Stockholm's Archipelago and Strindberg's

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with works – such as the play Midsommar (Midsummer) from 1900 and 

the long poem ‘Stadsresan’ (The Trip to Town) in the collection Ordalek 

och småkonst (Word Play and Minor Art) from 1902 and 1905 – that 

depict a celebration of summer at the lake Mälaren or, more exactly, 

in the space between Mälaren and Stockholm. My specific interest lies 

in the process of modernity, when Stockholm became a big city and 

the urban bourgeoisie turned east in their search for nature, recreation 

and vacation, preferring the skärgård and its marine wilderness to the 

more domesticated landscape of the lake

7

. 

The skärgård is a unique landscape, found in the Baltic Sea to the 

east of Stockholm and, further east, between the island of Åland and 

the south-western coast of Finland. The terms used in Swedish express 

two concepts: arkipelag – as it originally appears in the Aegean Sea – 

and skärgård. The difference in meaning may be slight, as a skärgård 

is after all a form of archipelago. However, an arkipelag consists of 

bigger islands, at a greater distance from one another and from the 

coast, and the focus of the word is on the islands. More specifically, 

a skärgård indicates a system of smaller islands, skerries and rocks, 

situated not far from the mainland or from one another, and forming 

one landscape with the coastline, the bays and the surrounding sea. 

The somewhat shifting semantic divide between ö, holme, kobbe and 

skär indicates a scale from the bigger to the smaller island, which is 

another trait of this peculiar scenery. Stockholms skärgård is formed 

by approximately 24,000 islands and skerries. The area it occupies, 

along the coast of the regions Uppland and Södermanland (with the 

city of Stockholm between them), has an extension of about 150 

kilometres from North to South, while the greatest breadth from the 

mainland is about 80 kilometres. It consists mainly of primary bedrock, 

granite and gneiss. This bedrock is probably two billion years old, but 

in a geologically recent period (the last million years, i.e. the latest part 

of the Quaternary or glacial period) it was under the pressure of ice, 

which eroded and shaped a characteristic landscape of rounded and 

smooth primary rock. This phenomenon applies to the whole territory 

of Sweden, but it appears more evident and, as it were, naked in the 

wild area of the archipelago (Hedenstierna 2000a: 9-23). One feels 

undoubtedly closer to the elements and their origin out there, and 

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this primordial and cosmic feeling is also what some of Strindberg’s 

characters experience. Another phenomenon that conveys the idea of 

ancestral origin is that the primary rocks and the coast are still rising 

after the end of the latest glaciation (about ten thousand years ago). 

At present they rise by approximately 30-40 centimetres in a century 

(Hedenstierna 2000a: 25-27). The number of the islands is therefore 

difficult to determine precisely: some new rocks emerge, while some 

separate islands and skerries merge.

The experience of losing contact with one’s natural origins, and 

yearning for them by representing the earthly paradise as an orchard 

or a garden within a pleasant countryside, often situated on an island 

or in an archipelago, has belonged to Western culture at least since 

the Bible and classical antiquity, as shown by Arturo Graf (1965) and 

Jean Delumeau (1992). Even the Swedish expression sommarparadis, 

evoking the holidays and commonly associated with the archipelago 

for the modern Stockholmers, bears this heritage. During Strindberg’s 

lifetime, which was also a time of industrial, technical and scientific 

revolution in Sweden, the civilized city dwellers discovered untouched 

nature, or rather, they saw with new eyes an environment that 

was well-known from time immemorial. This cultural construction 

objectified modern mankind’s loss of nature, and compensated for 

it. The archipelago, situated in another place and in a wild space, 

was becoming rapidly closer and available, thanks to the modern 

communication and transport facilities. The city was expanding in all 

directions, even towards North-East and East, thus incorporating the 

natural space made of islands, skerries, rocks and water. Steamboats, 

newspapers, telegraph and telephone are historical realities as well as 

recurring elements in Strindberg’s texts. In his multi-faceted literary 

universe these objects of our modernity become symbolic markers, 

pointing at various meanings and dimensions; but they clearly also 

perform a spatial function, connecting places and mediating between 

them: in our case the inner and the outer spaces, the city and the 

islands, the urban lifestyle and the wilderness, the expanding, dynamic 

and global middle classes and the rural, more static and more secluded 

world of local peasants, pilots, fishers and hunters. 

As Per Wästberg and Bertil Hedenstierna have shown, this conquest 

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of natural space reflected a need expressed, initially, by the wealthy 

upper-middle class of Stockholm in the last decades of the nineteenth 

century.

8

 However artists, too, played an important role in this process 

of incorporation. If the rich entrepreneurs of the industrial era found 

a status symbol in the spacious villas, newly built for themselves 

and their families in the inner part of the archipelago, people like 

Strindberg, Carl Larsson and Anders Zorn preferred to rent humble 

cottages from peasants and fishers, looking for more authentic spots 

on the islands farther out.

9

 As we shall see, Strindberg partook in both 

dimensions, the more bohemian at first, and the more bourgeois later 

in his life. The Stockholmers of that time, the bourgeois as well as the 

bohemian, used to treat themselves to leisure with a certain generosity 

in summer, when  holiday could last three months, or sometimes even 

longer. It was a privilege and a moment of bliss which Strindberg, too, 

could enjoy on some occasions. His life and work were, in this respect, 

part of a collective social history. 

Strindberg’s father was a shipping agent, who mainly worked with 

the boats that travelled on the lake Mälaren, to the west of Stockholm. 

The first part of the autobiography Tjänstekvinnans son (The Son of 

a Servant) from 1886 describes Strindberg’s first encounter with the 

archipelago, which occurred in 1866, when he was seventeen. It proved 

to be an epiphany and a lifelong love, something that inexplicably 

appealed to the teenager and with which he deeply identified. 

Strindberg writes retrospectively about his alter ego Johan’s reaction 

in front of this natural scenery: 

Där öppnade sig plötsligt en tavla som kom honom att frysa 

av förtjusning. Fjärdar och holmar, fjärdar och holmar, långt, 

långt ut i det oändliga. Han hade fastän stockholmare aldrig 

sett skärgården förr, och visste ej var han var. Den tavlan gjorde 

ett sådant intryck som om han återfunnit ett land han sett i 

vackra drömmar, eller i en föregående existens, som han trodde 

på men ej visste något om. [...] Detta var hans landskap, hans 

naturs sanna miljö; idyller, fattiga knaggliga gråstensholmar 

med granskog, kastade ut på stora stormiga fjärdar och med 

det oändliga havet som bakgrund, på vederbörligt avstånd.

10

 

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