Short night of magic at Midsummer

In the farming community Christmas and Midsummer were important events in keeping track of the calendar. The longest night occurred at Christmas, the shortest at Midsummer. On Midsummer Eve young boys and girls were supposed to pick seven or nine different kinds of flowers.

– And jump in silence over stone walls. They laid the flowers under their pillow before they went to bed, so that they would dream of the person they would marry, says Göran Sjögård, head of Folklivsarkivet ( Ethnological Archives) in Lund.

In old Swedish court sentences from the 18th century you can read a lot about disruptive young people and their noisy Midsummer celebrations.

– They could throw stones and break things, says Göran Sjögård.

In the Middle Ages we got the custom of decorating a maypole from Germany. A lot of people think the maypole is a phallic symbol, an ancient fertility rite. But Nordiska Museet dismisses that idea on its homepage. The maypole at Midsummer is linked to the hard conditions in the farming community, where magic was a way of trying to conquer the uncertainties in their lives.