Valborg

The name comes from Walpurgis, a saint who lived in Germany in the 8th century. Her feast day, 1 May, was brought to Sweden by Germans in the Middle Ages, and the evening before became valborgsmässoafton.

At the Reformation in the 16th century the new church set out to remove saints' days. Valborg survived as a folk festival, partly because it sat right next to 1 May, an important date in the farming year. In many places it was when livestock were first let out to graze.

There are several explanations for the bonfires. The Nordiska museet points to protecting grazing animals from predators and supernatural beings. In Germany, Walpurgisnacht was the witches' night, and the custom of lighting fires reached Swedish towns from there before spreading to the countryside.

As early as the Middle Ages the students of the day, the djäknar, held rowdy processions through the towns. In 1842 the Uppsala student choir Allmänna Sången made Valborg one of its four annual celebrations. At Skansen in Stockholm the arrival of spring has been marked since 1894.

By the late 19th century the night had a poor reputation: newspapers in the 1880s reported drunken workers on Djurgården. After the Second World War, labour and community organisations began running bonfires in residential areas, which is largely how it is done today.