Midsummer: Drunk Swedes and Maypoles

‘You’ve come for Midsummer? You will get to see a lot of really drunk Swedes,’ was the first thing that Erik – the Vandrarhem (youth hostel) owner, no slouch at imbibing himself – said to me upon my arrival in Leksand.

Leksand is a modest, 80s mid-American suburbs-looking town lying at the southeastern corner of Sweden’s Lake Siljan. There’s not much in Leksand, one grocery store, a handful of Italian and Chinese restaurants, the state-run alcohol shop, a movie theatre that operates only seasonally. On any other week – and indeed in the days prior to the event – it’s a serene place surrounded by villages of red wooden cottages with baby blue shutters and barn doors – the colors are mandated by local law – but now it was preparing for a raucous implosion of guests from all over the country. For Midsummer weekend, the Swedes all but evacuate the major cities and flock to the countryside; Leksand alone balloons to well over twice its normal population (an estimated 20,000 people come to watch the maypole rising on Midsummer’s Eve). Suffice it to say, I was in the right place to celebrate with the drunken Swedes.

A fertility festival of pagan origins, Midsummer’s Eve is the most important – or at least most zealously celebrated – weekend on Scandinavia’s yearly calendars. It takes place annually on the Friday following the 21^st of June, the longest day of the year (It never actually gets dark in most of Sweden during the summer. In Leksand, the sun sets somewhere around midnight. One night, I rode a bike home from a party in a neighboring village at 2am and had no need for a lamp, as there was still plenty of light out).

Midsummer celebrations center on the rising of a maypole. Symbolically the maypole is meant to be a phallus and, accordingly, its erecting is a fertility ritual. The Swedes go the extra mile in decorating the dried pine tree trunk with a pair of wreaths positioned like testicles, just in case you had difficulty deducing the symbolism. Each town in Sweden has its own maypole and its own erecting (stop giggling) ceremony. It’s a lot more difficult than it sounds. Leksand’s maypole is the biggest in the country at just over 28m in length, or about a third of a football field. Check out the picture above to get an idea of the scale (this one is from another village and is considered a small maypole).

A big part of the fun in watching the maypole rising is the interlude between stages. While the supporting sticks are undergoing strategic repositioning, a band of violinists dressed like a roaming tribe of Quakers play a speedy Swedish ditty that sounds like the Scandinavian combination of folk and bluegrass. The song is always the same (or at least it sounds exactly the same to me), so the team hoisting the maypole knows when the end of the number is near, and they prepare for the next big cry of “HAAAIIILLL” and accompanying heave.

After the maypole is finally up and standing, a circle of people several bodies thick forms around it and a series of dances commence. At the big rising in Leksand, thousands of people held hands and danced (ran) frantically around the circle, kicking up a cloud of dust that obscured the view of all but the very top of the maypole.

Then come the big parties and the drunken Swedes, but that’s a whole nother story.