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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 (5 ft. 8 in.), slim (120 Ibs., 22-in. waist) 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.