Columnist Paula Dubbink watched a controversial commercial with Sweden’s best football player, which made her ponder about the Swedish national anthem.
If you have never watched Swedish television – or any television at all – you’re missing out on something great. One of the newest commercials offers you a combination of the best that Sweden has to offer: Volvo, the Swedish landscape and Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
In the commercial, we see the dark and woody Swedish landscape (no, this is not in Scania), Zlatan jumping in an ice cold lake (they must have paid him well) and a car driving smoothly over snowy roads. To complete the Swedishness of this all, Zlatan reads with a cute accent the Swedish national anthem in English translation.
I do not care about Zlatan, even less about Volvo and I have seen enough snow last month. But I like the Swedish anthem, despite the fact that I don’t have Swedish citizenship. This might to some extent have to do with the standard that I am used to. My own Dutch national anthem was written sometime during our 80-years war, around 1580, and is marked by historical references that do no longer make any sense in the current context. As such, we Dutch still happily sing that we are ‘William of Orange, from German (!) blood’ and that we have always honored the King of Spain (!).
In comparison to that, every national anthem would of course make for an improvement. Moreover, Sweden’s ‘You old, You free’ has a nice, 19th-centurist romantic touch, references to the beautiful Swedish nature and a melody that is less pompous than most national anthems.
No wonder that the Swedes decided a few years ago to give up the day after Pentecost as a free day and instead took up June 6th as Nationaldagen, right? If you have such a nice anthem, it should be sung loudly while the national flag is raised and everybody is filled with patriotic feelings. Eller hur?
No, funnily enough.
Apart from its language, the Swedish national anthem is not so Swedish at all and it does not even mention the Swedish motherland by name. It was written in a time when many people were in favor of pan-Scandinavism: an extensive cooperation between the Nordic countries, with the possible option of the Scandinavia even becoming one country. The idea might be less popular or feasible nowadays, but the anthem never changed. So when Zlatan dramatically read out the anthem’s last two lines ‘I want to live, I want to die in Sweden’ – he must have known that he was reading a forged translation by Volvo. In the original, he would have wanted to live and die in ‘the North’ – a subtle but important difference.
Should we rejoice in the fact that an ‘immigrant’ wants to express his love for Sweden? Is this the first step to a kind of undesirable nationalism? And should the Swedish government sue Volvo for changing an old text? Or should it be happy for good PR?
The papers and Internet forums are already full of discussions. Personally I stand with the original version and wish more countries could be like Sweden: a national anthem that only mentions one of the four corners of the world and not the country itself. For this leaves space for all to sing along, including American tourists, Chinese exchange students or a Dutchie in Sweden.
“I want to live and die in the North” – that includes every country, if taken from a South Pole perspective, right?
