On Valborg

As a child growing up on an island off the west coast of Canada I awoke one morning to an incredible sight. Tens of thousands of translucent pink jellyfish had congregated around the pilings of the ferry dock, resembling a rippling, gelatinous duvet. We usually spotted them in ones or twos—long slippery tendrils entwined, blobbing by; and though belly-flopping onto them was ill-advised (they did sting), they’d always appeared, for the most part, harmless. But there was something menacing about this silent, undulating mob of jellies. We wondered what had compelled them all, suddenly, to behave in this singular manner—and disperse as mysteriously the next night.
This unsettling memory remained buried in my subconscious until I celebrated my first Valborg in Uppsala. While elsewhere in Sweden on April 30th a healthy bonfire and a round of traditional songs to welcome spring (or, alternately, scare away witches and the undead) suffice, in Uppsala the methods of communal celebration are both curious and astounding.

Perhaps the holiday is simply baffling to foreigners. Traditions that involve champagne before 9 am, served alongside a steaming bowl of porridge, can seem odd to the uninitiated. But pleasant customs, however strange, are not so troubling. Nor are traditions which non-Swedes are, by default, exempt from: the donning of identical captain’s hats after the University President’s Carolina Library speech comes to mind. No, during my first Valborg it was the picnicking that caused me deep concern.
I suppose the idea of en masse picnicking had just never struck me before. When friends invited me to lunch in the Ekonomikum park, I thought it a spontaneous idea. I didn’t realize their plan was motivated by a collective brain which would bring half the student population of Uppsala out onto the same lawn — sprawled across a psychedelic patchwork of end-to-end blankets, hollering over the broadcast dance music, and alternately tossing their heads back in drink and cursing at their dysfunctional mobile phones. I’m not sure how the concepts of group picnic and sharing came to be fused together in my mind, but when I eventually found my friends it became evident that the misinterpretation was mine alone. Wow. You must like potato salad a lot, one friend observed, nodding at the warm, 1 kilo tub tucked under my arm. I imagine this must be how world wars get started.
But I think it’s the bizarre mixture of tradition and anarchy which I find most perplexing about Valborg. The holiday appears to be carnivalesque: a kind of temporary liberation from the established order. Yet everyone seems to be escaping from the official way of life in the traditional way. I’m not endorsing the heaving of still greater amounts of Norrlands Nation furniture out of Studentvägen windows in random acts of sabotage. I suppose I just find the organized nature of the chaos rather fascinating: why suddenly on Valborg, collective picnicking just makes good sense to everybody, in the same way that trash cans don’t. How hundreds of students can hurtle themselves down the Fyris in dodgy, homemade crafts of Styrofoam and duct-tape. Why bevies of undergrads, plastered since the late morning, attempt to ride bicycles. And why the term public toilet has to take on a new meaning.

Prone to conspiracy theories, I believe there is some Valborg instruction book which failed to reach the inside of my mailbox. And perhaps not only mine, but other non-Swedes’ boxes as well. Like the poor Frenchmen who nabbed the Trygg-Hansa life-saver from the river’s edge two years ago. My partner, a part-time security guard on special-assignment in the city park, saw the whole thing from his post guarding the White Crown tulip bed (it was Linné year, after all). It seems the Frenchmen too were unclear about the rules of disorder: their juvenile prank turned into a potential COPS episode as four police and security cars surrounded them.
However, most mysterious of all is how abruptly it ends. On May 1st the collective brain suffers from a collective grand mal hangover of such a magnitude that the county gnomes have enough time to power-vacuum the broken glass up off the sidewalks and excavate the city’s green spaces out of the dump-heaps left behind in peace. This all seems a tad convenient.
But, then, perhaps like tubed caviar and bicycling through deep snow, the Valborg celebrations are just another aspect of Swedish culture inherently enigmatic to foreigners.