Carl Jonas Love Almqvist's Det går an ("It'll Do" / "It Is Acceptable," 1839) is one of the most consequential short novels in Swedish — a brisk, almost cinematic story of the glazier's daughter Sara Videbeck and the sergeant Albert, who meet on a steamboat and decide to live together without marrying. Its argument for a woman's right to her own work and her own life caused a scandal that drove Almqvist out of the country. For the language learner it is just as interesting, because it sits at a hinge in the history of Swedish prose: it still carries the old plural verbs (lågo, voro, hade) and a few older noun forms, yet its sentences are short, concrete and reportorial — strikingly modern, far closer to today's Swedish than the Gustav Vasa Bible three centuries earlier. This page quotes the famous opening verbatim and shows both the period features and how little, really, separates Almqvist from a contemporary writer.
The opening
En skön torsdagsmorgon i juli månad strömmade mycket folk förbi Riddarholmskyrkan i Stockholm och skyndade utför backen emellan Kammarrätten och Statskontoret, för att i rättan tid hinna ned till Mälarstranden, där ångbåtarne lågo.
One fine Thursday morning in July, a great many people streamed past Riddarholm Church in Stockholm and hurried down the slope between the Court of Audit and the Treasury, so as to reach Mälaren's shore in good time, where the steamboats lay. (Det går an, 1839, opening sentence — modernised spelling; the first edition prints thorsdagsmorgon, julii, der)
Line by line
En skön torsdagsmorgon i juli månad strömmade mycket folk förbi Riddarholmskyrkan...
Read this sentence as if it were written yesterday and you will be right about almost everything. En skön torsdagsmorgon ("one fine Thursday morning") is a perfectly ordinary fronted time adverbial, which triggers V2 inversion exactly as modern Swedish does: the verb strömmade ("streamed, flowed") comes before its subject mycket folk ("a lot of people"). The verb strömmade used of a crowd is a living metaphor still current today. Förbi Riddarholmskyrkan ("past Riddarholm Church") and the place-names — Kammarrätten (the Court of Audit), Statskontoret (the old Treasury office) — are all real, identifiable Stockholm locations; the prose has the precision of reportage, not of romance.
The one word that is not modern is emellan ("between"), the older and more literary form of today's mellan — but it is still understood and occasionally used for effect. I rättan tid ("in good/due time") is a slightly fixed, elevated phrase (modern everyday Swedish: i rätt tid or i tid), with rättan showing an old weak-adjective accusative ending that has since vanished. These are the only two specks of archaism in the whole first clause.
...för att i rättan tid hinna ned till Mälarstranden, där ångbåtarne lågo.
Here is the page's plural verb, and it is genuine first-edition Almqvist. The subject of the relative clause is ångbåtarne ("the steamboats"), which is plural, so the verb is lågo — the old plural past of ligga ("to lie"): ångbåtarne lågo = "the steamboats lay [moored]." Modern Swedish, having abolished verb–subject number agreement, writes the uniform singular låg regardless of number. So the reader's rule is the familiar one-step substitution: lågo → låg.
The noun ångbåtarne shows a second, subtler period feature: the older definite-plural ending -arne where modern Swedish has -arna. Both mark "the steamboats" (plural, definite); -arne was the standard nineteenth-century spelling for this class of nouns and survived in print well into the twentieth century. Map ångbåtarne → ångbåtarna. Together, ångbåtarne lågo is a tidy little museum of 1839 grammar inside an otherwise wholly modern sentence — which is exactly why so many modern reprints quietly "correct" it to ångbåtarna låg.
❌ (modernised reprints) där ångbåtarna låg
The common modern reprint — singular verb 'låg' and modern plural '-arna'. Readable, but NOT what Almqvist wrote.
✅ (1839 original) där ångbåtarne lågo
Almqvist's original — old plural verb 'lågo' and older definite plural '-arne'. The period features the learner should recognise.
A second plural-verb specimen (constructed, period-style)
The verified opening happens to contain only one plural verb. To show the others a C2 reader will meet across the book — voro ("were"), hade ("had"), gingo ("went") — here is a short sentence composed in Almqvist's style.
Passagerarne voro redan ombord, och de flesta hade funnit sig en plats vid relingen, där de kunde se staden glida förbi.
The passengers were already aboard, and most of them had found themselves a place by the railing, where they could watch the town glide past. (constructed period-style sentence — NOT a direct quotation)
The constructed sentence is labelled as such; only the opening above is a genuine quotation. It shows voro (← var, "were") agreeing with the plural passagerarne, the unchanging hade ("had"), and once more the -arne plural (passagerarne → passagerarna). Notice again how thin the archaic layer is: strip voro → var, passagerarne → passagerarna, and the sentence is indistinguishable from one a journalist might write today. Reling ("railing, gunwale"), glida förbi ("glide past") — all current vocabulary.
How modern-leaning Almqvist is — and the contrast with 1541
The point worth dwelling on is the distance travelled between the Gustav Vasa Bible (1541) and Almqvist (1839), roughly three centuries apart. Set the two side by side and the difference is enormous:
| Feature | 1541 Bible | 1839 Almqvist | Modern Swedish |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spelling of t/d | th- (thet, then) | modern t/d (det, den) | det, den |
| Spelling of v | w (wår, wij) | modern v (var, vi) | var, vi |
| gh / doubled vowels | yes (daghligha, Skee) | no | no |
| Plural verbs | yes (äro, skola, förlåtom) | yes (lågo, voro, hade) | no (invariant) |
| Archaic pronouns I / eder | yes | no (uses de, dem, er) | no |
| Old case endings on nouns | yes (jordena) | traces only (i rättan tid) | no |
| Definite plural ending | various older forms | -arne (ångbåtarne) | -arna |
The Bible is a foreign country: four spelling systems to relearn, lost pronouns, lost verb forms, old noun cases. Almqvist, by contrast, differs from modern Swedish in essentially one and a half features — the plural verbs (lågo, voro, hade) and the -arne plural ending — plus a thin dusting of slightly elevated vocabulary (emellan, i rättan tid). His spelling is modern; his pronouns are modern; his word order is modern; his sentences are short and concrete rather than periodic. (For why he reads so much more plainly than even his slightly later contemporary Strindberg, compare Annotated Literature: August Strindberg; for the deep archaic layer, The Gustav Vasa Bible (1541).)
Why is Almqvist so modern? Partly the period — by 1839 the spelling had been largely modernised and the plural verbs were already felt as bookish even by writers who still used them. But mostly it is Almqvist himself: he was a deliberate stylistic radical who wanted a clear, democratic, almost journalistic Swedish, stripped of ornament. Det går an reads like the work of a man who has decided that plain prose is a moral as well as an aesthetic choice — which, given the book's argument, it was. (For the broader arc of the language's modernisation, see Swedish: History of the Language; for the literary register, The Literary Register.)
Common Mistakes
With heritage prose you decode rather than produce, so these are reading traps.
❌ Reading 'ångbåtarne lågo' as containing an unfamiliar verb.
Wrong — 'lågo' is just the old plural of 'ligga' ('lay'). Modern Swedish writes the singular 'låg' for any number. Map lågo → låg.
✅ 'där ångbåtarne lågo' = 'where the steamboats lay' (plural 'lågo' = 'låg').
❌ Treating '-arne' (ångbåtarne, passagerarne) as a misprint for '-arna'.
Wrong — '-arne' is the regular 19th-century definite plural ending; modern Swedish replaced it with '-arna'. Map -arne → -arna.
✅ ångbåtarne → ångbåtarna; passagerarne → passagerarna (the steamboats / the passengers).
❌ Assuming Almqvist's Swedish is as archaic as the 1541 Bible.
Wrong — Almqvist (1839) differs from modern Swedish in barely more than the plural verbs and the -arne ending. The Bible (1541) differs in spelling, pronouns, verb forms AND noun cases. Don't expect th-, w-, or 'I/eder' in Almqvist.
✅ Almqvist is near-modern prose with old plural verbs; the 1541 Bible is a different language layer entirely.
❌ Reading 'emellan' as a typo or unknown word.
Wrong — 'emellan' is just the older, more literary form of modern 'mellan' ('between'). It is still understood today. Map emellan → mellan.
✅ 'backen emellan Kammarrätten och Statskontoret' = 'the slope between the Court of Audit and the Treasury'.
What to notice
- The verified 1839 opening reads ...där ångbåtarne lågo with the genuine period plural verb lågo (← låg) and the older definite plural -arne (← -arna); many modern reprints quietly modernise it to ångbåtarna låg.
- Across the book you also meet voro (← var) and the unchanging hade; one substitution table handles all the verb agreement. See Swedish: History of the Language.
- Almqvist's prose is strikingly modern-leaning: modern spelling, modern pronouns, modern word order, short concrete sentences — it differs from today's Swedish in barely more than the plural verbs and the -arne ending.
- The contrast with the 1541 Bible is the headline: three centuries turned a foreign-looking text (th-, w-, lost pronouns, noun cases) into near-modern prose. Compare The Gustav Vasa Bible (1541).
- A thin layer of (literary) vocabulary remains — emellan (← mellan), i rättan tid — but nothing that blocks comprehension. For a slightly later, slightly more archaic literary voice, see Annotated Literature: August Strindberg.
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- Annotated Literature: August StrindbergC1 — An annotated look at late-nineteenth-century literary Swedish through August Strindberg, whose 'Röda rummet' (1879) opens with one of the most famous lines in the language — 'Det var en afton i början av maj.' The genuine opening clause is quoted and decoded; a clearly-labelled period-style continuation then illustrates the era's features for a C1 reader: the old plural verbs (äro, voro, hava), the optional masculine -e adjective (den gamle), and the long periodic sentence. Strindberg matters because he pulled spoken rhythms into literary prose, making him more accessible than his contemporaries despite the archaic agreement.
- Annotated Heritage: The Gustav Vasa Bible (1541)C2 — An annotated reading of the Gustav Vasa Bible (1541), 'Biblia: Thet är all then Helgha Scrifft', the translation that standardised written Swedish. The Lord's Prayer and the opening Beatitudes are quoted verbatim in 1541 orthography and decoded feature by feature: the 16th-century spelling (th- for modern t/d, doubled vowels, gh, w for v), the plural verbs, the archaic pronouns (I 'ye', eder 'you'), older vocabulary, and the Bible's role in fixing the standard. Each archaic feature is mapped to its modern equivalent.
- Literary and Archaic SwedishC1 — Older and literary Swedish looks foreign in one decisive way: until about 1945 verbs agreed in NUMBER, so a plural subject took a plural verb — vi äro ('we are'), de voro ('they were'), vi hava ('we have') — forms a modern learner never meets. Add the pre-1906 hv- spellings (hvad, hvit), the archaic pronouns I and eder, the subjunctive vore/vare, and the optional masculine -e, and you have the toolkit for reading Strindberg, Lagerlöf, and the old Bible without panic.
- A Short History of the Swedish LanguageC1 — How Swedish became Swedish — from Old Norse runes through the Low German flood of the Hanseatic era (which gave the language its be-/för- prefixes and a huge share of everyday vocabulary), the standardising Gustav Vasa Bible of 1541, the 1906 spelling reform, and the 20th-century loss of plural verbs and the du-reform.