TENTH LETTER
Describes the ancient city of Visby; the Gotlanders of old; their wonderful wealth; their defeat by King Valdemar, and the vats of gold that he demanded for the city’s ransom. Returning to more modern days, Midsummer’s Day, the great holiday of Sweden, is described.
Visby, June 24.
My dear Judicia,
Please refer to the map once more, and you will see in the blue water, nearly halfway between the Swedish coast and the Baltic province of Russia, a long, scraggly island, with many capes and indentations. You will see that it is called Gotland, and on its western shore you will see that there is a city called Visby. I do not know that I can give such a traveler and geographer as yourself any real information about Gotland, but I will at least venture to refresh your memory concerning this most interesting island, for a very considerable part of the world’s history for a good many scores of years centered in this piece of sea-washed land, which contains barely twelve hundred square miles of surface.
At one time Visby, which has now dwindled to a somewhat obscure tourist resort, was the London of northern Europe. The East and the West paid their tribute to it. Russia sent her timber and her furs, and England and Germany and Flanders their precious stuffs, which were here exchanged for other precious stuffs and then went their several ways to all parts of Europe.
One of their old ballads tells us:
“The Gotlanders weigh their gold with twenty pound weights,
And play with choicest jewels,
The pigs eat out of silver troughs,
And the women spin with golden distaffs.”
That the old ballad had some foundation in fact is shown us by the splendid ruins that tell us of Visby’s former greatness.
Throughout Gotland there are no less than ninety great Gothic churches, most of them in ruins, while in Visby alone were sixteen of these churches, some of them among the largest in Europe. So much has the city dwindled that in only one of these churches is heard the voice of prayer and praise to-day. The walls of ten others can still be seen, but they are merely magnificent ruins.
That the ancient Gotlanders were proud of their splendid isolation, in the middle of the Baltic, and were not inclined to bend the supple knee to any potentate, is indicated by a tradition that has come down to us, of the ambassador whom these island people sent to the king of Sweden to seek an alliance for mutual offense and defense. This ambassador was named Strabagn, which being interpreted means “Long Legs.”
When he reached Upsala, where was then the royal palace, he found the king and queen dining in their great banquet hall. The king had a grudge against the Gotlanders, whom he considered too toplofty and independent, and so Mr. Longfellow was kept standing in the hall while the royal pair continued their sumptuous meal. At last the king condescended to ask gruffly, “What’s the news from Gotland?” “Nothing” replied Strabagn, “except that a mare on the island has foaled three colts at a birth.” “Ah,” said the king, “and what does the third colt do when the other two are sucking?” “He does as I do,” answered Long Legs; “he stands and looks on.” This stroke of wit pleased the king and queen so much that they invited the ambassador to make a third at their table, and were finally willing to conclude a treaty which was as much to the advantage of Sweden as of Gotland.
The thirteenth century was the Golden Age of Gotland. In this century the great warehouses were built, and it became the commercial metropolis of northern Europe. There were few stronger fortresses in the world, for an enormous stone wall thirty feet high surrounded the city, and from the wall no less than forty-eight huge towers arose.
It does not take much imagination to reproduce ancient Visby, for thirty-eight of the forty-eight towers are still standing. They are more than sixty feet high, and one can see in each of the five stories the holes through which the archers fired their arrows, doubtless winged with death for many a foe, while from the battlemented top of the towers huge stones were thrown from the catapults.
But in spite of Visby’s isolation, and in spite of her mighty fortifications, she was not impregnable as she supposed, for in 1361 Denmark, which in those early days seems to have always been the evil genius of Sweden, sent an army under the command of King Valdemar Atterdag to capture the city. The people behind their strong fortifications at first laughed at him and mustered all their troops to defend the city, but Valdemar was victorious, nearly two thousand of Visby’s noblest defenders were slain, and the city was at the mercy of the Dane.
He would not accept its surrender and accord it the honors of war, even after it had capitulated, but tore down a part of the wall to prove his ruthless might and marched as a conqueror to the center of the city.
One is reminded by Valdemar’s conquest of the hard terms that Pizarro made when he conquered the Peruvians. You remember that for the ransom of King Atahualpa he went into a great room, and drawing a red mark on the wall as high as he could reach he told the Peruvians that they must fill that room with gold as high as the red mark if they would release their king from bondage and save him from death.
King Valdemar did something of the same sort to the Visbyites, for he took the three biggest ale vats that he found in the city and commanded the people to fill them with gold and silver within three hours. So frightened were the inhabitants by his bloodthirsty cruelty that they obeyed, stripping themselves of their golden ornaments, rifling their churches and their treasure-houses, until the big vats were full to the brim.
But even this did not avail to save them from further rapine, for Valdemar made a clean sweep of all that was left and poor Visby was plundered by the rapacious troops of all her riches.
I should like to be able to tell you that I saw the bones of Valdemar Attardag safely encoffined where he could do no more harm, but the next best thing was to see the Jungfrutornet, or the “Maiden’s Tower,” where, according to tradition, the noble maid who opened the gates of Visby to the Danish king, whom she loved, was walled up alive. You need not waste much sympathy on this maiden, however, for I am told on good authority that she is a strictly mythical girl, and that her story was invented by the people of Visby to account for what many believed was a somewhat cowardly capitulation of the city to the Danes.
King Valdemar, however, must have had one or two redeeming traits of character, for he erected a great stone cross on the battlefield to commemorate the death of the eighteen hundred citizens whom he slew. The cross can still be seen, scarcely marred by the passage of these five hundred years, and the inscription on it is not a record of triumph so much as a memorial to the dead.
You have noticed, perhaps, that this letter is dated “June 24.” This date may not have any great significance for you, but it is a high day in Sweden, perhaps the most joyous of all the year, for it is Midsummer’s Day, the day without a night in many parts of this northern land.
In almost every village in Sweden you will see to-day a Majstang. Perhaps you can guess that a Majstang is a Maypole, though I think I hear you say, “Why have a Maypole in June?” The Swedish word for May, Maj, is an ancient term meaning “green leaf,” and June 24 is preëminently the Feast of the Green Leaf.
It is not the somber evergreens, however, that decorate the windows at Christmas time and that stand dressed with Christmas candles and Christmas gifts; the Midsummer Tree is the birch. If it should ever be put to a vote in Sweden, I think the Swedes would decide that the birch is their most beloved tree. It is equally beautiful in summer and in winter. In the former its delicate drooping branches are covered with green, and in the latter with white. There is nothing quite so lovely in the northern latitudes as the birch trees silvered with a thick coating of frost in midwinter, unless it be these same birch trees in their glad green livery in midsummer.
On June 23, in preparation for Midsummer’s Day, all the lads and lassies that you see in the country will have a load of birch boughs on their shoulders. In Stockholm hundreds of wagons and little steamers bring tens of thousands of young birch trees to the city, and every window and doorway is decorated with its delicate green. Even the dray horses are decked out in green, and “the wearing of the green” is more popular in Sweden on June 24 than in Ireland on March 17.
This is the out-of-door festival of the country. At Luleå in the far north the people all flock on Midsummer’s Eve to a mountain near by called Mjaolkudds Berget. Here each family builds a small bonfire and over it makes their coffee, which is supposed to have a peculiar flavor and potency on Midsummer’s Eve. The midnight sun cannot quite be seen from Mjaolkudds Berget, but according to the ancient custom the coffeepot must be placed on the hot coals just as the last rim of his upper disk disappears. Before the coffee is brewed, the upper disk is again visible above the horizon, and then the coffee can be drunk by every member of the family, from the great-grandmother to the youngest scion.
This of all days is a day of life and color in Sweden. Let us not stay in little Visby, with its mournful ruins reminding us of the golden days of Gotland, but go out into the country, for nature is ever fresh and new. She knows nothing about ruins, or, if she does allow some giant tree to totter and fall in the forest, she soon covers up his decaying form with moss and creepers. The colors that we see are not all green by any means, for this is the day when Swedish maidens adopt the bright, ancient costumes of their country, the Crown Princess herself having set the example. The Maypole is set up on every village green, and the children first are given the right of way. Hand in hand they romp around the Maypole, singing the folk songs and the glees which Sweden’s children for many a generation have sung on Midsummer’s Day. Then the older ones take their place, and all is motion and gladness and color and song.
If we should find ourselves in the woods after the day’s festivities are over, we should very likely see some silent, solitary maidens wandering through the fields, in the long twilight which here lasts till midnight. Do not think that they are lovelorn lasses deserted by their swains, for they are simply seeking to know their own fortunes, which Midsummer’s Night reveals to them. In one of the provinces the maiden must pick three flowers each, of three different kinds, and must speak to no one until the next morning. These flowers she puts under her pillow when she goes to bed, and if she has been conscientiously tongue-tied, and has been quite alone when she picked the flowers, and has replied to every question which teasing suitors would put to her only by signs, she will dream of her future husband, and the next morning will know who he is to be.
In other provinces she has to pick nine different kinds of flowers from as many different farms, and this bouquet is even more efficacious than a smaller one. Why should we not have such a midsummer holiday in America? It is true that we have our Fourth of July, which is not very far from the right date, but, however “safe and sane” we may make it, the Fourth of July can never be anything but a patriotic holiday, nor should it be.
Thanksgiving Day is too late in the year for an out-of-door holiday, and the thirtieth of May is dedicated to a sacred celebration all its own. But why should we not have one genuine out-of-door day, a day when we shall see to it that every city child may romp and play in God’s green fields, and when we may make it a joyous duty to thank the Giver of all, not only for the harvests and for the full granaries as on Thanksgiving Day, but for the sun and the green trees and the flowers and grass and everything that makes us glad to be alive? What day could be so good for such a celebration in America as well as in Sweden as Midsummer’s Day?
Before we bid good-by to Gotland and Visby, let us climb in the late evening twilight the ruined towers of the church of St. Nikolaus. From the old wall we can look out to sea, and if our imagination is strong enough, supplemented by a sufficient knowledge of old traditions, perhaps we shall see an eerie, reddish light on the calm waters of the Baltic. This light comes from two great carbuncles in the bottom of the Baltic. These carbuncles once adorned the western gable of the church of St. Nikolaus, where, according to the tradition, “these carbuncles shone with the brightness of the sun at noonday, throughout the night, and served as guiding lights to storm-tossed mariners far out on the Baltic wave. Twenty-four soldiers stood constantly on guard to watch these ruddy gems, the most precious possessions of the church, and no one, on pain of death, might approach the sanctuary after the going down of the sun.”
Ruins of St. Nikolaus Cathedral, Visby, Gotland.
King Valdemar could not leave such priceless jewels to St. Nikolaus, and so he snatched them from the rose windows which they adorned, put them on his biggest ship, and sailed away to Denmark. But justice followed the sacrilegious freebooter; his ship was wrecked on one of the little islands which line the coast of Gotland, and the king himself barely escaped with his life. The carbuncles sank to the bottom of the sea, which accounts for that strange glow which any one with a vivid imagination can see from the ruined tower of St. Nikolaus as he looks off on the peaceful Baltic.
Faithfully yours,
Phillips.