Festival has Ancient Roots, and a Few Limits
This evening (Friday, June 21), the lawn at Rockefeller Park will host a solstice celebration presented by the Battery Park City Authority and the Consulate General of Sweden. The Swedish Midsummer Festival begins at 5pm and continues until just after sundown, with Swedish delicacies, live music by fiddlers from the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, a parade, arts activities such as floral wreath-making, children’s games (including a Midsummer pole), and folk dancing. Admission and most activities are free. (Traditional Swedish food, candy, and beverages are available for purchase.)
Sweden’s tradition of marking the longest day of the year with festivals is an intriguing amalgam of Christian and pagan traditions, merging the feast of St. John the Baptist with ancient Nordic rites, celebrated as long as 10,000 years ago, according to archeological evidence.
For hobgoblins of consistency, the solstice is deemed to be “mid-summer”—in spite of the fact that, by contemporary reckoning, the season began only 24 hours earlier—because farmers dozens of centuries ago apparently considered summer to begin around what modern calendars call the first of May.
Such celebrations seem to have arisen spontaneously across northern Europe at the dawn of the Holocene Epoch, which began at the end of the last Ice Age and continues to this day. As human tribes started to settle on newly habitable lands and domesticate plants and animals for the first time, they unleashed the Neolithic Revolution, marked by the transition from hunting and gathering to the advent of permanent agriculture. Long before anyone in Scandinavia had heard a word of the New Testament, midsummer festivals were seen as a way to invite good fortune and plentiful harvests, and scare off evil spirits.
The date of the solstice was important enough to ancient Europeans that they exerted herculean efforts to build megaliths that would align with the sun on the appropriate day. Stonehenge, in England, is the best known of these, but Sweden has its own version, Ale’s Stones, which dates from roughly 5,500 years ago.
Tonight’s Midsummer Festival in Rockefeller Park will diverge from the traditional celebration in Sweden in two important respects. The Swedes like to end the evening with bonfires and skinny dipping in the nearest body of water. But New York parks regulations take a dim view of pyromania, and a dip in the Hudson could be perilous, swimsuit or birthday suit.