A Gallant Ballad from Göinge
In Lund in the mid-eighteenth century there was an obvious interest in the dialects of Scania. The article presents a previously unknown Lund print from 1741 which the author found in a collection of “Swedish Chap- Books” at the University of Harvard in summer 1999. It is entitled En galant Göingevisa (“A Gallant Ballad from Göinge”) and is in the dialect of northern Scania, evidently composed by a student, possibly the future clergyman Pehr Lovén. The tune is unknown, but the ballad scholar and troubadour Christer Lundh has done a “reconstruction” in contemporary ballad style, p. 17.
The text consists of 18 verses, each with four lines with the simple rhyme scheme aabb. The ballad is of a jocular character, describing the experiences of a hop dealer. The hops that were used to make beer bitter and keep longer were grown for sale in northern Scania. The hop dealer, who calls himself Pehr Göing, happens to come with his load of hops to a farm where a wedding is being celebrated. He takes it as a good sign, fortifies himself with a snifter of aquavit, and enters the wedding house, ordering his boy helper to look after the horses and the load of hops. Once inside, he invites the girls to whirl around the floor in a Göinge dance. The hop dealer knows how to behave properly towards the peasant folk and the persons of rank who are present, but he forgets both his cap and his business for the pleasure of taking part in the wedding feast. The description of this feast agrees completely with what Pehr Lovén writes in his own dissertation about Göinge in 1745.
The ballad conveys a vivid picture of a province which had not yet belonged to Sweden for more than a century. The poem is a good example of what presentday folklorists call performance. In addition to that, however, it gives valuable insight into the hop trade. The vocabulary – although it is mixed with standard language – is partly older than anything recorded by dialect scholars.
