Libertine Love as a Proto-Romantic Mating Ideology in Fredmans epistlar

Abstract

An evolutionary approach to the Romantic Century offers insights into the era’s ideological diversity and progression of ideals. Carl Michael Bellman (1740–1795) makes for a particularly illuminating case study. He transformed drinking songs into world literature, sanctifying uncommitted sex and devaluing marriage. His magnus opus, Fredman’s Epistles (1790), made later critics praise him as Scandinavia’s greatest poet. His songs have been compared to the literature of Shakespeare and Dickens and the paintings of Hogarth and Rembrandt; his English standard biographer calls him “the greatest of all song-writers, in any language.” Swedish Romantics rediscovered the mostly forgotten Bellman. His life, artistry, and sensibilities made him a good fit for being celebrated as a proto-Romantic genius, but his bacchanalian, libertine ideology has remained misunderstood and under-researched. This article situates Bellman at the tail end of the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) whose unravelling marked the beginning of the Romantic Century. The Epistles’ ideology of libertine love can be understood as an early version of romantic love. These songs uphold the ideal that individuals should be able to copulate irrespective of social implications. Such an ethos contributed to a steep increase in illegitimate births across the West. As a response to this social dysfunction, Fredman’s Epistles chronicle an early stage of the evolution from libertine love to a more conventional ideology of romantic love, the nineteenth-century ethos that would reattach copulation and pair-bonding.