Erik Axel Karlfeldt

Erik Axel Karlfeldt was born in 1864 at Karlbo, in the province of Dalarna, into a farming family. He was christened Erik Axel Eriksson, but in 1889 took the name Karlfeldt, wishing to distance himself from his father, who had suffered the disgrace of a criminal conviction. He studied at Uppsala University, supporting himself by teaching in schools, among them a school for adults, and afterwards spent five years at the Royal Library in Stockholm.

His first collection, Vildmarks- och kärleksvisor (1895), was followed by the two books in which he created his poetic alter ego Fridolin — a learned man who returns to the farm of his forebears — in Fridolins visor (1898) and Fridolins lustgård (1901). Through Fridolin, Karlfeldt celebrated the peasant culture of Dalarna: its calendar of labour and feast, its hymns and folk speech, its painted wall-hangings, which he turned into verse in his Dalmålningar. Later collections — Flora och Pomona (1906), Flora och Bellona (1918) and Hösthorn (1927) — deepened the elegiac and visionary note. Beneath the apparent regionalism lay a highly wrought, symbolist art, dense with archaic diction and biblical cadence, and a pantheist’s sense of nature.

Karlfeldt was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1904 and became its permanent secretary, a post he held until his death. Because of that position he declined the Nobel Prize when it was offered to him in 1919. After he died in Stockholm in April 1931 the Academy awarded him the prize posthumously — the only time the literature prize has been given in this way. He remains little translated into English.