| "Solen glimmar blank och trind" | |
|---|---|
| Art song | |
 First page of sheet music | |
| English | The sun gleams smooth and round |
| Written | February 1772 |
| Text | poem by Carl Michael Bellman |
| Language | Swedish |
| Melody | French, used by Antoine de Bourbon and others |
| Published | 1790 in Fredman's Epistles |
| Scoring | voice and cittern |
Solen glimmar blank och trind (The sun gleams smooth and round) is Epistle No. 48 in the Swedish poet and performer Carl Michael Bellman's 1790 song collection, Fredman's Epistles. The Epistle is subtitled "Hvaruti afmålas Ulla Winblads hemresa från Hessingen i Mälaren en sommarmorgon 1769" ("In which is depicted Ulla Winblad's journey home from Hessingen"). One of his best-known and best-loved works, it depicts an early morning on Lake Mälaren, as the Rococo muse Ulla Winblad sails back home to Stockholm after a night spent partying on the lake. The composition is one of Bellman's two Bacchanalian lake-journeys, along with epistle 25 ("Blåsen nu alla"), representing a venture into a social realism style.
Places along the route can be identified from Bellman's descriptions. The work has been called a masterpiece, with its freshness compared to Elias Martin's paintings, its detail to William Hogarth's, its delicacy to Watteau's, building up "an incomparable panorama" of 18th century Stockholm.[1] The Epistle, alone among Bellman's works, is often sung in Swedish schools.