Annotated Literature: August Strindberg

August Strindberg's Röda rummet ("The Red Room," 1879) is usually called the first modern Swedish novel, and its first sentence is among the most quoted lines in the language. Strindberg is the right author to meet late-nineteenth-century literary Swedish through, because he did something the textbooks did not: he pulled the rhythms of spoken Swedish into literary prose. The result reads far more directly than his contemporaries' ornate periods — yet it still carries the period's archaic grammar: the old plural verbs (äro, voro, hava), the optional masculine -e adjective (den gamle), and the occasional long periodic sentence. This page quotes the genuine opening, decodes it, and then uses a labelled period-style continuation to drill the features a C1 reader needs.

The genuine opening

The first words of Röda rummet are a verified, widely-anthologised line. This sentence is a real quotation:

Short as it is, it shows why Strindberg felt so new. It is a plain, almost conversational presentational sentence — Det var ("It was"), the dummy det introducing the scene, then en afton ("an evening," afton being the slightly literary word for "evening," still current). I början av maj ("in early May," literally "in the beginning of May") sets the time. No archaic verb, no ornament — a film could open on this sentence. That deliberate plainness, after decades of high-flown prose, is the Strindberg revolution in miniature.

The period-style continuation

To show the era's archaic features — which the famous opening sentence happens not to contain — here is a continuation composed in Strindberg's style.

Line by line

Träden voro nyss utslagna... hava nu de första syrenerna börjat dofta.

This sentence carries two of the period's plural verbs. The subject Träden ("the trees") is plural, so the verb is voro — the old plural of vara, "[they] were" — where modern Swedish writes the uniform var. Then, after a fronted location clause, comes the plural auxiliary hava ("have"): ...*hava nu de första syrenerna börjat dofta ("...the first lilacs have now begun to give off scent"). *Hava is the old plural/full form of ha; modern Swedish would write har (or just ha). So in one sentence you meet voro (were) and hava (have) — the two archaic auxiliaries you will see most often.

Embedded in the middle is the masculine -e adjective, the feature most distinctive of older (and formal) Swedish: den gamle ämbetsmannen ("the old civil servant"). In a definite phrase, an adjective describing a male person could take -e instead of the usual -a: den gamle mannen (a man) versus den gamla kvinnan (a woman). Modern usage has largely levelled this to -a for everyone, but -e survives for males in formal writing, in names of organisations, and pervasively in nineteenth-century prose. (The full account is on The Masculine -e Adjective.) Note that the verb brukade ("used to," past of bruka) marks habitual past action.

Människorna äro besynnerliga... deras gärningar äro sällan så rena som deras ord.

The plural verb here is äro — the old plural of är, "[they] are." It appears twice: Människorna *äro besynnerliga* ("People are peculiar") and *deras gärningar äro sällan så rena...* ("their deeds are seldom so clean..."). Modern Swedish uses är for both singular and plural, so äro is your clearest single signal that you are in pre-reform text. Map äro → är and the clause is transparent.

Inside sits another masculine -e form: den unge mannen ("the young man") — ung takes -e for the male referent, exactly parallel to den gamle above. The relative clause som stod vid fönstret ("who stood at the window") is an ordinary post-modifier. Stylistically, notice how spoken this feels despite the archaic verbs: a thought reported almost as inner speech (tänkte den unge mannen, "thought the young man"), the colloquial directness of Människorna äro besynnerliga. That is the Strindberg signature — modern, near-conversational rhythm wearing old grammatical clothes.

Han, som hade kommit till staden... styrdes av helt andra lagar än dem han läst om i böckerna.

This is the long periodic sentence, the one structure where Strindberg does indulge the era's taste for elaboration — and where a C1 reader must work. The skeleton is short: Han... förstod ännu icke att... ("He... did not yet understand that..."). Everything else is suspended around it:

• a relative clause describing the subject: som hade kommit till staden med tomma fickor och stora förhoppningar ("who had come to the city with empty pockets and great hopes");
• the archaic negation icke ("not"), the literary/older equivalent of modern inte;
• a long att-clause as the object of förstod: att den värld han drömt om... i själva verket styrdes av helt andra lagar... ("that the world he had dreamed of... was in fact governed by quite different laws...");
• inside that, an appositive dash-set expansion — de fria tankarnas och de ärliga vänskapernas värld ("the world of free thought and honest friendships"), with two genitive noun phrases (tankarnas, vänskapernas) stacked before the head noun värld;
• and a final comparison än dem han läst om i böckerna ("than those he had read about in books"), where dem is the object form standing for "those [laws]."

The reading strategy is the same as for any periodic sentence: locate the main verb (förstod), identify what it governs (the att-clause), and treat the relative clauses, the dash-set apposition and the genitive stacks as nested modifiers you resolve one layer at a time. The verb styrdes ("was governed") is an s-passive in the past. (For nesting and subordination strategy, see Complex Sentences: Overview.)

Why Strindberg is the accessible entry point

It is worth being precise about why Strindberg reads more easily than other nineteenth-century authors, because it tells you what to expect. His archaic features are few and regular — essentially the plural verbs (äro, voro, hava) and the masculine -e — and his sentences, the occasional periodic showpiece aside, are built on spoken rhythms: short clauses, direct thought, colloquial vocabulary, dialogue that sounds like talk. Where a contemporary like Viktor Rydberg writes dense, Latinate periods, Strindberg writes something close to how an educated Stockholmer actually spoke. So the C1 learner's task is again small: absorb the plural-verb table and the masculine -e, brace for the odd long sentence, and the rest is remarkably modern prose. (For the spelling and agreement reforms that separate his Swedish from today's, see Swedish: History of the Language; for the literary register in general, The Literary Register.)

Common Mistakes

These are reading traps — with heritage prose you decode rather than produce.

What to notice

• The genuine opening Det var en afton i början av maj is plain, near-conversational presentational Swedish — Strindberg's deliberate plainness is the historical point.
• Late-nineteenth-century literary Swedish keeps the plural verbs äro (are), voro (were), hava (have); map each to its modern singular (är, var, har) and the prose clears.
• The masculine -e adjective marks a male referent in definite phrases: den gamle mannen, den unge mannen — not a plural and not an error. See The Masculine -e Adjective.
• Strindberg occasionally builds a long periodic sentence; find the main verb, then resolve the nested relative clauses, dash-set appositions and genitive stacks one layer at a time. See Complex Sentences: Overview.
• He is the accessible entry to the century because his archaic features are few and regular and his sentences ride spoken rhythms — background on the reforms at Swedish: History of the Language.