Ulla Winblad

Ulla Winblad was a semi-fictional character in many of Carl Michael Bellman's works. She is at once an idealised rococo goddess and a tavern prostitute, and a key figure in Bellman's songs of Fredman's Epistles. The character was partly inspired by Maria Kristina Kiellström (1744-1798).

Paul Britten Austin summarizes Ulla Winblad's dual nature:

Fredman's Epistles are distinctive in combining realism - drink, poverty, gambling, prostitution, old age - with elegant mythological rococo flourishes, enabling Bellman to achieve both comic and elegiac effects. Britten Austin cites Afzelius:

Several of the most personal poems are staged with a heavy overlay of classical mythology ... It is as if a curtain with a whole rococo world of gods and goddesses on rosy clouds ... were suddenly raised, revealing a tavern-interior with shaky chairs, spilled and shattered glasses, staggering clients and sluttish barmaids [N. Afzelius).]

The sluttiest of the barmaids "on the rosiest mythological clouds" is of course Ulla Winblad. In Epistle 36, (Concerning Ulla Winblad's flight), Bellman "at his most rococo" describes Ulla asleep in a tavern bedroom - while the owner peeps through the keyhole and three excited drunks wait outside. As she wakes, three rococo cupids assist her with make-up, perfume, and her hair. Then she runs into the bar, revives herself with a glass of brandy, and leaves with the blindest of the waiting fellows, "leaving the inmates of the tavern, shaken, to contemplate Ulla's glass where she has left it, empty and broken on the bar."

The fictional Ulla Winblad and the real Maria Kristina Kiellström have frequently been confused, but were not at all the same. Kiellström, born in 1744 in a poor family, did borrow her stepmother's surname, Winblad (the name means vine-leaf). About 1763, she found a job in a silk factory. At the age of about twenty Kiellström became notorious for being made pregnant by a Swedish nobleman, Count Wilhelm Schildt. And in 1767, while without regular employment, she was accused of wearing a red silk cape, a banned luxury item: but unlike Ulla, she was acquitted. By 1770, Kiellström had moved out of the town centre; she and another girl, whose name was Ulla, were both officially recorded as being suspected by their landlord of "loose living".

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