See Death awaits you. New angles on Bellman. Edited by Per Olsen, Randi Larsen and Hans Lundsteen.
Fredman's epistles, published in 1790, were to become a classic.
In Tøm nu dit glas, se Døden på dieg venter, Scandinavian literary researchers analyze, interpret and discuss the oeuvre of the outstanding 18th-century Swedish poet and poet Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795) – not only Fredman's epistles and songs, but also other, more unknown pages of the diverse authorship. But especially the epistles and their thematization of Bacchanalian excesses with love & sex, wine, music, song & dance are still current and long-lasting literature. The Christian gospel is here replaced by a new one: "Drinking, frolicking,/with girls romp/ is what Saint Fredman teaches", the trinity is parodically replaced by Venus, Bacchus and Apollo, the representatives of love, wine and music.
And the epistles get an extra deep perspective, not least because they always include death, as in the poem "Til Ulla Winblad, written when her love bore fruit": "even in the hour of love/ death's bells are heard chiming."
Attempts to define Bellman must be incomplete, but Empty Your Glass now offers new angles on this inexhaustible Bellman, and together the book's articles nevertheless constitute an attempt to create a holistic view of Bellman's acidic texts and their variegated and crooked existences, as well as to create an outlook to the period. The book is a tribute to a world literary 275th anniversary.
