Sjuttonhundratalshandskrifter i rörelse

Abstract

Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts on the Move. Olof von Dalin’s Poetical Manuscripts and their Contexts of Publication
 This article focuses on Olof von Dalin’s occasional verse, which has not yet been collected in a scholarly edition. Dalin’s occasional poems have survived thanks to a number of people. Some of them were personal friends and acquaintances of Dalin’s, while others did not move in his circles and were not personally known to him. They copied his poems and in not a few cases made sure that they were printed; they preserved them and handed them down to posterity. However, the manuscripts were often interfered with – usually for the purpose of voicing a message, most often political, which was either not present in the original text or merely hinted at. In such cases the readers appropriated the texts, adding lines of their own and making changes where ever they saw fit. Since these appropriations were made anonymously, the perpetrators’ purpose was not to pretend that the resulting poem was of their own making but to anonymously advance a political message in an attempt to affect public opinion. Since Dalin was a prolific popular poet it was easy for unscrupulous versifiers to avail themselves of his verse and to use it as a means to intervene in the political discussion of the day.