Nils Ferlin
Encyclopedia
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
poet
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
.
Nils Ferlin was born in Karlstad
Karlstad
Karlstad is a city, the seat of Karlstad Municipality, the capital of Värmland County, and the largest city in the province Värmland in Sweden. The city had 61,685 inhabitants in 2010 out of a municipal total that during the first quarter 2010 was 84,885 inhabitants...
, Värmland
Värmland
' is a historical province or landskap in the west of middle Sweden. It borders Västergötland, Dalsland, Dalarna, Västmanland and Närke. It is also bounded by Norway in the west. Latin name versions are Vermelandia and Wermelandia. Although the province's land originally was Götaland, the...
, where his father worked at the Nya Wermlands-Tidningen
Nya Wermlands-Tidningen
Nya Wermlands-Tidningen , shortened NWT, is a Swedish local newspaper distributed in the provinces of Värmland, Dalsland and western Dalarna....
newspaper. In 1908 the family moved to Filipstad
Filipstad
Filipstad is a locality and the seat of Filipstad Municipality, Värmland County, Sweden with 6,177 inhabitants in 2005.Filipstad was granted city privileges in 1611 by Charles IX of Sweden, who named it after his son Duke Carl Philip .After a major fire destroyed forest and town in 1694, Filipstad...
and Nils' father started his own paper. Unfortunately his father died one year later and the family was forced to move from their adequate residence to more simple living conditions in the industry district, to maintain Ferlin's education at his school, from which he graduated at the age of sixteen.
Ferlin also had a minor career as an actor and debuted at the age of seventeen in Salomé
Salome (play)
Salome is a tragedy by Oscar Wilde.The original 1891 version of the play was in French. Three years later an English translation was published...
by Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
and continued his career with a travelling theatre
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
ensemble.
Although many of Ferlin's poems are melancholic, some also contain humour. Several of them have been set to music and went on to become popular songs - such as Valsmelodi, an attack on the music industry. He was and remains extremely popular with the public and sold over 300,000 copies of his poetry collections during his lifetime. Part of Ferlin's appeal can be perhaps attributed to his "dating" - the Stockholm city centre before the big urban renewal
Urban renewal
Urban renewal is a program of land redevelopment in areas of moderate to high density urban land use. Renewal has had both successes and failures. Its modern incarnation began in the late 19th century in developed nations and experienced an intense phase in the late 1940s – under the rubric of...
- and his association with the popular culture that flourished there at that time.
Several statue
Statue
A statue is a sculpture in the round representing a person or persons, an animal, an idea or an event, normally full-length, as opposed to a bust, and at least close to life-size, or larger...
s of Nils Ferlin have been erected in Sweden: one in Filipstad
Filipstad
Filipstad is a locality and the seat of Filipstad Municipality, Värmland County, Sweden with 6,177 inhabitants in 2005.Filipstad was granted city privileges in 1611 by Charles IX of Sweden, who named it after his son Duke Carl Philip .After a major fire destroyed forest and town in 1694, Filipstad...
of him sitting on a park bench, one in the Karlstad
Karlstad
Karlstad is a city, the seat of Karlstad Municipality, the capital of Värmland County, and the largest city in the province Värmland in Sweden. The city had 61,685 inhabitants in 2010 out of a municipal total that during the first quarter 2010 was 84,885 inhabitants...
city square of him standing on a table, and one near Klara kyrka in Stockholm
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...
of him lighting a cigarette.
Translations
- LP: Swedish Songs - Fred Lane (1975) Sweden
- With Plenty Of Colored Lanterns - Thord Fredenholm (1986) Sweden