewriting it and in 1878 recast it in verse. But the earliest version was the one used for the first performance, and generally most admired. That's the one translated here by C.D. Locock in 1931,  and previously by Edwin Bjorkman in 1915; Bjorkman's version is available online:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7363/7363-h/7363-h.htm#link2H_4_0002

Mäster Olof: Swedish text.

http://runeberg.org/mastolof/


Olof's horror reflects the general view of Anabaptists at the time. The term itself was invented by their enemies: it means "those who baptize again", which of course isn't how the Anabaptists saw it; they regarded infant baptism as invalid.

This was an opinion that appalled Catholic and Protestant churches alike; both saw their legitimacy (not to mention their economy) as founded on the involuntary membership of the entire local population.

The pellucid Schleitheim Confession is absolute in its declaration of pacifism and civil obedience.Yet some Anabaptist groups were prepared to take part in active, even violent, dissent. This, inevitably, became the fearful image of Anabaptism fostered by their opponents.

According to Bjorkman, Strindberg was misled: the Germans Melchior Rink and Bernhard Knipperdolling never came to Stockholm. I'm not even sure they knew each other; the active life of an Anabaptist, i.e. between baptism and life imprisonment (Rink) or execution (Knipperdolling), tended to be brief.

 But the Dutchman Melchior Hoffman did come to Stockholm. Hoffman influenced both streams of Anabaptism. His wilder adherents were involved in the Münster Rebellion (Bernhard Knipperdolling was one of its leaders); these activists were wiped out by a Europe who were completely united in this respect. But Melchior's peaceful disciples seeded movements that somehow survived, in spite of dreadful persecution. For instance Obbe and Dirk Philips; the former ordained Menno Simons in 1537, from whom the Mennonites take their name. Other modern-day groups deriving from Anabaptism include the Amish and the Hutterites.