Langdans Fran Solleron: A Song History

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The dance takes its name from Sollerön, which sits in Lake Siljan and is the biggest island in Dalarna, and by the twentieth century its steps had all but vanished from memory.[1][2] According to Rune Svensson's 1975 account in Sool-Öen, the local history society's journal, the Gagnef folk-dance recorder Johan Larsson had picked up reports of an archaic långdans, or long dance, from the island while travelling the Siljan parishes, but no one could tell him its hold or its steps; Svensson thought it had likely dropped away once the waltz took hold locally toward the end of the 1800s.[1] Svensson, who had photographed Dunder Karin Jönsson on her birthdays for years, helped Larsson reach her when she was 101: from her chair she first hinted at the steps with her feet, then got up, took Svensson and her daughter Frida by the hands and showed the hold and footwork until Larsson was satisfied.[1] She died less than a year later, and "Långdans från Sollerön" is the name the dance has gone by since.[1]

Watercolor of a young woman in a patterned headscarf and blue jacket

Anders Zorn, Skerikulla, watercolor, c. 1875–1920. A Swedish woman painted by Anders Zorn, who worked in Dalarna; the sitter has no known connection to Sollerön or the dance.

The tune has its own pedigree: a second piece on the society's page says the melody was noted down from Reser Anna, born in 1848, who had heard it from an old fiddler who was ill but much in demand.[1] Helmer Nilsson, writing in Sool-Öen in 1987, calls it one of the oldest known melodies and explains that it had no words: dancers hummed it, and the dance itself existed well before couple dances arrived.[3] He also reports that Jörgen Lidberg of Mora wrote a wordless choral arrangement of it for a jubilee of the Siljansfors works, after which the Sollerö choir took it up and a text in the local dialect was added.[3] The society's page compares the dance with the Faroese dances and describes it winning dancers in many parts of Sweden within a short time, while FolkWiki, a Swedish online tune collection, lists the melody as a långdans from Dalarna in D minor.[1][4]

In the dulcimer world, the tune sits among the Scandinavian melodies of Mark Gilston's Scandinavian Tunes For Dulcimer, a download issued by Gilston that pairs the complete book with a separate PDF for each tune.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Langdans Fran Solleron"

Sources

  1. Sollerö hembygdsförening (Sool-Öen, 1975): "100-åringen och Sollerö långdans" (Rune Svensson).
  2. Sollerö hembygdsförening (Sool-Öen): "Om namnet Soll ~ Sollerön" (Bror Lindén).
  3. Sollerö hembygdsförening (Sool-Öen, 1987): "Gamla låtar som nya visor" (Helmer Nilsson).
  4. FolkWiki: "Långdans från Sollerön".
  5. Mark Gilston: "Scandinavian Tunes For Dulcimer".
  6. Image: Anders Zorn, Skerikulla, watercolor, c. 1875–1920. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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