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]

Birchenbaum and "En annan ny visa" were forgotten until the mid-nineteenth century, when the poem was rediscovered by the antiquarian Per Hanselli.[1] It was first published in 1896.[3] Before the authorship was established, the poem was attributed to a seventeenth-century Swedish poet, Lars Wivallius.[1]

Birchenbaum is the first known female writer from Finland.[1] (Maria Simointytär, whose poems were published anonymously in broadside form, was likely the first published Finnish female writer.)[5] Birchenbaum was also the first known Finnish poet to write in the Swedish language.[3] She is additionally notable in that "En annan ny visa" is the only firsthand literary account of Finland's participation fighting under Sweden in the Thirty Years' War.[1]

• Christina Regina von Birchenbaum at Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon