Scandinavian literature. THE literature of Scandinavia is the literature of our ancestors. There has been of late years a determined bias to show our ancestry from the Germans; but with the Germans proper we have little or nothing to do. It is with that branch of the great Gothic race, stretching from Norway to the frontiers of France, including the Scandinavians, the Holsteiners, the Dutch and Flemish, that we claim kindred, and from whom we derive a portion of our blood and the freedom of our institutions. It has been well said, that we are not even Anglo-Saxons, but English, being amalgamated of the ancient Britain, the Roman, the Anglo-Saxon, and Scandinavian. They who endeavour to trace our paternity to the Germans proper, will find that we have few traces in our language, our political constitution, or our national character of such paternity. The Germans are, and always have been, an inland, sedentary, industrious, but unenterprising people, having no fleets, no colonies, no free institutions, except such as they have of late years copied from us. But when we turn to the natives whose maritime habits led them to locate themselves on the sea-board of the greater part of Western Europe, we discover our true progenitors. They, and especially the Scandinavians, have always had a determined tendency to political liberty, to ships, maritime adventures, colonization, and foreign conquest. The language of the Anglo-Saxons—a Scandinavian, and not a pure German race, Anglen, whence they came, being still a portion of Holstein, a Danish province—Dean Trench, a great authority, tells us, constitutes sixty parts of our present English out of every hundred, thirty only being from the Latin, five from Greek, and five from other sources. It is extraordinary, therefore, that we have not made a more intimate and educational acquaintance with a language which is the great foundation of our own, and a literature so illustrative of the great sources of our descent, and our present stamp of character.
The earliest literature of Scandinavia is of an antiquity the date of which is vastly remote, and its limits untraceable. It consists of those accounts of its gods and heroes which had been handed down from age to age by a class of poets and oral historians educated for the purpose, and styled Scalds and Sagamen. The Scalds, or poets, attended the kings and princes both in their palaces at home and on their martial expeditions, and sung the history of the gods and the exploits of the sovereigns and distinguished heroes. The Sagamen appear to have not only related their histories and legends in palaces, but far and wide amongst the people. This system of oral literature continued till Christianity introduced letters, in or about the year 1000. It is true, that the Scandinavians possessed long before that a rude species of letters called Runes, which were cut on staves of wood, called Runstafrar, or Rimstafrar, or on rocks and stones, as memorials of some great event. Their Bauta-stenar, or stones of memorial, had Runic inscriptions upon them, and they had staves of a calendar-like character cut with them, called Kaffar; they had also arrived so far as to write letters on great occasions in them, as the letter which Anskar the Christian missionary, the apostle of the North, received from King Björn. But however extraordinary, they never appear to have conceived the idea of preserving their knowledge in them, but continued to commit their histories, their poems, and their tales, to the memories of their Scalds and Sagamen.
Wherever Christianity came in the shape of Romanism, which was the case sooner or later all over Europe, it put down the original literature or traditional lore of the country, because it was inseparably mixed with the pa-
ganism of the people. This was the case in Scandinavia, and so completely did it root out the ancient knowledge, that neither in Scandinavia itself, in England, nor in Normandy, were there left any traces of the grand mythologic and heroic compositions which had filled the Scandinavian mind for countless ages up to that period. All this ceased to exist, except in a much metamorphosed form in the minds of the common people, in what are called Folksagor, to which we shall, ere long, allude. Odin, Thor, Frigga, and Iduna, became mere names, and their deeds are no longer remembered as theirs. Fortunately for some very noble and curious compositions, these were preserved by such of the Scandinavians who had fled to Iceland from the oppression of some of their conquering monarchs, and who there retained a greater independence of the Romish Church. In that wild volcanic island, amidst its stormy northern seas, the ancient order and arts of the Scalds were preserved. The Scalds went thence to attend the courts and campaigns of the Scandinavian kings, and learned men, by their lamps during the six months' perpetual darkness of their winters, penned down what yet remained of the pagan orature of their ancestors. The first of these was Samund Sigfusson, surnamed Frode, or the Learned. He was born in 1056, only about a year before Christianity was introduced into the island by Isleif, the first bishop. He was, therefore, though educated a Christian, also a Scald; and thus sympathizing with the Scalds gone before him, he wrote down all that remained of their great mythologic and heroic poems, now remaining under the name of the Elder, or Rhythmic Edda. After him followed Ari Hinn Frode, who began the chronicles of Iceland in the Landnama Bok; and Snorre Sturleson, the author of the Second or Prose Edda, and the Heimskringla, or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway. These, with a great number of romantic and popular sagas, constitute the mass of the ancient Norse literature, which, escaping the annihilating hands of the Romish priests in that remote island, which remained an independent republic till 1261, astonished the learned world of Denmark and Sweden, by their discovery in the middle of the seventeenth century. For a full account of these extraordinary productions, we must refer to Howitt's History of Northern Literature, where a complete analysis and copious translated specimens of the Eddas are given, and to Mr Laing's translation of Snorre Sturleson's Heimskringla. Our space will admit of only the most cursory notice of them.
On entering on these ancient books, we are immediately struck with the corroborative evidence which they furnish of the eastern origin of the Goths, the fathers of the Scandinavians. As all languages, so all mythologies run in lines, which converge to one common centre, the original source of the human race, and consequently of all tongues and primeval faiths—Central Asia. And little as we might expect it, no sooner do we open the ancient religious books of Scandinavia, than we are carried back thither. Our northern people are a people of eastern origin. Odin and his Asar, as Asiatics, declared themselves to be from the great Svithiod, a country which appears to have been the present Circassia, lying between the Black and Caspian Seas. The whole of their memories abounded with the proofs of it. They brought with them abundant eastern customs, those of burning the dead, and burying under mounds, like the tombs of Ajax and Achilles on the Phrygian plain, or which are still seen on the plains of Persia and Tartary. They
practised polygamy, looked back with imperishable affection to the great Svithiod, to the primitive district of Asgard, and the city of Gudahem, or home of the gods. They transferred a religion bearing the primal features of those of Persia, India and Greece, to the snowy mountains of Scandinavia. The Asar and the giants were in constant hostilities, like the gods of Greece and the Titans. They had their three principal deities—Odin, Thor, and Loke, the latter the evil principle, the Pluto of the Greeks, the Ahriman of the Persians, the Siva of the Hindoos. They had their gods of thunder, of war, of eloquence, and of the sea. They had the actual Venus of the Tanais, the great deity of the Persians, the very name Vanadis suggesting that of the Hellenic Venus. They had in Balder the Vishnu of India, and a more beautiful Pan. The gods of Scandinavia are actually described as sitting on Idavalla, or Mount Ida; and Odin, Thor, and Loke, like the Jupiter, Mercury, and Mars of Greece, make excursions amongst mankind, and indulge in singular love adventures. You have the strife of Light and Darkness in Balder and Höder, as in Ormuzd and Ahriman; you have a tripart divinity,—the Jove, Neptune and Pluto of Greece, the Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, find their counterparts in Odin, Thor, and Balder. Instead of the ox Abudad, we have the cow Audumbla; instead of genii, nymphs, dryads and nereids, we have elves, dwarfs, and trollquinnas. All the powers of nature are shadowed forth in this great pantheistic system, in the various deities of the various eastern mythologies; there is a great and sublime deity, far above all semi-human deities, that stand in greater proximity to men, and then comes a final fire, Regnarök, like that of the Persians, and the grand mundane catastrophe of the Christian creed. Through the whole, indeed, we trace the earliest traditions of the primitive world, the Adam and Eve in Ask and Embla, the Meschia and Meschiane of Persia; the very Fates are there, the Nornor, the Dog of Hell, and the Tree of Life. That tree so conspicuous in the Hebrew system, in the remains of Nineveh, and in the Christmas customs of Germany, has assumed in the Scandinavian mythology, through the grand imagination of poet-priests of unknown ages, a magnificence which is without a parallel.
The Rhythical Edda consists of eight-and-twenty poems; these are divided into two parts. The first part contains everything relating to the mythology and morals, to the histories of the gods and heroes of the Scandinavian world. From the three first, the Völuspá, or song of the Vala or prophetess; Vafþrúðner's song and Grimner's song, we obtain a complete view of the uranic, cosmogonic, and mythic system of the ancient Scandinavians. In the Hávamál, or Odin's high song, we have a system of ethics which astonish us by their profundity and knowledge of human life and motives. The maxims contained in it more resemble the Proverbs of Solomon than anything else in human literature. One is surprised to find, too, the whole philosophy of clothes contained in a single strophe a thousand years before either Montaigne or Carlyle enunciated it:—"I hung my garments on the two wooden men who stand on the wall. Heroes they seemed to be when they were clothed! The unclothed are despised!"
In the second part of the Edda, we come upon a still more interesting discovery, the original of the great German poem, The Nibelungen Lied. The Germans, with a natural egotism, claim this great story as their own. They call the Nibelungen Lied the Iliad of Germany, and place it above all ancient poems, except that of Homer. But here we have not a Nibelungen Lied, but the original materials of it,—a cycle of ancient Icelandic heroic poems that have no parallel in all the treasures of ancient literature. They are to the Nibelungen Lied as the songs of the Rhapsodists, which Homer elaborated into his immortal epic. The Nibelungen Lied has been elaborated from
Scandinavian materials, and these materials exist in the Edda in a form than which Greece itself has nothing vian literature. prouder to show. The stories and characters of these poems differ in many particulars from the German version. Siegfried here is named Sigurd, Chrimhilde, Gudrun; Brunhilde is a far finer character, and the final tragedy proceeds, not from Chrimhilde, but from Atle, the Etzel of the German story. These tragic events and heroic personages, which for ages filled all the North with love and admiration, and which the poems themselves declare "shall live for ever in all lands," possess a colossal and powerful nature. They are the expressions of the souls of poets existing in the primeval and uneffeminate earth. They are linings of men and women of godlike beauty and endowments, full of the vigour of simple but impetuous nature. They have gigantic proportions; a thrilling revelation of beauty; a terrible force of passion, which lead to crimes and desolation of life, which are unsurpassed by the awful fatalities of the Atridae family, the madness of Orestes, the terrible story of Medea, or the sorrows of Iphigenia or Antigone.
The Prose Edda was compiled by Snorre Sturleson, and deals with the same topics in prose as the Elder Edda has presented in poetry, mixed up with many other matters of an inferior or extravagant character. It betrays the lower taste of the age, though including some striking sagas.
The sagas were the prose recitals of Sagamen, as the Eddaic poems and the heroic lyrics, as the well-known death-song of Ragnar Lodbrog were of the Scalds. The sagas comprehended, indeed, almost every species of narrative in prose. There were great historic sagas; sagas relating to local and familiar matters, romantic sagas and heroic sagas. In the sagas it is difficult to say where fable ends, where fact commences, or how much of one is amalgamated with the other. Saga literature is a world of itself. It consists of above 200 volumes, lists of which may be seen in the Series Dynastarum et Regum Daniae, of Torfius, in Müller's Saga Bibliothek, and in Bjorn Hallderson.
Of all the sagas, however, the great historical one of the Heimskringla is the most important. This is so called from the leading word of the manuscript, "Heimskringla," the home-circle, meaning the circle of the earth, the home of man. It is a most admirable history of a great portion of northern Europe, from about the time of the Christian era to 1177 A.D., or the twenty-third year of our own Henry II., a hundred and eleven years after the Norman Conquest. It traces Odin and his Asar from the East; gives the settlement of Scandinavia, the contests of the petty kings of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, till they became three compact kingdoms, each under its own sovereign; the Vikings expeditions to all parts of the world; the discovery and settlement of Iceland and Greenland; the discovery of the coast of America; the conquest of Normandy and England; and this is done, not in the dry manner too common to chroniclers, but with a life and freshness belonging only to a great and dramatic genius. The actors are alive; the details have all the simple grandeur and vivid colouring of the narratives of the Bible. Mr Laing's translation has made this accessible to the English reader.
The Romantic Sagas of Iceland resemble the great romances of the middle ages, in which, without much regard to times or geography, the most wonderful stories of kings, heroes, giants, ferocious and terrible beasts, as well as beautiful countries and beautiful maidens, figured, such as now constitute the Volks-Bücher of the German peasantry.
The Remaining Literature of Iceland consisted of the Grágás or Laws; and at a later period, supposed to be of the twelfth or thirteenth century, the Konungs Skuggja, or Mirror of Kings, supposed to be addressed by King Sverrer to his son, a work curious for its moral inculcations and its melancholy description of the island. We may add that
Scandina- Iceland has continued to the present time to have its lite-
vian litera- rature, chiefly of an economical and practical kind, many of
ture. which productions have been printed in Denmark by socie-
ties formed for that purpose. Iceland, too, has also had its
poets, the chief of whom, Jon Thorlakson, is known to our
countrymen by his translation of Milton's Paradise Lost
and Pope's Essay on Man into Icelandic, as well as by a
fine poem on the "English and Foreign Bible Society." He
also translated Klopstock's Messiah. Dr Henderson found
this venerable poet in 1814 living on an income of L.6, 5s.
sterling. Other of the Icelandic poets of great popularity
were Jon Jonsonius, Stephen Olafson, Benedict Jonson
Groendal; Thorvald Bóðvarson, the translator of Gellert's
"Christian" and Pope's "Messiah;" Professor Finn Mag-
nusin, and Sigurd Peterson. Iceland had also its historians
and eminent antiquarians and naturalists. Amongst these are
Jon Olafson, a learned orientalist; Olaf Olavius, a natural-
ist; Halder Jacobson, the historian of Rolf of Normandy
and of Iceland in the eighteenth century; Arne Magnusen,
a great antiquary; and Finn Magnusen, the learned editor
of the Elder Edda and of the great Lexicon Mythologicum;
Jon Eyricksson, president of the Icelandic Society in Co-
penhagen, and a learned writer on Icelandic mythology and
history, &c. &c.
But perhaps no form of Scandinavian literature furnishes
such striking evidence of our descent from the Scandinavian
root as the Folks-Sagas. These have been collected only
in modern times; but they are the true productions of an-
cient, not of modern Scandinavians. When the Papal
religion had put down the scalds and sagamen, and so com-
pletely extinguished the oddas and the mythic stories of the
Odin period, that, except in the secret archives of Iceland
and the hidden wastes of an old German library, they were
no longer to be found; when the Latin had superseded the
vernacular tongue amongst the learned all over Europe, and
monkish legends and dry chronicles had displaced the imagi-
native compositions of Scandinavia, the spirit and traditions of
these old mythologies and wonder-worlds still remained fast
rooted in the minds of the people. Though Catholicism be-
came the people's religion, and the miracles and diablerie
romances of the convent were engrafted on their prior cre-
dence, their forefathers' faith became their fireside literature.
The marvels of the Pagan faith survived the faith itself;
and now, when the monkish twaddle with which the Roman
priests abused the imagination of the population wherever
they prevailed, has again sunk into matter of laughter, the
legends of the old creed of the North show themselves
everywhere in a revived and immortal bloom. True, they
are greatly metamorphosed, but they are there. The
names of Odin and Thor, Frigga and Iduna, are forgotten;
but their deeds and potency remain, and cast a spell on all
the nurseries of England, Normandy, and Germany, as well
as over those of all the north of Europe. All the witch,
fairy, and dragon lore which Odin and the Asar brought
out of the East exist under new names in the saga lore of
our infancy; in Jack the Giant-Killer, Cinderella, Blue-
beard, The Little Old Woman Cut Shorter, The Pig that
would not go over the Brig, The Giant who smelt the Blood
of an Englishman, Pass in Boots; nay, even traces of Dick
Whittington and his Cat and Baron Munchausen.
These Folk-Sagor have of course much in common with
the German Kinder und Haus-Märchen, as collected by
the brothers Grimm; but they have many features not to
be found in those of Germany. Of these the collection of
Folk-Sagor by Olaf Hytten Cavallius and George Stephen
is a good specimen of the Swedish ones. The Danish are
equally abundant. The English reader will find a good
assortment of them in Dasent's Tales from the Norse, lately
published.
The extinction of Odinism, with its scaldic and saga sys-
tem, by Christianity, or rather by Romanism, was insuffi-
cient to extinguish that poetic and imaginative spirit which
had lent its life to them. This spirit ere long manifested
its indestructible presence in new forms. As the saga revived
in the form of the Ridder-Romanen, such as that of Died-
rich of Bern, and the Folk-Sagor, so the scaldic fire reap-
peared in one of the most brilliant forms of this old litera-
ture,—that of the Kämpe-Visor, or heroic ballads, followed
by the Folk-Visor, or popular ballads. The Kämpe-Visor,
though the ancient religion had fallen, and the model of the
Eddic hymns was abandoned, still celebrated the very
heroes of the mytho-heroic period. These heroes and ho-
roines lived again, as it were, in new bodies. Though the
Visor are supposed, at least the most ancient of them, to
have been composed in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fif-
teenth centuries, "Chriemhilde's Revenge," "Brynhilda's
Song," Sigurd, under the name of "Sivard Snarensvend," re-
appeared in them. Diedrich of Bern and Vidric Verlandson,
or son of Wayland the smith, once more performed their
prodigies of valour. Giants, trolls, and dwarfs still lived
amid saints, angels, and abbesses. But the Kämpe-Visor
present only the first phases of this class of national ballads.
They continued to appear down to very modern times, and
embodied the varying characteristics of the successive ages.
The Scandinavian collectors very properly divided them
into heroic ballads, ballads of the necromantic and superna-
tural, historic ballads, and ballads of love and romance.
These ballads of Scandinavia, the early volumes of which
were collected and published 174 years before Bishop
Percy published his Reliques, nevertheless resemble in
fact, in spirit, manner, and topic, those of England and
Scotland. They are the common expression of the life and
feelings of a common race under the prevailing influences
of the same period; and what is more, in many of them the
subject is identical, showing that they were, as far as Eng-
land, Scotland, and Scandinavia were concerned, drawn
from one common source, where the people and the language
were one.
Our space forbids us to note these exact identities; they
can be seen in the authorities referred to, as well as the
artistic peculiarities of these splendid ballads. We may,
however, notice one of the most remarkable, the "Omquidé,"
or refrain, which reminds one greatly of those in the English
and Scottish ballads, "Binnorie, O Binnorie," "The sun
shines fair on Carlisle wall," &c. These refrains display, in
the nameless poets, the same intense love of nature as those
of the Robin Hood ballads. In such refrains as—"The
Linden Tree which quivers in the Grove," "The Fragrant
Rose Wood," "The Lily and the Lily Tree," a poetic
imagination abounds. See Howitt's Northern Literature,
where many translations of such ballads are given.
The first collection of Danish ballads was published
through Tycho Brahe inducing Vedel, the collector, to
recite some of them to the queen of Sweden when on a visit
to his observatory, Uranionburg. They appeared in 1591.
Other volumes from time to time have been added by Syv,
Abrahamson, Nyerup, and Rahbek, &c.; and they have
successfully inspired many of the modern Danish poets and
romancers, Ervald, Oelenschläger, Ingerman, &c. The
same may be said of the Swedish ballads, which are equally
splendid.
With the Visor which we have been noticing, the litera-
ture of Scandinavia in reality divides itself into two nation-
alities, the Danish, including the Norwegian, and the
Swedish. We now come upon a wide intellectual desert,
stretching itself betwixt the ancient and modern literatures of these countries. The modern literature of Scandinavia is very modern indeed. The ancient literature may be said to terminate with the Visor and Folk's-Sagor in the thirteenth century. These survived amongst the people, but these only; and it was not till the sixteenth century that a fresh Scandinavian literature in the mother tongue began to show itself. Through this long interval of three centuries a foreign literature prevailed—that of the Church of Rome, with its Latin and its legends—the ingrafted tongue having no root in the spirit of the people, but remaining a mere life in death.
From this judgment we must except Saxo Grammaticus and his Historica Danica, which, though written in Latin, was written whilst the old Scandinavian knowledge was in its fulness. Saxo was contemporary with Snorre Sturleson, had the famous sagaman, Arnold, the Iclander, who, like himself, was in the service of Absalon, archbishop of Lund, for companion, and drew, according to his own confession, his earliest annals from the Eddaic songs, Runic inscriptions, and the written records of the Icelanders. He completed his Annals in 1186, merely enshrining in Latin what had drawn its life-blood from the vigorous vernacular. No wonder, then, that he could supply such material for the genius of our Shakespeare and the Danish later writers. But from him and his contemporary chronicler of Norway, Theodoric, the monk, what a dreary dearth till the very commencement of the seventeenth century compared with the Anglo-Saxons, who adhered longer to their own tongue, had their "Song of Cædmon," their fine poem of "Beowulf," "The Battle of Finaburgh," and the "Song of the Traveller." But when we have taken leave of Saxo, Theodoric, and Svend Aagesen, author of the Suenonis in the twelfth century, with the exception of a treatise on medicine by Henrick Harpestreng, in the thirteenth century, we travel down to the fifteenth before we reach the Rimkronike, or Chronicle in Rhyme, of Neil, a monk of Sorøe. Neil turned Saxo's Latin into Danish, and added fresh matter from other sources. Soon after Mikkel, a priest of Odense, produced a volume of religious poems; but these were solitary swallows who made no summer. In 1479 the university of Copenhagen was founded, but seemed only to add to the rage for Latinity. The learned wrote in Latin; the court spoke German. In 1508, Peter Lølle published a volume of Proverbs in Danish; and in 1550, the Bible and New Testament, under the influence of the German Reformation, were translated into the native tongue. In 1591, Vedel published the first volume of the Kümpe-Visor; yet these great events, capable, one would have thought, of stirring the popular mind to its depths, appeared for a long time to produce little effect on native literature.
The first man who may be said to have heralded the dawn of modern literature was Anders Christensen Arreboc. Arreboc was bishop of Drontheim at the early age of thirty; he died in 1637. His chief work is the Hexameron, or, the World's First Week, written in Alexandrines, the same stanza as that of the German Nibelungen Lied. It is a free translation, or rather adaptation, of The Creation of Du Bartas, which was recommended to him by the chancellor Christen Friis. It was completed in 1622, but not published till after his death. The poem is a compendium of all the natural philosophy of his time. It abounds with learning, and displays great poetical beauty. The Danes regard him as the Chaucer of their literature. In the Swedish literature Stiernhelm holds a parallel place, though he wrote a few years later, and in a more polished language, that of the court of Christian IV., brother-in-law of our James I.
Anders Bording, who immediately succeeded Arreboc, was a lyrical poet of considerable merit. He was born in 1619 and died in 1677.
Thomas Kingo was a man of far higher and more serious genius. He was born in Slangerup in 1634, and died in 1703. Kingo was of Scottish descent, his grandfather having gone to Denmark after our Scottish James married the sister of Christian IV. He was a genuine religious poet; he wrote a volume of hymns, which at once acquired an immense popularity and were translated into German, Swedish, Icelandic, and Latin. These are still in use, and highly esteemed by the people.
The other poets of this period were the patriotic William Helt, who died in 1724; the satirist, Tøger Reenbergh, who died in 1742; and Jørgen Jørgensen Sorterup, who wrote both satires and Heltesange, or martial songs. Christian Falster was also a most stinging satirist, whose productions appeared between 1730 and 1750.
Denmark at this era also distinguished itself in various other departments of literature and science. History and natural history flourished. Erik Pontoppidan, born in Funen in 1616, and bishop of Drontheim in 1678, published his Grammatica Danica in 1668, being the first systematic analysis of the Danish language. In this department he was followed by Peter Syv in 1685, and Hoysgard in 1743. The second Pontoppidan, also Erik Pontoppidan, but much more celebrated than the first, is well known in England by his Natural History; but he was the author also of various other learned and important works, as Annales Ecclesiæ Danicæ; one on historical geography, Marmora Danica; natural history, Gesta et Vestigia Danorum extra Daniam; one of the first theological romances, Menozia, &c. &c. He was born in Aarhuus in 1698, and ascended through various ecclesiastical dignities till he became bishop of Bergen and chancellor of the university of that city.
In theology, also, Hemmingius flourished at this period; in jurisprudence, Theophilus and Seavenius were most eminent; in medicine and physiology, Morsing, Ole Worm, better known by his Latinized cognomen, Olaus Wormius, also celebrated for his works in history and antiquities; Simon Pauli, Bartholin, and Olaf Borrich. In philosophical knowledge A. Krag, Eilschov, and Peter Severin; in mathematics, O. Römer; in philology, Winding and Rhodé; in history and literature, Hvitfeldt, with his Kronike, Resen, Gram, and Arnas Magnæus. A lady also, Brigitta Thott, distinguished herself by the translation of Seneca and Epictetus. These are evidences of a rapidly growing wealth of intellectual accumulation. But the great man of this epoch was Denmark's most illustrious astronomer, Tycho Brahè, whose life and discoveries will be found under their own head.
Brahè introduced to notice another astronomer, namely, Christian Severin Longomontanus. Longomontanus was a poor orphan, who being educated by the minister of his parish, attracted Brahè's notice at the college of Wiborg. He took him and instructed him in astronomy. Longomontanus went with Brahè during his exile to Prague, but on the death of his patron returned, and became professor of the higher mathematics in Copenhagen. He was more brilliant than sound; he believed in astrology, and that comets portended disaster. He died in 1647.
Holberg. The appearance of Holberg is regarded by Denmark as a great epoch in its literary history. He is their great comic poet, the Moliere of Denmark. Arreboc and Kingo were writers to be proud of as pioneers, but not to claim comparison with the authors of other nations. To that distinction the Danes believe Holberg fully entitled. Still he has no claims to the tragic; he is simply comic and satirical. He has no Macbeths, no Othellos, Hamlets, or Romeo and Juliets; but the Danes see all their social life, their humour and national character so clearly reflected in him, that they are never weary of their exhibition. He became at once universally popular through a satirical mock-heroic poem called Peter Paart. In 1722 appeared his
Scandinavian literature. Mikkelsen's Four Comic Poems, and, in 1726, his Mikkelsen's Metamorphoses. He then began writing for the stage with amazing rapidity and equal popularity; and saw acted and published seven volumes of plays called Mikkelsen's Comedies. These were speedily translated into Swedish, French, and German. He thus became the founder of the comic stage of Denmark. His Niels Klim's Subterranean Journey, a satirical work in Latin, was equally popular, and was translated by Baggesen and others into various languages. He wrote many other works on ecclesiastical history, a History of the Jews, biographies in the style of Plutarch, Moral Tales, &c. He died in 1754.
From the death of Holberg to the publication of Rolf Krage by Evald, the next poet who marked a national era, the only names of note which appear in the history of Denmark's literature, are those of Stub, Sneedorf, Tullin, and Stenersen, and these are of a minor class compared with Holberg. It is curious how common-place abounded in most European literature of this period. The compositions of Ambrosius Stub consist of lyrics and drinking songs, written in the deepest poverty and obscurity. He was born in Ribe in 1707, and passed the greater part of his life in Funen, where, while his songs were on every tongue, he himself continued in the most perfect neglect. He is said to have died in 1758. His merry drinking song, "Crambambuli," is still everywhere sung by the Danish and German students.
Christian Brauman Tullin, with far less talent, had a far different fortune. He was in easy circumstances; fame attended his every effort; and everywhere he was received with open arms as a genius of the highest order. When we look in the poems which could thus entrance his contemporaries, we find them to consist of odes, prize poems, occasional verses, epitaphs in large numbers, on a par with the verses to Cloe or Cleopatra, which fill so many volumes on English shelves once called poetry.
Peder Christoffer Stenersen was a clergyman and comic poet, who died in 1776. Jens S. Sneedorf, who lived at this period, was the father of the periodical literature of Denmark. His poems were much admired, but his Patriotic Spectator was still more popular, and undoubtedly did more than all writings which had gone before to refine and elevate the public taste. About this period, too, Kraft, Langebek, and Möllman distinguished themselves; Kraft in logic and metaphysics, Langebek in periodical literature, and Möllman in history.
Evald. "About the middle of the eighteenth century," says Molbeck, the great Danish critic, "there stood forth a young man whose destiny it was to give to the poetry of Denmark a wholly new form." This man was Johannes Evald, the son of a clergyman, the director of the orphan-house in Copenhagen. Evald was born in 1743, and died in 1781, in the thirty-eighth year of his age. He was unfortunately intemperate in his habits, having been disappointed in love. A considerable portion of his life was passed in the deepest poverty, and the most excruciating agonies from rheumatism; yet whilst almost wholly disabled for bodily motion, he struck out a new and brilliant path as a lyrical, dramatic, and romantic poet. His first successful production was a lament for the death of Frederick V. His most splendid lyric was "King Christian," which became the national song of Denmark. Evald was equally great as a dramatist, in the satirical drama, in tragedy, and in opera. Excited by the Messiah of Klopstock, he burst the fetters of the French taste, and overthrew the Frenchified tragedies of Nordal Brun and Niels Krogh Bredal, imitators of Voltaire. His Adam and Eve, his first production in the romantic school, was the first original tragedy in Denmark. His next, Rolf Krage, drawn from the heroic times of Denmark, opened up that rich field of myth and legend which Oehlenschläger has since so splendidly
worked out. This was followed by The Death of Balder. Scandinavian his most noble production, in which his admiration of Shakespeare and Ossian are clearly marked. His lyrical drama, The Fishermen, was his last work of any extent.
DANISH LITERATURE FROM EVALD TO BAGGESSEN.
The forty years from the death of Evald to that of the death of Baggesen produced a great number of poets and literary men in Norway and Denmark, but none who rose to the same national rank; we must, therefore, pass slightly over them. At this period the literary men of Copenhagen, a large proportion of whom were from Norway, introduced club-life, in imitation of that which had in England flourished under different chiefs, and where Dryden, Pope, Addison, Gay, Bolingbroke, and, in fact, all the principal literary men had assembled, or still did assemble. The Norwegians formed themselves into a club, called the Norwegian Society, which met at Juel's coffee-house, in the Svartegaden; and at its head stood John Herman Wessel. The Danish club, at the head of which stood Evald, met at Neergaard's coffee-house, in the Badstuestræden. Another club, consisting of men who could not go the length of the hostilities of these two rival clubs, formed under the title of the Society of Belles Lettres.
Wessel, the head of the Norwegian club, was born in 1742, in the parish of Vestby, in the diocese of Aggerhus, in Norway, where his father was dean and parish-priest. He was the nephew of the brave Admiral Wessel, called Tordenskiold, mentioned in Evald's national song, King Christian. In 1772, Wessel suddenly became popular by a satirical comedy in ridicule of the French trash of Brun and Bredal, already mentioned, called Kiarlighed uden Strømper, "Love Without Stockings." Wessel wrote a great quantity of articles in verse and prose, very much of the character of The Three Warnings, The Three Black Crotes, of our own literature of that period. He edited a periodical with the singular title, Votre Serviteur Otiosis, and passed his days at different coffee-houses and taverns, amusing the people with epigrams and impromptus. He died in 1785, at the age of forty-three, leaving not enough to pay the expenses of his funeral.
Cotemporary with Wessel were Johannes Wibe, a comedy writer; Bull, the author of ethic and didactic poems; and the brothers Tröjel. Peter Magnus and Peter Kofod Tröjel, both writers of bacchanalian lyrics, and the latter of some serious poetry.
Edward Storm, a Norwegian, is the author of Brøger, a mock-heroic poem, describing a rural dean going his rounds at Easter, collecting his pask-eggs; also of narrative poems and fables of the Fontaine school. His ballads and religious poems have great merit.
Tyge Rothe was more noted for his prose than his poetry. His work on The Love of One's Country is a fine specimen of prose style. Johan Nordal Brun, whose French tragedy we have noticed, was in his time very popular; but his fame has long died out, except as connected with the violent contest which his tragedy excited. He received church preferment, became a truly eloquent preacher, and wrote a poem, Jonathan, in ten books,—an utter failure. He died in 1816.
In this period also appeared several ladies of considerable merit: in poetry and the drama: Dorothea Biehl, Catherine Bojé, Sophie Buckholm, and Louisa Lindenkrone; besides several other male poets who claim only a mention: Wivet, Weyer, Fasting, and Colbiørnsen.
About the same period appeared writers whom we only need name. Povel Dankel Bast wrote poetry and epigrams; J. C. Tode, a German, who wrote as a Dane, distinguished for comedies, fables, and humorous pieces; Thomas Christian Bruun, author of tales and satires; Lauritz Hasse, a novelist; Olufsen, author of a comedy called "Gulddansen;"
Horrehow and Abrahamson, poets, and the latter distinguished in other works; Samsoe, author of a popular tragedy called Dyveche. Jonas Rein wrote a tragedy entitled Hagen and Valborg, founded on the old Danish legend of Axel and Valborg. He wrote also lyrical, elegiacal, and narrative poems. Thomas Thaarup wrote two admirable operas, "The Harvest Supper," and "Peter's Wedding." Thaarup was eloquent as an orator, and wrote many beautiful hymns and other lyrical poems. Zedletz, a clergyman by birth, a Norwegian, lived chiefly in the country. His poetry is celebrated as extremely varied, new, genial, and joyous, never serious and pathetic.
Christen Henriksen Pram was a man of great importance in his day. He was a Norwegian; a man in office. His principal work is "Stärkodder," a heroic poem, celebrating a great mythic hero of Norway with twelve arms, the Briareus of the North. Stärkodder is the "Kehama" of Scandinavia; and, indeed, the genius of Pram very much reminds us of that of Southey. There is the same incessant industry exerted on all sorts of topics, poetry, criticism, politics, political economy, journalism, and the literature of the day. There is the same want of penetration into the depths of poetry in its most psychological character, and, as if to seek compensation for the defect, a letting loose of the imagination almost reckless into the world of phantasy and supernatural legend. Pram also edited a periodical, The Minerva, in which he was succeeded by his friend, Rahbek.
During this period Luxdorf distinguished himself in criticism; Suhm wrote his History of Denmark, a great and elaborate work, in sixteen volumes quarto. Birknir distinguished himself as a classical prose writer; Juel as a portrait-painter; Wiederveld as a sculptor, the master of Thorwaldsen; Jacob Baden in philology; and G. L. Baden in criticism and by his History of Denmark.
Ove Höegh Guldborg was a great name at the close of the eighteenth century. His historic productions are master-pieces. He united with Sneedorf, Schytte, and others, in a History of the World. He translated the New Testament, and published an essay on the dates of the writing of its different books. But he is equally remarkable as the successor to the ministry of Denmark on the fall of Struensee, and the simultaneous ill-treatment of the amiable Caroline Matilda, the unhappy sister of our George III. The son of Guldborg, Frederick Höegh Guldborg, was a genial poet and translator of Tibullus, Terence, and Plautus. Jørgen Zoega is celebrated for his work on Egyptian antiquities; Thorlacius for northern antiquities and literature; Abrahamson, a military officer, for his publication, with Nyerup and Rahbek, of five volumes of Select Danish Verse of the Middle Ages. Thomas Bagge wrote on astronomy and mathematics; and Foersom is celebrated for his translation of Shakespeare, as far as four volumes, Captain Wulff completing it in five more volumes in 1825. Before this, Niels Rosenfeldt had translated Macbeth in 1787, and two other volumes of Shakespeare's other plays in 1792. Bastholm requires mention in philosophy and morals, Malling in history and biography. Periodical literature had now several active and influential organs.
Jens Baggesen. Baggesen is a man who occupies a large space in the field of Danish literature. He lived partly in the last century and partly in this, and represented in the fullest manner the spirit and character of the past. He may be said to be the last of the classical school, living to do battle with and fall before the new or romantic school. In these circumstances he was accompanied by his friend Rahbek, who was the representative of the literary men of the latter end of the eighteenth century, as he was of the men of genius. He died in 1826, Rahbek in 1830. A new race and a new spirit were rising around them, even while they were in the prime of their years and popularity; but they themselves resisted vigorously the new influences,
especially Baggesen. Their contemporaries were preparing, and some of them carrying out, as great a revolution in Scandinavian literary taste as that of France was in political philosophy. Klopstock, Bürger, Voss, and Wieland, in Germany, had already broken down the boundaries of what was called the old classical school; Rousseau and Voltaire, in France, Bishop Percy, Burns, and Campbell, in England, had entered on an entirely new track; and everywhere giants were showing their heads above the crowd, prepared to astonish the world with a wholly novel creation,—a wholly new world of poetry, literature, and romance. Schiller and Goethe, Tieck, Fichte, and Jean Paul, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, had produced some of their master-pieces before the representatives of the last age had disappeared from the scene; and still nearer home, Oelenschläger had startled them as by the apparition of their own Thor, before the blows of whose hammer all the artistic creations of the more cold and precise French classicity fell in dust and fragments.
No man in Denmark, up to a certain moment, ever enjoyed so great and universal a popularity; his genius was so brilliant, so multifarious, so genial, and fascinating. In classical style, in learning, in wit, in imagination, in masterly reason, he was equally pre-eminent. He was the Tom Moore of the very highest classes, caressed, and living in familiar equality with princes, princesses, and nobles, with more than Moore's genius and intellectual stamina. Before he was twenty years of age, a volume of Comic Stories in Verse, appearing the same year as Pram's Stärkodder, Bartholm's Liturgy, Scheel's Theatre of War, and Pram and Rahbek's new periodical, The Minerva, notwithstanding rose far above their interest, and placed him on the pinnacle of fame, especially in the realm of comic and satiric poetry. From this time, for nearly thirty years, he continued to pour out a series of volumes of poems, travels, dramas, operas, and miscellaneous writings, which held his countrymen in entrancement. The works of Baggesen in Danish fill twelve volumes, exclusive of his works in German, amongst which latter are some of his most considerable productions, as the Parthenais, Oceana, Adam and Eve, and Heideblumen. Amongst the Danish dramas and operas, the chief are Holger Danske, Erik Eiegod, the Trylleharp, the passionate and very beautiful drama of Pandion and Dione, from the Greek mythology, and Thoru. The poems of Nanna, written in his latter years, are undoubtedly amongst the most beautiful compositions in Danish. The translation of Holberg's Niels Klim into Danish is a masterpiece, and his Labyrinthen, containing his travels, have all the brilliance, vivacity, and fascination of a novel. His life was indeed a romance. His birth was in poverty; his youth amid the warmest sunshine of fame and honour; his latter days plunged in gloom by envy of his younger contemporaries, and a public neglect too much merited by his conduct. He died at Hamburg in October 1826.
Knud Lyne Rahbek was author of plays, songs, miscellaneous poems, prose stories, much criticism, &c. He has left, however, no original works which can fix his name pre-eminently in the temple of his country's fame, but a mass of able and interesting writings, so mixed up with the people and the time that they form an inseparable portion of the Danish literature of the period. He was born in Copenhagen in 1760, and died in 1830. He united with Nyerup and Abrahamson in the collection and publication of the Kiempe-Viter; edited the plays of Holberg and others; wrote the lives of his contemporaries; and songs, the favourites of the young throughout Scandinavia. He edited the Minerva after Pram left it, and the Tilskuer, or Spectator, in imitation of Addison's Spectator, for many years. Later, he edited a political paper, Dagen, the Day, from 1811 to 1814. His house, known to all Scandinavia
Scandinavian literature. as the Bakkehuss, or house on the Mount, was the constant resort of the learned and the happy, and the home of the poor and sorrowful. He was the constant friend of struggling merit.
Oelenschläger, the greatest poet of his country, and at a time most capable of developing his genius to perfection, requires no mention here, his life and works appearing under his own name. The only writer in Scandinavia with whom he can be compared is the Swedish poet Tegnér. Both are poets of a high order and of kindred genius; but while Tegnér perhaps excels Oelenschläger in tenderness and delicacy of feeling, Oelenschläger certainly transcends Tegnér in vigour, and in the wide and varied field in which he exerted it. Fritiof's Saga stands as the only great poem of Tegnér, without which he would be reduced to the simple rank of a lyrical poet; but Oelenschläger is the author of a host of works, epic, dramatic, and lyrical, which, from first to last, display the same wonderful freshness and vigour. Oelenschläger's great companions at the university were the two brothers Oersted, afterwards so famous; Hans Christian, the great natural philosopher, author of The Soul in Nature; and Anders Sandøe, the great lawyer and statesman.
Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig is equally remarkable as a philological antiquarian and translator, and as a theologian and preacher. He was born, in September 1783, at Udby, in South Zealand. His earliest works were on the mythology of Scandinavia, of which he was an enthusiastic admirer. On this subject he published his Northern Mythology, and Scenes from the Fall of the Kämp's Life in the North. But his mind suddenly took as enthusiastic a religious turn, in which he condemned his zeal for the old mythology, and in an essay On Religion and Liturgy, he called for reform in the church. For eight years he lay under the clerical ban. During this time, however, he employed himself in historic and antiquarian labours; published a Bible Chronicle, The Roskilde Rhyme, Roskilde Saga, Kvædlinger, &c. In 1822 he completed his greatest and most laborious work, his translations of Saxo Grammaticus and Snorre Sturlesen, in six quarto volumes, by which the ancient chronicles of Norway and Denmark were made the property of the multitude. He had now also gone deep into Anglo-Saxon, and already, in conjunction with Rask, had published a masterly translation of Beowulf's Drape. From 1828 to 1838 he edited a monthly theological magazine, published several volumes of his sermons, and in 1829 he came to England, to consult the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in Exeter and in the British Museum. Whilst here, he issued the prospectus of a most gigantic work, a Bibliotheca Anglo-Saxonica, which was to contain not only Beowulf's poem, with an English translation, but Cædmon's celebrated paraphrase of the first book of Moses, many minor Anglo-Saxon poems and fragments, Layamon's Old English Rhyme Chronicle, in three volumes, and a collection of Anglo-Saxon homilies in three other volumes. In a second visit to this country in 1831, he explored the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts at Cambridge, where he was introduced by Mr Babbage. But though Grundtvig received much courtesy in this country, his great plans received no real encouragement. Since then, Grundtvig has become one of the most celebrated preachers and sacred lyrists in Denmark.
Steen Steensen Blicher is one of the most original poets and romance writers of Denmark. He was a clergyman, born in Jutland in 1782, who had lived in a country of wild heaths, sandy and heathery, and amid pine woods, studded with ancient cairns, and his poetry and his romances breathe their solitary and dreary spirit. Besides his tales, the earliest of which was his Rural Dean's Diary, and his poems, the earliest volume of which was styled Snowdrops, he translated Ossian and The Vicar of Wakefield from the English.
Bernhard Severin Ingemann is the great romance writer of Denmark. He has, indeed, poured forth works of many different kinds with an astonishing prodigality, and is one of Denmark's most voluminous writers. Poems, great and small; psalms, hymns, and other religious lyrics; lyrical poems of various kinds; poems, epic and dramatic; tragedies, comedies, satires. But his great historic romances are what give him his position of one of the greatest writers of his country. They are read and re-read by the winter firesides throughout the North, amid the wildest mountains and the vastest snow-barricaded woods, in the huts of the peasant, the hunter, and the fisherman.
Johan Ludvig Heiberg, a poet, critic, and dramatist, is most distinguished for the introduction of the vaudeville into Denmark, and for a new kind of play, the romantic or fairy comedy, of which the Elles, acted in 1835, and the Pata Morgana, in 1838, are amongst the most popular. In 1849, he was made director of the theatre for his services to the drama.
Madame Heiberg is one of the most distinguished actresses in Denmark. After all, the most charming compositions attributed to Heiberg are, Tales by the author of Every-Day Stories; which, however, by others are attributed to his mother, the Countess of Gyllembourg. Heiberg's father, Peter Andreas Heiberg, was also a dramatic and satiric writer, but rather French than Danish, being an exile residing in Paris from 1800 to his death.
Amongst living writers of Denmark, the following are of high distinction. Johan Carstens Hauch, a lyric, dramatic, and romance writer. He was born, in 1791, in Frederikshald, the son of a man of high note. He was himself chiefly attached to literature, and had been professor in Kiel and lecturer to the academy of Sorö. In his poetry there are strong traces of the naturalist, as in his Life of Plants. So also his romances, as Wilhelm Zabern, The Goldmaker, and The Two Points of View. In his tragedies, which are numerous, on the contrary, there is an equally strong tendency to metaphysical philosophizing, to the tracing out the springs of action, yet mingled with intense passion and scenes of exciting peril. They are more calculated, indeed, for the deep thinker than the secker of light amusement.
Henrik Herz is one of Denmark's most brilliant poets and dramatists. It is in the latter character, however, that he is most distinguished. He was born in 1798, and in 1827 produced anonymously the play of Herr Burekhardt and his Family. Since then his principal productions have been, The Flitting Day, and Emma, plays; Love and Police, Love's Strokes of Genius, and Debates in the Police Friend, vaudevilles; Stend Dyring's House, a romantic drama in five acts; and The Swan-Coat, or Swan Disguise, a romantic play, in three acts, founded on the ancient sagas and viser. His most celebrated production, however, is his lyrical drama, King René's Daughter, ably translated into English by Theodore Martin.
Frederik Paludan Müller is one of the most powerful poets of the present day. He was born in 1809, and is regarded by his admirers as the Byron of Scandinavia. He has published Four Romances, Dundserinden, a female dance or serio-comic poem; Cupid and Psyche, a lyrical drama, and various other poems, lyrical and dramatic; but his great production is Adam Homo, a poem in three volumes.
Christian Wintler, is the half-brother of Paul Martin Möller, also a poet of good standing. He is author of some novels, and of strong and life-like poems from the old Kämpe-Viser, and the life of the people.
Caspar Johannes Bojó is a clergyman, famous for his psalms and hymns, to be found in all collections. He has published also the following tragedies:—Seend Grathe, King Sigurd, Queen Jutta of Denmark, and Erik the Seventh. He has issued a volume of psalms translated me-
trically from the Hebrew, under the name of David's Harp, and Spiritual Poems and Songs. He is also well known as the translator of Walter Scott's best romances, and as co-editor of Baggesen's works.
Hans Christian Andersen is well known to the English reader by his romances of The Improvisatore, O. T., and Only a Fiddler, and his Stories and Legends for the Young, first introduced to us by Mrs Howitt. He was born in 1805, the son of a shoemaker in Odense, and has raised himself to a first place in Danish literature by his talents.
To this illustrious list we could yet add a long series of names well known and honoured in Denmark. Amongst them Hans Peter Holst, who has published poems and romances; Out and Home, or his travels; Giachino, a play; and in the war of Holstein in 1848 stood prominently forth as a patriot in his Little Hornblower. Moritz Christian Hansen, the author of various dramas, novels, tales, and educational works. A. M. Goldschmidt, the editor of Corsaren, the Danish Punch, and author of Jacob Bendiscon, the Jew, a novel, &c.
Besides those who belong more particularly to the literature, poetry, and romance of Denmark, the departments of art, science, and antiquities boast names that deserve more mention than we have space to give. Thorwaldsen, the sculptor, belongs to the whole world, and will be found in his proper biographical niche in this work. He died at Copenhagen in 1844, aged about seventy years; and lies buried in the centre of the museum built in his honour. The best sculptor before Thorwaldsen was Wiedevelt, Thorwaldsen's master; the greatest now are Jerichau and Bissen, specimens of whose productions appeared in our Great Exhibition in 1851,—by Jerichau, "Adam and Eve," in plaster; "The Hunter and Panther," in marble: by Bissen, "Orestes," "Eros, or Love," "A Fisher-Boy Angling," and a bust of Andersen.
Amongst the best painters of Denmark are Juul, Gartner, Schütz, and others, in portrait; Horneman, in miniature portrait; Eckersberg, historical and marine painter; Dahl, Harder, Marstrand, Simonsen, Sonne, Melby, Sørensen, Möller, Skovgaard, Keirskow, and Rump, in landscape; Gebauer, animal painter; Lorenzen and Stubbs, in historical portrait; Fritsch, Camradt, Martens, Jensen, and Ottensen, flower-painters; genre painters, Schleisner and Monnier. The wife of Jerichau, the sculptor, is a fine portrait-painter.
In music, Hartman, Ronge, and Gade, are most distinguished.
In medical science, the names of Bang, Trier, and Stien are pre-eminent. In botany, Professor Schouw.
In philology and antiquities, no nation boasts greater names than Rafn, Rask, Grundvig, Molbech, Finn Magnusen, and Warsaæ. Rask is one of the greatest philologists that ever lived. A complete account of his travels in discovery of ancient knowledge, and into the origin and principles of language in Scandinavia, Lapland, Russia, Georgia, and the regions of the Caucasus; in Persia, Tartary, India, Ceylon, Iceland, Scotland, &c., of his grammar and treatises on almost all languages, would fill volumes. His invaluable collection of MSS., inscriptions, &c., now belong to the library of the university of Copenhagen and to the great Royal library.
In geography there is a name which most readers believe to be French, Malte Brun. It is, however, merely the Frenchified name of a real Dane, Malthe Conrad Bruun, who resided in Paris, was one of the founders of La Société de Géographie, and its secretary.
Professor Molbech is one of the northern literati whose industry astounds us. To his Poetical Anthology and his criticisms we are greatly indebted in this article. His great Danish Dictionary is work enough for one life; he is the Johnson of Denmark; but besides this he is the author of
a Dictionary of Danish Dialects; of a History of the Scandinavians on the Throne of England; History of Erik Plogpenning; editor and translator of various works, &c.
Of the labours of Thorlacius, Müller, Nyerup, Finn Magnusen, Werlauff, Simonsen, Thomson, Abrahamson, &c., in archaeology and antiquities of the North, it is impossible to speak too highly. But for their individual labours, as well as those of Monrad and Schlegel, we must refer to information under their own names.
In intellectual philosophy and theology, Denmark has a new and distinguished race of theorists, who seem by no means inclined to follow in the German fog, mist, and find-nothing school; on the contrary, they are of a decidedly Christian tendency. They have probed the German philosophy to its depths, and have drawn very different results from their psychological researches. Amongst the most eminent are C. F. Sibbern, author of Psychological Pathology, and The Letters of Gabriel; the eloquent Bishop Mynter; Grundvig, already mentioned; Martensen, in his Anatomy of Self-Consciousness, &c.; and the brothers Kierkegaard, in various works. Nor must we close our notice without again referring to the illustrious brothers Oersted, one the statesman, the other the author of The Soul in Nature, and discoverer of electro-magnetism in 1820, which has led to the electric telegraph, and other wonderful results.
MODERN LITERATURE OF SWEDEN.
The ancient literature of Sweden, like that of Norway and Denmark, was that of the common Scandinavia. Its first independent literature, like that of those countries, consisted of the Folk-Sagor and Visor, which we have given. During the middle ages the same causes which annihilated the native literature of Norway and Denmark, annihilated that of Sweden. It was the incubus of Latinity and Rome. From the time that monkery set its foot in Sweden till the Reformation shook its yoke from the soul of the people, there lay a dark and barren waste of mind in which the Visor and Sagor, circulating amongst the uneducated population, alone preserved the germ of intellectual life amidst woods and hills. Other causes followed in Sweden, which retarded the revival of literature even more than in Denmark and Norway—the deep hold which the French influence and ideas gained there. Sweden, up to this moment, has never developed the same vigour and varied genius as the rest of Scandinavia. She is confessedly neither dramatic, epic, nor, till lately, at all historic. Many causes have been assigned by Swedish writers for this, into which we need not here enter; the reason given by Beskow, in his Reminiscences of Stjernstolpe, is sufficient. "No literature," he says, "is so poor in comic authors as the Swedish. What is the cause? The Swedes have no want of the love of fun or wit. But the first requisite for the development of comic, as of all other genius, is freedom, in the aesthetic and social meaning. Has no one, then, discovered that this may have had its influence on our dramatic status? The intolerably heavy aesthetic fetters have only in our own day become broken; but conventionalism, etiquette, and the daily circumstances of social life, rule with scarcely less vigour than formerly. We are too serious, people say. On the contrary, we are not serious enough. The most serious and most proud of all nations, the English and the Spanish, possess the most splendid comic authors."
The Swedish literary annals divide the history of their literature into four grand periods. First, the romantic; second, the Germanico-Italian, or Stjernhjelm, period of the seventeenth century; third, the Gallic period; and fourth, the new school, commencing with 1809. Over all, except the last two periods, we may pass very cursorily, for the reasons adduced above. The Eddaic and Visor periods are
Scandinavian literature already given; the second and great part of the third period present nothing of great originality. The first, or romantic period, extends over the enormous space of 500 years, that is, from the introduction of Christianity, or about the years 1000 to 1600. During this time the chief literature was historical visor and folk-sagas, as the "Battle of Brunkeberg," "King Erik and the Fortune-telling Woman," "Battle of Brännkryka," "Gustavus and the Dalecarlians," "Charles XII.'s March," a fine song, set to a fine air, and other ballads about Charles XII., &c.
Amongst the first initiators of the old Folks-Visor was Nicolaus Hermanus, bishop of Linköping, in the thirteenth century, who wrote the ballad of "Elsif Eriksdotter, the Nun." This author, too, wrote an account of Ansgarius, the Northern Apostle. In 1437, Bishop Thomas wrote poems on Engelbrecht and Erik Puke; Dahstjerna, the "King and Sir Peter," on the victory of Narva. Director Odel wrote a popular song, "Malcolm Sinclair," and "The Old Hen-woman's Song," by Cardius, pastor of Södermanland, is the Swedish literary history from Christina to Adolf Frederick. Erik XIV., a monarch equally poetical and unfortunate, and who married Karin Mansdotter, the daughter of a corporal, wrote some most popular songs, especially one addressed to his low-born but admirable wife. Being imprisoned by his usurping brother John, he wrote in his prison religious hymns, and the versions of the 180th and 373d psalms in the Swedish psalm-book are by him; the latter one a most singularly simple and touching composition. Ericus Olai had preceded King Erik in psalmody; and others of that period followed in the same line. Many nobles of that period also wrote popular love-songs; amongst them Count John Hoya. Gustavus Adolphus celebrated his youthful favourite, Ebba Brabé; and one of his bravest officers, Colonel Ekeblad, wrote many lyrics in imitation of the ancient Visor; as "The Five Perils of Man"—from the caprice of great lords, from April weather, rose-coloured garments, cards, and fair women. He wrote also many amorous pastorals. Burrus was the first introducer of hexameters.
The reading of this period consisted greatly of foreign chivalric poetical romance, and Queen Euphemia of Norway was a great translator of them; as the Charlemagne and King Arthur romances, which were called Queen Euphemia's Visor. Then arose hosts of these, followed by "Rynocké the Fox," "The Dance of Death," "Martin Goose," and the like. The native Folks-Sagas were as numerous, besides the "Childhood of Christ," "Judas Iscariot," "Pontius Pilate," "Faust," "Fortunatus," "Owlinglass," "Baarlham and Josaphat," "Blue-Beard," "Master Cat," and all the middle-age romances still read by the German peasantry. To this literature of simplicity and simple faith we must add that of Rhymed Chronicles, and a species of drama much akin to Mysteries and Morality, in which all the characters of sacred history figure; and others, called Ballets, resembling the English Masques. In some of these, and especially in the play of "Tobit," by Olaus Petri, written only eight years before our Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, we are astonished to find the wonderful resemblance betwixt Swedish and English, much greater than betwixt English and Scotch of the same period. What is remarkable is, that the sound and spelling of the th in "the," "three," and all similar words, now quite abandoned by Swedes and Danes, and nearly all continental nations, and so difficult of expression to foreigners, was then in full use.
SECOND SWEDISH PERIOD—THE GERMANICO-ITALIAN SCHOOL, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
The Reformation in Sweden, as in other countries, put to flight all the prognostics of its effects on poetic literature.
What many authors have asserted that Protestantism is founded on reason, and is therefore opposed to imagination and poetry, soon showed its falsity. Darkness, delusion, and superstition fled, but all the elements of poetry remained in the daylight. Nature smiled with her glorious face into more intelligent eyes; into spirits more capable of comprehending and loving her. Shakespeare and Milton stand the perpetual refutations of the aspersions on Protestantism as prosaic. Here no Shakespeare arose, but the drama was removed from the cloister and the church to its more legitimate stage amid social life; and John Messenius and his son Arnold, and George Stjernhjelm, improved on what Olaus Petri had begun. The elder Messenius wrote six dramas or comedies, as all dramas were then called, like Dante's. They were chiefly from the old sagas, or the national history, as Seanheita, Signill, Gustaf I. They are all flat, and destitute of interest at the present day. The younger Messenius was historiographer of the kingdom, and represented the whole reign of Gustaf I. in a drama! Their contemporaries, Prytz, bishop of Linköping; Brask, a clergyman; Hjörne, Kolmodin, and Beronius, all wrote plays, and terminated that school. Then followed George Stjernhjelm, who wrote dramas, lyrics, an epic and didactic poems, and produced such an impression that he decided the character of his country's literature for a century. As he chose his subjects from the classics, he has been considered the first classic poet of Sweden. His great poem was "Hercules," in hexameters, which Hammarsköld pronounces the best poem of its kind in the Swedish language. He wrote besides, "The Hanged Artrild," "The Captive Cupid," &c., &c. His works much improved the language. His chief followers were Lindsköld, Rjork, Wallenius, and Count Stenbock; but the growing influence of the Italian and German taste was now fast prevailing.
The chief writers of the Italian school were Dahstjerna, who introduced the Ottova Rima; Gustaf Rosenhane, Leyoncrona, Ruden, bishop of Linköping, Gripshjelm, and Liljenstedt. Of the German school, Samuel Columbus, who published songs and epigrams, under the title of the Biblical World; Gyllenborg, Holmström, Risell, Werwing, Geisler, and Olaf Broms. Lasse Lucidor, or Lasse Johansson, was a wild, eccentric genius of this period, who lived like a Diogenes, wrote songs and hymns, and was murdered at the age of twenty-four. The first lady authoress of Sweden, if we except Queen Euphemia, appeared in the person of Fru Brenner, who, says Lénström, bore fifteen children, and wrote still more poems. Her verses related chiefly to weddings and funeral feasts, and had the strangest and most elaborate titles; but she was immensely popular in her day, and was complimented by more than thirty eulogistic addresses, some of them from foreign countries. Archbishop Haquin Spengel was the Arreboe of Sweden. He translated, and, the Swedes say, greatly improved Arreboe's Hexameron; but his psalms are the compositions which give him, and justly, as the Swedish Psalm Book testifies, his reputation in Sweden. He had read Milton, and wrote a Paradise Lost and Found of his own, as also a keen satire, called Sir Highmind Downfall. His disciples in the department of sacred poetry were Olof Kolmodin, author of the immensely popular Voice of the Dove; Professor Arrhenius, Bishop Svedberg, and Jacob Frese. Besides these, Runius, Dalius, Triewald, and Fornelius, are names of mark of this era.
The taste and knowledge of Sweden were now fast progressing, and they were growing familiar with the best French, English, German, Italian, Dutch, and Danish authors. We find them quoting Ronsard, Corneille, Spenser, Milton, Cowley, Flemming, Cats, Vondel, Arreboe, Kingo, Hoffmannswaldian, Lowenstein, Opitz, Gryphius, Guarini, Boileau, etc.
The splendour and ecclat of Louis XIV.'s court, and the familiarity with French affairs and opinions produced by the long war betwixt Popery and Protestantism, which was ended by the peace of Utrecht, spread everywhere French taste and fashion. Even England, which had so stoutly combated French domination, did not escape its contagion. Our literature, from Pope to Cowper, bore melancholy traces of it; Germany suffered immensely from the same cause; and a fresh importation of the Gallo-mania was revived in Prussia by Frederick, misnamed the Great, where Voltaire and French fashions, French vice, French atheism, and French poetry were enthroned and worshipped amid pigtails, powder, and jack-boots. But in no country did this Gallic pest fall more heavily than on Scandinavia. The Swedes divide this period into three portions:—
1. The Morning of Gallicism—The Dalin Period.
The principal writers of this period are Dalin, after whom it is named, Fru Nordenflycht, Creutz, and Gyllenborg. They display little originality, and there is as little pleasure in perusing their compositions as there is in those of our own Yaldens, Spratts, Dukes, and the like. Dalin was a courtier and a favourite of Queen Louisa Ulrika. He wrote an epic, Swedish Freedom, a drama, Brynhilda; a comedy, The Envious One; a great number of festive odes, birth and death poems, &c. In fact, he filled all the functions of a court laureate, in effusions which have no more value for posterity than so many old cast-off clothes. As a prose writer he had more merit, publishing a periodical, The Argus, in 1782, on the model of Addison's Spectator, which continued two years.
Hedvig Charlotte Nordenflycht was a very different person. She was the popular poetess of this period, and in a better age would have been a better poetess, for she possessed, in no ordinary degree, passion, feeling, and imagination. She vented her real and her Sapphic sorrows in a series of elegies called The Sorrowing Turtle Dove. She wrote an idyll, Camilla, and much love poetry. She was the centre of all literary society, and founded a literary society, of which the queen, Louisa Ulrika, seized the idea, and established the Academy of Literature, which lasted till her death in 1782, and was again restored by her son, Gustavus III., in 1786, under the title of the Academy of Literature, History, and Antiquity.
The Counts Gyllenborg and Creutz were formed in the school of Madame Nordenflycht. Creutz was born in Finland in 1729, and died in 1785. His best work is Atis and Camilla. The only merit of the poem is its feeling for nature, and its beautiful style. He wrote also a Song of Summer, elegies, and a clever satiric poem, The Defence of Lying. Gyllenborg's chief works are, Songs of the Four Seasons—for both he and Creutz had an admiration of Thomson's Seasons; the Joys and Sorrows of Men, Ode on the Power of the Soul; fables, satires, and plays. His Tåget efter Balt, in twelve books, is a feeble attempt at a national epic, in the style of the Henriade. In most of his works there is a melancholy without hope, a poison of scepticism. He was the chief poet of his time, and his poems on the Seasons the most pleasing.
The other writers of this first section of the century were Wrangel, Hesselius, Celsius, Lalin, Wellander, dramatists; Liljestrål, Skjöldebrande, Göstaisson, Bergeström, narrative poets and translators; Olof Rudbeck, Lavin, Cederhjelm, Nyren, comic and satiric writers. Mörk was the great romance writer of the time, Sweden's first regular author of romance. His models were Fenelon, Barclay, and Lohenstein; yet his productions are more numerous than readable. He had imitators in Wexel and Gyllenstolpe. Palmfelt and Nicander were translators from Virgil and others.
2. Noon of Gallicism—The Period of Gustavus and the Scandinavian Academy.
Gustavus III. was a great patron of literature and an author himself, but unfortunately educated in the French taste, and thus only contributed more firmly to fix that taste on his country. Still, in some respects, Swedish literature owes much to Gustavus. He encouraged polish of style, and discouraged coarseness and grossness. Of this mid-day of the Gallic era, Gustavus, Kellgren, Leopold, and Oxenstjerna are the chiefs. Gustavus, following in the steps of his mother Ulrika, and by the advice of his tutor Tessin, established the Swedish Academy of Literature in 1786. He wrote a number of dramas, the chief of which are Gustavus Wasa, Gustavus Adolphus and Ebba Brahé, Siri Braké, Helmfelt, Gustavus Adolphus's Magnanimity, Frigga, a comedy; The Jealous Neapolitan, Alexis Michelovitch, Natalia Narischkin, &c. These dramas were in prose, and are still read with interest; but he had several of them thrown into the form of operas by Kellgren and Leopold, by which they only lost their freshness and originality, and the prose ones are still preferred. Kellgren was born in 1741 and died in 1795. He was the best lyric poet of the period. He commenced the Stockholm Post in 1777, with his friend, Carl Lenngren, which exercised a powerful influence for nearly fifty years. He was a witty and keen satirist, as is evidenced by his Enemies of Light, My Laughter, Man only a Genius when Mad. He wrote operas which did not equal his lyrics. Kellgren showed unmistakably symptoms of a tendency to back out of the bondage of the French school. On studying the German literature, he began to suspect that his literary career had been an error; and on reading Klopstock's Messiah, he declared that he had lived in vain.
Carl Gustav Leopold, after the death of Kellgren, was at the head of the literary world of Denmark during the remainder of the century. He was born in 1756 and died in 1829. His works fill six volumes, including almost every species of poetry but the epic; but he is best known by his dramas and miscellaneous poems.
Johan Gabriel Oxenstjerna, born in 1750, became a marshal of the kingdom, and died in 1818. He was a wonderful admirer of our Thomson, and wrote in imitation the Harvest, and the Hours of the Day, which, spite of the faults of the age, display living pictures of country life in Sweden, much idyllic beauty, and homely, attractive grace. He also translated Milton and Tasso; the first remarkably well, the latter indifferently.
The other writers of this period are Johan Stenhammar and Isaac Blom; Axel Silverstolpe; Sjöberg, who cultivated the English taste; Edlerantz, who translated "God Save the King."
TERMINATION OF THE FRENCH SCHOOL IN SWEDEN.
This was properly a transition period. The day of French taste was drawing to an end. The French Revolution, by its startling events, was in fact most powerfully destructive of French taste. Voltaire, the author of the miserable Henriade, by his other writings was preparing a mine which, in its explosion, broke the intellectual fetters of other nations. In England, the process of literary revolution dates still earlier, from Bishop Percy's Reliques, in 1765. In Germany, similar innovations date from Klopstock; in Denmark, Steffens carried about the new German fire; and in Sweden the same spirit was stirring in Bellman, Hallman, and numbers of others before the French Revolution broke out. That world-awakening carried on and completed the change. Not only Bellman and Hallman, but Kexel, Wallenberg, Lidner, Thorild, and Madame Lenngren, at this period, in songs, lyrics, dramas, and other compositions, drew their spiritual life
Scandinavian literature. from the people, and startled and exasperated the orthodox dulness of the academy.
Carl Michael Bellman is the Anacreon of Sweden. He is the pride of his countrymen and the puzzle of foreigners. His songs, which are chiefly bacchanalian and describe the people in their tavern life, have a wonderful joviality and power of language; but much of the charm of his compositions is lost to all but Sweden. There can be no translation of such lyrics as "Up, Amaryllis!" "Drink out thy glass, see Death awaits thee;" "Mark how our shadow, mark, Moritz, my brother;" "Ulla, my Ulla!" etc., etc. Bellman was born in 1740, and died in 1795.
Carl Israel Hallman wrote comedies and farces, often coarse but full of Swedish folk-life. His vaudeville of Opportunity makes the Thief, is still extremely popular on the stage. He drew his characters from the same class as Bellman.
Olaf Kexél lived a gay, vagabond life, and found a home in a debtor's prison. He wrote comedies, and re-wrote those of others, as Captain Puff, and Michael Wingler, which still are admired.
Carl Envalson, a writer of numerous plays, Schröderheim, Lannerstjerna, and Holhusen, were popular in their day. A much more remarkable writer was Jacob Wallenberg, a witty dramatic author and traveller. He wrote merry sketches on an Indian voyage, My Son in the Galley, or All Sorts of Ink-horn Wares; and an equally amusing visit to London, where he saw and described Wilks, in London in George III's reign, as seen by a Suede.
Lidner and Thorild were men of a totally different character, grave, philosophic, and almost wholly of the new school. Lidner wrote Medea, a tragedy; The Messiah; The Last Judgment, etc., but with a pure and a fiery glow, which denoted the coming change. Thorild was from head to foot a man of the new ideas. His nature was revolutionary. In the face of the court and academy he maintained the merits of Ossian, Klopstock, and Goethe. He was a master in prose, published a Critique on Montesquieu, studied law in England for two years, and in 1798 was banished for four years for a work On the Freedom of the Understanding. His poems, the Göthmanna Songs, The Passions, and Pleasures of the Imagination, have much merit. Swedish literature, in fact, is greatly indebted to Thorild for the spirit of manly freedom, and the sound principles of taste which he infused into it. Enbom and Engzell were followers of Thorild.
But perhaps the most interesting character of the close of the last and the opening of the present century in Sweden is Anna Maria Lengren. She was born in 1754, married Carl Lengren, counsellor of Commerce in 1780, and died in 1817. She counselled her literary career by the translation of some operas; but her original poems, contained in one small unpretending volume, are what will for ever secure her a place amongst the classical writers of her country. She is the Miss Bremer of Sweden in poetry. Her poems are, in fact, Swedish domestic life in all its varieties and all its charms.
Fru Widström was another lady poetess of this time, of a more sentimental mood.
Amongst other writers of the period were Paykull, Boman, Regné, and Adlerbeth, chiefly known as translators of the classics; Stjernstolpe and Sköldebrand, translators and original writers; Wallerius, a song-writer, the Tom Moore of his day, who was in much request at dinner and other parties for his fine voice and singing of his own songs; Choræus, Kullberg, and Lindgren, poets of a grave caste; a second Kullberg, who wrote afterpieces for the theatres; Granberg, Altén, Nordfors, Becker, and Wallmark, names of merit; and Ehrensvärd and Höjer, men of profound philosophical merits. Ehrensvärd was an admiral, and wrote on esthetics in a deep and
original manner, on what he called the free arts—architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry—because they are not based on our necessities, but spring out of the love and desire of beauty. Höjer followed up Ehrensvärd's views by establishing a Literary Gazette, to diffuse ideas on art and true beauty in literature; but he was prohibited from proceeding by the king, who declared that he would only have one literary journal in Sweden, and put it into the hand of Wallmark.
THE NEW SCHOOL, COMMENCING IN 1809.
Whilst in England, Germany, and Denmark the new literature was progressing rapidly; whilst in Germany, philosophy, through Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, had acquired a profounder field of labour, more extended views of science and art, and the latter, through the works of Winkelmann, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller, became more correctly understood; and the Schlegels, Tieck, and Novalis, made the public familiar with the beauties of art in the middle ages in other towns and other countries,—the Swedish academy still contended stoutly against the new spirit of the age. Though Oelenschlager, following Evald, and stimulated by Steffens, was producing new creations of beauty in Denmark from its ancient myths; though the spirit-destroying doctrines of the French Encyclopaedists had failed of its object, religion had received a new impulse, natural philosophy taken a healthier tone, history was liberated from the chains of rhetoric, and everywhere men were crying out for fact, reality, practical virtue, and freedom, the academy stood fast, resisting all innovation. Fortunately a political revolution gave freedom of the press, and effected the necessary revolution in mind. "The Friends of Literature," an association formed in Upsala some years before, including some of the leading critics of Sweden, in 1807, resolved itself into a new league called the Aurora League, and the first men of the movement flocked into it. In 1809, on the establishment of the freedom of the press, the effect of this association was seen. A new journal, The Polypheme, edited by Askelöf, was issued, which made determined war on the old school. In 1810 also appeared the Lyceum, and in the same year Phosphorus, the organ of the Aurora League, with Återbom at its head. This journal became famous, and the disciples of the now triumphant new school eventually settled into the three sects of Phosphorists, a Romantic school, the Gothic school, and the Miscellaneous school, but all more or less of the romantic character. Two writers are considered to constitute a class of themselves: Phosphorists, yet having traces of the past school about them, amidst all their beauty and freedom, and not entirely classable with the sects which afterwards arose. These were Franzén and Wallin.
Franz Michael Franzén was born at Uleaborg in Finland, in 1772, and was educated at Abo. He travelled into most European countries, England included, and rose through different preferments from librarian to the university of Abo to the bishopric of Hernösand, where he died in 1847. Franzén resembles Wordsworth in the simplicity of his subjects, drawn from lowly life and open nature. There is in him the same wise and almost child-like nature. The Swedes have noticed the resemblance. It is the idyllic and lyric in which he is most at home. He wrote several larger works, Emile, or an Evening in Layland, new and striking; Columbus, an unfinished epic; Gustavus Adolphus in Germany, an epic fragment in twenty cantos; Seante Sture, a romance in the school of Walter Scott; Julia de St Julian, a poetic story; The Murder on Elgarös, a drama, etc. But it is not on these, but on his small poems that rests his fame.
Wallin, the archbishop of Sweden, was born in 1779, and
Scandina-
vian litera-
ture.
died in 1839. He is the greatest religious poet of his country. He wrote much miscellaneous lyrical poetry; but they are his hymns, of which seventy-six are included in the new Swedish Psalm-book, which have given him his unparalleled reputation as a sacred poet. He is styled the "David's Harp of the North," and truly was an archbishop in song as well as in station. His hymns are more truly grand anthems and religious poems. The same characteristics marked his preaching and his speeches. His sermons, like his psalms, are said to have no parallel in the Swedish language.
Atterbom, Hammarsköld, and Palmblad were the chiefs of this sect, but Atterbom was its head and founder. In Polypheme, in Phosphorus, and other publications, he led the attack on the academy and the old French school. But in aiming at being romantic, the new school became too romantic; they became fantastic. In Atterbom's "Island of Blessedness," and his "Flowers," we are carried back to the allegories of Fletcher's "Purple Island" and Darwin's "Loves of the Plants." His productions are warm and sunny, but want substance and reality. In the former mentioned, and in "The Blue Bird," there are splendid passages, but as wholes they are heavy. Atterbom was born in 1790. In later life he became reconciled to the academy, and grew conservative through his connection with court. The results of his university teaching are several works on history, A System of Philosophy; The Swedish Seers and Poets, etc.; amongst the latter standing pre-eminent Swedenborg and Ehrensvärd. This work, in fact, contains some of the best accounts we have of Swedish writers. His poems were published in two volumes in 1836.
Hammarsköld was born in 1785, and died in 1827. Besides being one of the ablest antagonists of the academicians, he was one of the ablest critics and historians of Sweden. His poems and tales are of little value, but his histories of Swedish literature, of the plastic arts, and philosophy, have given him great and just fame.
Palmblad besides being a very caustic critic, was the author of the first Swedish novel Amala, an Eastern story, of Castle Stjernborg, Åreshutan, and The Island in the Lake of Dall. He translated portions of Homer, Æschylus, and Sophocles.
Of this same school is Anders Fryxell, a poet, and author of an admirable History of Sweden, under the name of Narratives out of the History of Sweden. Adolf Iwar Arvidsson is a distinguished poet, and editor of Korly Swedish Ballads, in 2 vols. Besides these are many names—Elgström, Ingelgren, Sondén, Zeipel, Björjeson, Rydquist, editor of Heimdall, and translator of Moore's Irish Melodies. Hedborn, Graftström, and the Countess d'Albedyhl, all more or less distinguished in poetry and literature. Fru Kerstin Nyberg is a popular poetess, the L. E. L. of Sweden. Her poems have appeared under the nom de plume of Euphrosyne.
Tegnér and Geijer, the two greatest names of Swedish literature, stand at the head of a section of the literary world so-called, because they adopted a more general taste than the phosphorists, whom they deemed too one-sided, and condemnatory of much in the old school which had merit. They approved of the reform, but denounced the bitter spirit in which it was prosecuted. Instead of adopting what was merely national, they extended their range of sympathy over the whole Gothic race. Hence their name.
Geijer was the son of an iron-founder in Wermland. Born in 1783, he studied in Upsala, visited England in 1809, and
became professor of history in Upsala in 1817. He originated the Gothic school in the Iduna, and perceiving that Atterbom and the Romanticists were fast merging into German idealism, he took fresh and more solid ground. He produced some of the most admirable poems in the language on this principle, "The Last Scald," "The Viking," and "The Last Champion," in the style and spirit of the ancient Visor. He is known equally as a poet, a musician, and a historian. Like Bellman, he has written the music to many of his small poems, and some of them expressly for Jenny Lind. But his Chronicles of Sweden, Stora Rikes Hufvud, are the grand monument of his fame. Sweden has many poets, but only one Geijer. He was writing also a Lesser History of Sweden at the time of his death, 1847. His great work, too, remains a Titanic fragment.
Elías Tegnér, the greatest poet of Sweden, was, like Geijer, a native of Wermland. His principal poems are, "Prestvingning, or Consecration to the Priesthood;" "Nattvardsbarnen;" "The Young Communicants," well translated by Longfellow, and "Frithiofs Saga," found on the old saga of Frithiof and Ingeborg, the nearest approach to an epic poem which Sweden has yet achieved. Though not a regular epic, for it is rather a bundle of lyrical poems woven into one epic cycle, it is yet a complete and great poem. It abounds with innovations, not only every book bring in a different metre, but the dramatic dialogue being introduced in the midst of the narrative. The success with which the poet has achieved these innovations prove that there is no reason in nature why poets, any more than architects, should slavishly adhere to Grecian models. We have had five or six translations of "Frithiof," none of which give any conception of the exquisite beauty and splendour of the original. His minor poems are full of beauty, life, and variety. His "Gotha Lion" is the national song, and is set to fine music.
The other chief poets of the Gothic school are Ling, Afzelius, Nicander, Von Beskow, and Lindblad, and they show the system run to ripe seed.
H. P. Ling, who died in 1839, was an eccentric man, who wrote two tedious epics, "The Asur" and "Tirfing," the former of which Lönnström compliments as "the most long-winded poem in the language." His dramas, nine in number, are equally heavy, but his lyrics are first-rate. The choruses in his dullest dramas are masterpieces. Ling, however, is more famous as a gymnast than as a poet. He introduced the ancient classical system of gymnastics as a means of restoring the northern race to its ancient vigour, and raised it to an effective branch of medical manipulation.
Afzelius, a lyric poet of the same school, was led into the same extravagances by the overstrained admiration of the old Northern. In his own proper lyric element, Afzelius is admirable, like Ling. His most popular original poems are "The Neck's Polska," "The Neck" being a popular water-spirit of the North; and "Tomtarne," the Hobgoblins. But Afzelius has still higher claims on his country's regard. With Rask, he translated Sæmund's Edda into Swedish; with Geijer, he collected the Ancient Folk-Visor, in 3 vols.; and afterwards himself published, under the title of Svenska Folkets Sagohufvud, a history of Sweden drawn from the traditions of the people.
Karl August Nicander, who died in 1839, was rather an Italian than a Gothic poet. Like many Scandinavians, he had a passion for Italy, and many of his poems are quickened and coloured by the South. Yet he wrote the Rune-Sword, a tragedy, and translated Othello and Schiller's Maid of Orleans. In fact, in Nicander there is more grace and colour than substance.
Bernhard von Beskow, besides being the author of various original poems, has produced a series of dramas, which are the nearest approach to regular acting dramas which Swe-
Scandinavian literature. The chief of these are the tragedies of Erik XIV., Hildegarde, Torkel Knutson, and King Birger and his Race. His opera, The Troubadour, was set to music by the present king of Sweden.
Assar Lindblad, a clergyman of Scania, is a disciple of Tegner; his poems display much genius.
POETS BELONGING GENERALLY TO THE NEW SCHOOL.
There are a number of poets belonging to the new school, yet who differ as much from each other as they do from Phosolorists and Goths, so that they cannot be very regularly classed. Prominent amongst these are Stagnelius, Almqvist, and Runeberg, with others of more or less mark. The greatest of these poets is perhaps Stagnelius, though Runeberg treads closely in his steps.
Erik Johan Stagnelius is a genuine modern gnostic. His poetry is as fully and as positively the enunciation of gnosticism as ever were the preachings of the old Syrian and Egyptian speculative Christians. Suffering himself in a sickly and torturing body, and with a soul longing intensely for liberation, he held, with the gnostic sect, the belief, inherited from Plato and Pythagoras, that souls are here cast into prison for their past sins, and that Christ is the liberator from this captivity. All his poems, the "Cydippe," the "Narcissus," the "Bacchantes," "Proserpina," and "Svedger," are based on this faith, and are eloquent with the passion of a deep and divine sorrow. They are amongst the most spiritual poems ever written, and abound with word-paintings, that remind us of the old Byzantine pictures, with their devotional figures and golden back-grounds. Stagnelius was born in 1793, and died in 1828. Besides the works mentioned, he published Women of the North; Wladimir, a fine heroic poem in hexameters; and the Martyrs, i.e., Vivia Perpetua and her Companions, a masterly production; but they are his "Lilies of Sharon," which distinguish him from all other Swedish poets, and place him amongst the greatest intellectual poets of any country.
J. C. L. Almqvist is one of the most extraordinary characters as well as writers of Sweden. His productions are most voluminous, and on almost every subject. Professing to teach the practical duties of life, he has contrived to fly off into the strangest speculations and vagaries conceivable. Poetry, romance, philosophy, the drama, elementary treatises, and startling projects, have poured from his pen with a wonderful abundance. That he possesses real genius is undoubted, but it appears a genius allied to madness, if not to something worse. In fact, we suspect Almqvist to be a character of no ordinary kind, and his more recent proceedings put this even beyond suspicion. He has written legends of New Holland, and a life of Hector; on the condition of the poor in Sweden; on the honour of labour; and in advocacy of education. He is the champion of progress and of improvement of the social condition. He has written Writings for the People, The Gospel of Health, The Prop of Man, religious treatises; and along with these, others sapping the foundations of all morals, especially female ones. In his notorious novel, Det går an, a phrase equivalent to Cu Ira, he has advocated the loosest notions regarding marriage. He has written the most extravagant stories, as Skullnora Mill, and Ramido Marinesco, the infamous son of the infamous Don Juan; and the wildest fictions in his Tornrosens Book mingled masses of extravagance and beauty, or Schems-el-Nikar, a Nubian epic; Isodorus of Tadmor; the Wolf's Daughter, &c. At one time he proposed, like Southey, a Pantisocracy, called the "New Man-home Confederacy," and set the example by going off into the primeval forests of Wermland, living in a turf-cabin, clothing himself in home-spun, and eating porridge with a wooden spoon. At length, in 1851, having robbed an acquaintance of a large amount, he poisoned
him, and got off to the Great Exhibition of London, and Scandinavians to America, to the horror and indignation of all Scandinavian literature.
The distinguished modern poets of Sweden are Vitalis, Livijn, Dahlgren, and Fahlerantz. Livijn is also a distinguished novelist, and Fahlerantz a celebrated wit, though the bishop of Westerås. There are also Wadman, Ingelman, Wieselgren, Böttiger, and others. But we can only devote a more particular notice to Johan Ludvig Runeberg, a Finn by birth, but who writes in Swedish, his subjects being, however, Finnish; and they bring us at once into a perfectly new field of life. Finland has its own vein of poetry, though it cannot be said to have a national literature. It has for ages existed under foreign masters; there could, therefore, be no national literature, yet it has a native poetry. Amid its solitary forests, its wide, dark moorlands, its lonely lakes, it was impossible that poetry should not visit the people under their invasions and sufferings from both climate and men. Finland has its own mythology, totally different from that of Scandinavia. There we have no longer Odin, Thor, Balder, Braga, and the rest; but Ukko, the mightiest of heaven's powers, thunders from the purple cloud; Ahti is the god of the sea, Wellamo his goddess; Kalma, the monarch of death; and Wäinämöinen, the god of song, sings through the woods and by the streams the deeds of their gods and heroes; of Kullervo, the son of Kaleva, the great ancestor of all Finnish heroes. The Finns have their songs of the maidens, of the herdsmen, of their social festivities, songs of the cradle, and of the stern and stirring passages of life. They have always had their popular poets, and sing in a metre peculiar to the country, one form of which has been borrowed by Longfellow in his song of Hiawatha.
Runeberg is a genuine Finnish poet; he has thrown into his poetry all the wild and melancholy character of his country, and has mingled with it a deep feeling of its sufferings and its wrongs. He indulges in no morbid feelings of his own, but he is baptized with the spirit of his country and countrymen by the reflection, over those brute but overwhelming forces of the demi-savage Muscovite, which have torn his native land as a prey from its old and cherished associations, and made it an appanage of a vast, dominant, but unamalgamated empire. These feelings break forth in the Stories of Ensign Stål. No Northern poet has embodied in his compositions more poetry in the highest sense, —the genuine expression of the human heart in all its joys, troubles, and passions.
Amongst the remaining poets, Wieselgren has also written a History of Swedish Literature, to the close of the sixteenth century. Besides those mentioned, there are Ruda; Olof Fryxell, brother of the historian; Hedborn; Adlersparre; Braun; Lindeblad; Ridderstad; Satherberg; Blanché, a vaudeville writer; Strandberg, the poet of freedom; Malmström; Nybom; and Bergman; Gosselman, a naval officer and traveller; Unge, also officer and traveller, a humorous poet; Sturzenbecher, a brilliant writer of the Heinö school; Carlen, the husband of the novelist; Nervander, translator of poetry of King Ludvig of Bavaria; Wenström, Goransson, and numbers of rising men; Hagbart, the excellent translator of Shakespeare, in twelve volumes, which he has presented to the Shakespeare Society in England.
THE ROMANCE AND NOVEL WRITERS OF SWEDEN.
Whilst the literature of Sweden is almost wholly modern, its romance and novel literature is especially so. Mörk, about the middle of the eighteenth century, was the first to cultivate prose fiction. His models were Fenelon, Lowenstein, and Barclay; his productions were heavy, bombastic, diffuse, and monotonous. Their titles indicate their character, as The Romance of Adalrik and Göthilda,