Poetry
Svenska friheten
Not translated into English
Olof von Dalin · 1742
Synopsis
Liberty, personified, appears before Queen Ulrika Eleonora, who has just died, and tells her what she has experienced in Sweden since the beginning. The queen then turns to Svea, the figure of the kingdom, to urge her to preserve it, and warns her against the division of the parties. The poem, in alexandrines, mixes allegorical figures and meditations on the country's past with the speeches.
Context
Written in the last weeks of 1741, in mourning for the sovereign, the poem appeared in 1742. The author, who had until then followed Addison and Pope, draws on James Thomson's Liberty; the national biographical dictionary also sees in it the allegorical arrangement of a poem by Gunno Dahlstierna and the use of Voltaire's Henriade, and judges the epic already dated in its own time. A second edition, printed without the changes demanded by the censor, was among the grievances that later earned the author exile from court. Svenska Vitterhetssamfundet has published a critical edition.
Who it is for
A long poem in alexandrines, in eighteenth-century Swedish; it helps to know that the country was then torn by party strife.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by his contemporaries as his masterpiece and as a great national epic.
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