Anna Blennow, University of Gothenburg 

Schering Rosenhane and Skogekär Bergbo. The unmasking of a 300-year-old poet pseudonym 

This article argues that Swedish diplomat and nobleman Schering Rosenhane (1609–1663) should be regarded as the author of the three poetic works in Swedish written by pseudonym Skogekär Bergbo (“Wood-loving Mountain-Dweller”) in the 17th century: Thet Swenska Språketz Klagemål (“The complaint of the Swedish Language”), Wenerid (a collection of 101 love sonnets to a lady with the same name), and Fyratijo små Wijsor (“Forty small songs”). Central to this identification are two previously unstudied poems in Swedish written in Schering Rosenhane’s hand in the Manuscript Department of Uppsala University Library. One of the poems is a song in 13 strophes, in which “Sylvander” complains about the coldness of his beloved “Fillis”. Inspired by the early 17th-century French Air de cour tradition, it is also influenced by German poet Martin Opitz, including four strophes translated from his “Hirten-Lied”. The other one is an incomplete poem in 12 strophes, a free translation of the famous passage in Torquato Tasso’s Aminta where the choir sings of the lost Golden Age. Both poems are dated to the 1630s, based on a palaeographic analysis. Through a close study of Rosenhane’s biography and literary production, as well as an analysis of language and style in the two poems compared with the oeuvre of Skogekär Bergbo, Rosenhane is presented as the most probable author candidate, instead of his younger brother Gustaf, to whom the authorship traditionally has been assigned. The article shows that Rosenhane, during a study trip to England and France in 1629–1631, as well as during long residencies on diplomatic missions abroad in Münster and Paris in the 1640s, had taken active part in learned networks and poetic circles and thus had come into close contact with Italian, French and German literature and poetry, providing him with the proficiency needed for being Skogekär Bergbo.