Christina Regina von Birchenbaum

The poem "En annan ny visa" is constructed of twenty-nine stanzas of eight lines each. Birchenbaum's full name is spelled out in acrostic form by the first letters of the stanzas.^[1] The poem's style is reminiscent of Finnish folk poetry.^[2] The only surviving copy of "En annan ny visa", dated 24 July 1651, is preserved in the Diocese Library in Linköping.^[3]

According to the poem, Birchenbaum was born in Karelia; her father died when she was three. She met her future husband early in life.^[4] Marrying him for love, she followed him to Germany for the Thirty Years' War.^[1] Learning from a message that he had disappeared in the war, she traveled across the country looking for him, and eventually gave him up for dead.^[4] After seventeen years alone, in which she kept "all worldly joy and pleasure" out of her mind, she married again, this time to a young nobleman. However, the marriage was an unhappy one, due to "false friends" and local gossip that drove the couple apart.^[1] Birchenbaum concludes the poem by saying that she is alone in the world once again, and is saying goodbye to it.^[4]

Very little is known of Birchenbaum's life other than the account given in "En annan ny visa".^[2] Two other documents survive relating to Birchenbaum; they are petitions dating from the late 1660s, featuring her testimony that she was the widow of Major Axel Paulj Liljenfeldt,^[3] who died in the Thirty Years' War while serving in the Swedish army.^[4] Birchenbaum was a contemporary (though a younger one) of the Finnish poet Sigfridus Aronus Forsius.^[1]