| Sophie Durbin |
The Virgin Spring plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema on Thursday, June 12th, as part of Bleak Week. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
“What shall we do for our sins?”
“We shall build a church of lime and stone.
That church will be named Kerna,
And we will eagerly build it.”1
Folk ballads are precious, living traces of the past that explain how things came to be as they are, or how things once were. Buried within layers of variation and localization, the original singers’ voices remain a haunting echo. Documenting a ballad is a near-futile task: if a ballad is alive, it will continue to change, and its future interpretations are a key to its curious validity as a primary source. The Virgin Spring is Ingmar Bergman’s contribution to this art form. Adapted by Ulla Isaksson at Bergman’s request from the 13th-century ballad “Töre’s daughters in Vänge,” the film itself is a new variant of the song, a part of its ancient tradition.
The original ballad tells the story of a man named Töre, whose three daughters refuse to marry a group of highwaymen and are beheaded in a birch grove. Töre avenges the murder of his daughters, only to discover that the men he killed are his own sons whom he sent away in their youth. To atone for his sins, he builds a church in Kärna, Östergötland. The plot of the film is similar, with a few key deviations. One daughter dies, not three; the herdsmen are not Töre’s sons; he builds the church when he finds a miraculous spring where Karin’s body is found. Isaksson’s screenplay, like a folk song variant, changes key details but retains the narrative arc and core lesson of the original song. Characters sing ballads throughout the film to pass the time, reminding the audience that the inspiration ballad is but one example of many sung throughout medieval Sweden, and that singing and participating in folk musical traditions would have been woven through everyday life. Karin, the titular virgin, sings a ballad while riding into the village to honor the Virgin Mary with candles. Her companion, the servant girl Ingeri, pregnant out of wedlock, secretly worships Odin and prays to bring forth a terrible fate for Karin. The contrast between Karin’s public singing and Ingeri’s private incantations highlights the folk ballad as a place where the long, slow conversion process in Sweden was mediated.
Bergman elaborates on the tension between pagan and Christian beliefs in great depth throughout the film. Sweden was late to Christianization compared to Western Europe. While the first missionaries arrived in Sweden in the 800s, the average Swede wouldn’t have worshiped the Christian god until centuries later. Remnants of the old polytheistic Norse cosmological system remained even after the belief itself evaporated. While Norse cosmology and Christianity cannot be compared on a one-for-one basis, their differences can be stated quite simply. Christianity advocated for a personal relationship with God through prayer. In the pagan system, the power of the gods had to be channeled, often through magic. Bergman takes care to depict the ambiguity of both belief systems, despite their core differences. Violence spills forth from both pagan and Christian rituals. Karin’s fate may stem from Ingeri’s pleas to Odin; however, in bits and pieces, we learn that Karin spent the night before dancing with every man in town, and that it’s not the first time she has stayed in the village without permission. Thus, her attack might also be viewed as a punishment for violating Christian morality. Töre’s actions can also be viewed through hybrid Christian and pagan lenses. His name itself means Thor; while he is clearly a devout Christian, he carries pieces of the old ways with him at all times.
Through Töre, Bergman explores the most vivid images from the original folk song. Töre uproots a birch tree and uses its branches to cleanse himself before killing his daughter’s murderers. The birch branch ritual references the first murder scene of the ballad, in which the highwaymen cut off the young girls’ heads “on a log of birch,” and “there soon three wells sprung up.”2 These lyrics hint at the significance of groves within the old Norse cosmology. In the film, the herdsmen attack Karin in a grove, just as Ingeri is overcome with fear of the forest. In his 11th-century account of his travels to Scandinavia, Adam of Bremen describes a sacred grove used for human and animal sacrifices at the Temple of Uppsala.3 Odin is said to have hung himself on Yggdrasil, the “world tree,” a myth possibly influenced by the rise of Christianity and the compelling image of Christ on the cross. By returning to the birch imagery from the folk song, Bergman digs an entire world of syncretic belief out of just a few lyrics. He uses film to his advantage to give these beliefs a visual interpretation. The Virgin Spring is an example of a conscious practice among mid-century filmmakers, artists, musicians, interior designers, and writers to contribute asynchronously to the corpus of medieval creative expression. In this case, Bergman delicately iterates on the tradition of “Töre’s daughters in Vänge,” creating not just a film adaptation but a fully formed variant on the folk song itself. Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, inspired by The Virgin Spring and released just twelve years later, shows that Bergman’s variant was valid, and that others yet may add their own contributions to this still-living ballad.
Notes:
- Traditional, Töre’s daughters in Vänge (SMB 47). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%B6res_d%C3%B6ttrar_i_W%C3%A4nge From the folk song “Töre’s daughters in Vänge.” In the final lines, Tor and his wife ask each other what they should do to atone for their sins, and agree to build a church. The ballad has been sung in the region to depict the origin story of a 12th century church at Kärna. ↩︎
- Wikipedia has a nice primer on holy wells. ↩︎
- The exact nature of the Temple at Uppsala is disputed, but for those who like digging into this kind of thing, look no further. ↩︎
Edited by Finn Odum