In the U.S., my homeland, the holidays are not often connected to harvest seasons or other things dictated by nature. I mean, Memorial Day and Labor Day were just plopped down on a certain date and then massaged even more to always provide a Monday off work. The old, weird European holidays I now have gotten used to seem always tied to some ancient time that people were sacrificed to the gods of harvest, fertility, ill-fitting burlap garments, or something.
Walpurgis night, known as Valborg in Sweden, has something to do with lighting bonfires and drinking. Looking it up it has got some folksy background: “Valborg is a very old tradition and used to be all about scaring away witches and bad spirits by lighting big fires for protection and making a lot of sounds to scare off evil forces.” So, what better purpose to have a celebration well into our age of reason? It’s got big fires!
Anyway, Uppsala is a university town, and it can’t claim to be that without some weird student stuff going on. So, on Valborg students build little boats that barely float, mostly due to the buoyancy of fear, and race down the murky Fyris river. The water is too green and too cold this time of year, but they do it. I don’t know the reason, really.
I took some of these pictures when I first started living in Sweden and the rest this spring, almost 10 years late. Like any good tradition, little changes. Here they are.
