Like Norsemen of old toasting Balder, the god of light, Scandinavians
celebrate summer with feasting and fireworks, music festivals and folk
dancing until dawn. At lunch hour, heliotropic beauties stand on every
sidewalk with closed eyes and hiked skirts, “mooning at the sun,” as
the Swedes say. Restaurant tables are laden with summer delicacies:
crayfish, trout in sour cream, fresh eels, wild strawberries. In the
milky gloaming that passes for night, Copenhagen cabarets work double
shifts, and the nightlong sounds of revelry prompt a tourist official's
tip: “Have fun in Denmark. Sleep in the next country.” It is the season when northerners finally shuck “winter sickness” and
speak soulfully of the Good Life. Above all, the good life of summer is
for the young. Graduating high school students, wearing old-fashioned
visored caps, swarm through the cities celebrating their freedom.
Stockholm's pimply raggare, teenage rowdies who drive battered U.S.
cars, roar up the Kungs-gatan, stop to pick up a nymphet, then roar off
again. Mothers and children troop off to cottages beside gleaming lakes
and fjords to sail, swim and hike until fall. Except that they usually
adjourn to summer palaces, Scandinavia's royal princes and princesses
follow much the same routine. This summer has been different—but then,
it's not every year that royal families get to marry off three
daughters. Red-ringed Date. First to be married in June was Princess Desiree, 26,
third oldest granddaughter of Sweden's Gustaf VI Adolf. A beautiful,
gifted textile designer, she married Baron Niclas Silfverschiold, a
rich, landowning aristocrat, and will live in a 40room, 400-year-old
castle. Desiree's elder sister Margaretha, 29, also will be in the
headlines this week when she mar ries British Businessman John Ambler,
40. She will do the cooking in their Knightsbridge flat, but decided
against promising to “obey” him in her marriage vow. Red-ringed on every royal and near-royal engagement book in Europe is
Sept. 18, date of the 21-cannon wedding that will reunite the ruling
families of Greece and Denmark. In a Greek Or thodox ceremony in
Athens, King Constantine of the Hellenes, 24, will take as his Queen
Anne-Marie Dagmar Ingrid. Prettiest, youngest and liveliest of three
royal sisters, leggy , slim
Anne-Marie will also be the first at the altar—as well as the first
Danish princess to marry a reigning monarch since 1680, when Sweden's
King Karl XI took Ulrika Leonora as his Queen. Grabbing the Oars. In the midst of the scramble to get Sweden's
Margaretha to the church on time this week, Scandinavia's royals had to
act relaxed and be nice to Nikita Khrushchev, who descended with his
family for an 18-day goodwill tour of Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
There were moments of levity, such as the time when Khrushchev startled
Swedish Premier Tage Erlander by grabbing the oars of a boat and rowing
him nonstop across a 300-yd. lake. But all in all, Nikita was no great
hit anywhere. He miffed the Danes right off by sneering that their
prized, highly productive farms are too small. In Sweden, he again
rankled his hosts at a dinner by declaring that Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania have been better off since Russia grabbed them in 1940.
