“Blås upp vind och gunga bölja...” : August Strindbergs sagospel Lycko-Pers resa, Himmelrikets nycklar, Abu Casems tofflor samt Svanevit. Sago- och sägenmotiv, narrativa grundmönster och mytisk initiationssymbolik

Sammanfattning: This dissertation deals with four of Strindberg’s fairy-tale plays produced over a period of three decades, plays to which he himself gave the subtitle “sagospel”, fairy-tale plays. The first of them, Lucky Peter’s Journey, written in 1882, takes a central place in the investigation. The play is interesting for several reasons; it is the first in a total of five fairy-tale plays that Strindberg wrote - if the The Black Glove is included among them - thereby initiating a period of dramaturgic creativity that was to be an important part of his total production. It is the first in a succession of five “journey plays”; along with Gillets hemlighet and Herr Bengts hustru, with which it has many points in common from the point of view of motifs and ideas, it is a representative of Strindberg’s dramatic production in the early eighties, which heralded the whole of his future dramatic authorship. On stage, it was the most successful of all Strindberg’s plays as regards the number of performances during his lifetime: a total of 183 in Stockholm theatres. One of the least appreciated of Strindberg’s works, it has commonly been dismissed with gentle indulgence and regarded as flawed by imperfections attributable to youthful incompetence.Taking this quintessential drama as its starting point, the dissertation analyses the motifs that establish it as belonging to the drama of the eighties and at the same time heralding the later fairy-tale plays. Its close affinity with the verbal traditions of the folk tale permits analysis on the syntagmatic and morphologic plane using developments in some of the 20th century methods of structural analysis. This has been combined on an overarching paradigmatic level with observations on theories concerning the form and contents of the distinctive nature of the folktale as well as on an empirical “mythological” methodology.