En ton från himmelen: En studie om Linnea Hofgren och mystikernas modersmål.

Melody from heaven: A study on Linnea Hofgren and the native tongue of the mystics.

Författare

Maja Ekström

Summary, in English

Linnea Hofgren (1868-1921) is an unknown name to most people. She was too marked by
her physical sickness to work, but serving her days as a songwriter and pray-er, she found a
spiritual home in the mystic network Flodbergskretsen, that gathered in Stockholm around
the beginning of the 1900s. This essay aims to bring attention to the story of a bed-bound
Christian with a deep human longing, and in particular to investigate the relationship
between experiences of mystic revelations and language. How does Linnea Hofgren find a
language that makes her experiences available to others, at the same time as it still
conceals them? By approaching this essay's primary source material, Hofgren's
unpublished autobiographies, with a hermeneutic method, the review leads to a discussion
remarking on the variations of form, content and use of differing lingustic tools in the text.
Based on the results it is suggested that Linnea Hofgren through a combination of
everyday language typical of the period, a mystic-pietistic vocabulary inherited from
predecessors throughout the centuries, poetic excesses, prayer, Bible references, imagery
and silence finds her way to express her story.

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