Refections on Lundagård

For friends and colleagues throughout the world the names of Hägerstrand and Lund are associated as closely as are those of Wittgenstein and Vienna. To be personally introduced to that place by Torsten – the place which for forty years has been the milieu of his own creative work – certainly leaves a lasting impression. One returns from such guided tours with a kaleidoscope of impressions: the architecture is no longer “frozen music” (Goethe), it comes alive with harmonious as well as conflicting melodies, with enigmas as well as consistencies. If one can play with the notion that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and historical “fact” in the head of the scholar, then surely the visible landscape can be a playground for imagination and inference: interpretations telling as much about the observer as the observed. The following parody and sequel to Esaias Tegnér’s Pa Helgonabacken – an epic which, Torsten assured me, every schoolboy knows – is such a playful exercise. One May evening in 1976 I walked alone through Lundagård and allowed imagination and memory to mingle freely between impressions of Swedish life and history and my own impressions of Fenian folklore, endeavoring to “fit” all that I saw into the Vidalian tenet that “landscape is a mirror of civilization”, a “medal struck in the image of a people”. Successive pageants had no doubt paraded through this site, each with its own retinue of symbols, building styles, political and functional objectives. Traces from each could be easily discerned. Was there a way to discern, albeit metaphorically, the human drama which had accompanied the morphological evolution of Lundagård? And could one speculatively bridge such historical musing with the contemporary drama of Swedish society? With all the naivete of “first impressions”, the following saga emerged…