Christina Reina von Birchenbaum has been declared Finland’s first Swedish-language poet. An acrostic, i.e. a poem in which the first letter of each verse together form a name, indicates that she is the author of an autobiographical poem dating from the Thirty Years’ War about a woman, “Een annor Ny wijsa” [dated 24 July 1651, ed.], a copy of which is kept at the Diocese Library in Linköping and was printed in Nylänningen, 1896. The narrator loses two of her children and her husband, who goes missing in Germany and is later reported to have fallen in battle. She later falls in love with a younger man, but gossip puts an end to their relationship.
The only available biographical information on Christina Regina von Birchenbaum is in the form of two petitions from the late 1660s, in which she writes that she is the widow of Major Axel Paulj Liljenfeldt.
