Literature
In 2005, the whole world will be focusing on Danish literature. It is a triple anniversary: the bicentenary of Hans Christian Andersen‘s birth, the 150th anniversary of Søren Kierkegaard‘s death, and the 120th anniversary of the birth of Karen Blixen, whowrote under the name of Isak Dinesen.
With these three names, Denmark has made a crucial contribution to world literature. Hans Christian Andersen is in a class of his own, as his tales are known and used, dramatised and filmed, set to music and illustrated all over the world.
But from the beginning of Danish literature until today, Danish writers have created works and oeuvres that have attracted international attention.
Four of the principal Danish authors of the 18th and 19th centuries. From the left: Ludvig Holberg, Adam Oehlenschlager, Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard. Illustrations: Frederiksborgmuseet and H.C. Andersens Hus.
Saxo in the 13th Century
A start was made around 1200 AD when the monk Saxo sat in his cell in Sorø Monastery, located according to tradition in the Monastery Gate which is still preserved and inhabited. There he wrote his mammoth work, The History of the Danes Books I-X (Eng. 1996), originally composed in brilliant Latin.
It is a topical, politically inspired history, but with its extensive legendary material about the times of the first kings it is also a fairytale book, full of exciting stories which have contributed towards shaping and mythologising Danish self-understanding from the Renaissance, when the book was first printed in Paris in 1514, until the end of the 19th century. Saxo is for instance the source of the legend of Hamlet, who became the protagonist of one of Shakespeare‘s most famous plays.
The Medieval Ballads
Denmark also has an exceptionally rich vernacular, orally transmitted medieval literature: the folk ballads. These are mainly narrative poems. How old they are is a matter of debate. Some believe they date back to the 13th century, others that the earliest are from the late 15th century. They include chivalric and fairytale ballads, but also boisterous comic songs. What is remarkable about Danish ballads is partly the genre‘s great homogeneity, partly that they were written down a couple of centuries before anything similar happened in other countries.
Already in the 16th century, during the Renaissance, ladies of the aristocracy sat in their manor houses writing down the ballads in their manuscript albums. On the basis of these, the historian Anders Sørensen Vedel published his Book of a Hundred Ballads in 1591, followed in 1657 by the noblewoman Mette Gøye‘s collection Tragica, and in 1695 by Peter Syv‘s new edition of the Book of a Hundred Ballads with 100 additional ballads.
In a European context, these early ballad editions are unique, and they became a fertile soil for a long linguistic and formal tradition within Danish poetry, stretching from the Romantics in 1800 until just before the First World War. Outside Denmark, Danish ballads have been translated by, among others, the German literary critic Johann Gottfried von Herder in his famous collection Ballads from 1778-1779. Through Herder, the Danish ballad tradition inspired the famous song The Elf King from 1782 by the German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe.
Literature as a Separate Genre
A deliberate and intensive cultivation of literature as a separate art form did not begin until the Baroque period in the second half of the 17th century, when grammarians and prosodists established a regulated written and formal literary language, entirely in the spirit of a dawning and powerfulabsolutism. The greatest figure of the Baroque was the hymn writer Thomas Kingo (1634-1703), still known and loved in the Danish church singing tradition. However, Kingo also wrote a number of secular poems and florid occasional verse.
The Father of Danish Literature
Traditionally, it is the comedy writer, historian and moral philosopher Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754), who is regarded as the father of Danish literature. The Danish drama tradition has its origin, and perhaps its only lasting peak, in the 25 comedies he created in a furious ecstasy of inspiration for the Lille Grønnegade Theatre (1722-1728) at a time when Danish stage performances were entirely new and unheard of. Holberg was inspired partly by the French comedy writer Moliere, partly by the boisterous comedies of the Roman playwright Plautus, but above all by the Italian Commedia dell‘Arte, the fair and street theatre he had seen in Rome. The ideas of the Enlightenment, which Holberg propagated with much common sense in his historical and moral-philosophical works, hardly affected the comedies, which contain a robust humour and an outlook more akin to that of the Renaissance and Baroque.
Holberg‘s comedies also transcended the national boundaries. They formed part of the repertory in Russian and German theatres, and some of Goethe‘s early attempts at comedy were inspired by his knowledge of Holberg. Even the German Romantic writer Ludwig Tieck knew and read Holberg‘s comedies, and that in Danish. Holberg‘s Latin Utopian novel The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground (1741, Eng. 1960) attracted attention when published anonymously in Leipzig, far from the vigilance of Danish absolutism.
Romanticism
With the pre-Romantic Jens Baggesen (1764-1826) and the main figure ofearly Romanticism Adam Oehlenschlager (1779-1850), Danish literature again became known in Europe. Almost a third of Baggesen‘s oeuvre is written in German, and particularly his great verse epic Parthenais or the Alpine Journey (1802-1803) was recorded in European literature as one of the major works of the period, published in several languages though not in Danish until 1965.
Oehlenschlager, too, occasionally wrote in German, but his fame in Europe, and probably especially in Germany, was largely due to his establishing himself as a figure in the cultural circles of the time through his travels and correspondence. With his early Romantic poetry, he renewed the language of poetry, while his dramas gave an Old Norse touch to tragedy.
Hans Christian Andersen and the 19th Century
In fame and circulation, Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) far outstripped Oehlenschlager, although he had admired Oehlenschlager and throughout his life pledged himself to the myth of the artist which his predecessor had created in and with his epic fairytale play Aladdin or The Magic Lamp (1805). Already in the 1830s and 1840s, Andersen‘s novels and fairytales made their triumphant progress through many countries, starting with German and later English translations, and in 1859, the French biographical encyclopedia Vapereau described him as one of the most original poets of 19th century European literature. Like Oehlenschlager, Hans Christian Andersen worked actively and deliberately to establish himself as a writer and artist in the European artistic circles of the time.
Hans Christian Andersen is often classified as a writer for children. That is both true and untrue. His name is closely linked to children‘s literature, but what is special about him is that even the fairy-tales known and loved by children contain much which they cannot understand at all and which is primarily aimed at adult readers. That applies to his attitude to nature and society, his religious ideas, his view of love and art, his satirical description of human behaviour, his irony and often verbal humour. In addition, many of his tales and stories are not intended for children at all, just as he produced a large body of purely adult work: travel accounts, poems, plays, opera libretti, novels, articles and autobiographies.
Hans Christian Andersen marks the transition from Romanticism to early Realism and even to attitudes and idioms pointing towards far later precursors of 20th century Modernism.
Kierkegaard and Grundtvig
Hans Christian Andersen‘s contemporary, the poet-philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), also touched on problems and idioms pointing far ahead of his own time, by which, incidentally, he was regarded as a purely marginal phenomenon. During the 20th century, he came to be regarded as the founder of international Existentialism. His complex oeuvre, in which he hides behind a mask of pseudonyms and makes it the responsibility of the reader, ‘that single individual‘, to choose his own way among the possible ways of life presented, deals with philosophical and theological issues in a mostly literary and even fictional manner.
A figure with huge influence on Danish culture and society to this very day is the clergyman, poet, school and church reformer Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783-1872), whose folk high school ideas of popular and general education in examination-free schools have had a profound impact on Danish culture and politics.Being in many ways an indigenous and nationally-oriented phenomenon, he did not attract attention outside the Nordic countries in his own day . Not until the 20th century did sporadic manifestations of Grundtvig‘s influence appear in places as different as the Tokai University in Japan and certain African developing countries trying out folk education models.
The Modern Breakthrough
Literary criticism and the essay-form had not been particularly developed in the first half of the 19th century. However, with the critic and literary scholar Georg Brandes (1842-1927), who was topically and internationally oriented to a hitherto unseen degree in Denmark among other things he ‘discovered‘ the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and wrote about him in Danish and German. He took part in the Nordic and European debate, the journalistic form and spirit of debate of a new age came to the fore, as did the literary movement he named ‘the Modern Breakthrough‘, i.e. the years around 1870-1880. Brandes established the cultural radicalism which remains a prominent feature of Danish (and Norwegian) cultural debate.
The only poet of lasting international importance from this period was the novelist and poet J.P. Jacobsen (1847-1885), whose novel Niels Lyhne (1880, Eng. 1896) inspired German authors such as Thomas Mann as well as the English composer Frederick Delius in the opera Fennimore and Gerda (1908-1910). Jacobsen‘s poetry inspired the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the Austrian composer Arnold Schonberg.
The novelist and short-story writer Herman Bang (1857-1912), who developed a sophisticated literary impressionism, a theatrical idiom distantly related to Hans Christian Andersen‘s, was for a time a major name in Germany, where the Realist Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943) also attained a certain fame. Pontoppidan‘s socially critical novel The Country of the Dead (1912-1916) was filmed for German television in 1986.
In 1917, Pontoppidan had to share the Nobel Prize for literature with another Danish author, the apostate Naturalist and then Idealist Karl Gjellerup (1857-1919). In 1944, Johannes V . Jensen (1873-1950) also received the Nobel Prize, mainly for his great evolutionary epic The Long Journey (1908-1922, Eng. 1924). But his lasting influence on Danish literature lies in other areas: his linguistically and formally innovative poetry in the collection Poems (1906) and his suggestive-expressionist decadence in the historico-mythical novel The Fall of the King (1900-1901, Eng. 1933), which at the turn of the millennium was chosen by Danish newspapers as the best 20th century Danish novel.
Modernism
Portraits of four Danish authors who have been particularly influential in the 20th century. From the left: J.P. Jacobsen, Karen Blixen, Klaus Rifbjerg and Peter Høeg. Photos: Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Scanpix Nordfoto, Scanpix Nordfoto/ Jakob Boserup and Munksgaard/ Rosinante/Rigmor Mydtskov.
Karen Blixen (1885-1962) was mentioned by Ernest Hemingway as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, which he won and she did not. At the time of her Danish debut in 1935 with Seven Gothic Tales, published the previous year in the USA, Blixen was an alien figure in Danish literature, which in the 1930s was dominated by psychological and social realism. Nonetheless, she was able to create a unique position for herself by simultaneously reaching back into tradition and pointing forward towards the fantastic tale of both Modernism and the Post-Modernist literature of the last 10 to 20 years. Her seemingly old-fashioned aristocratic ways and fatalism conceal an extreme aestheticism of life and narrative, inspired by among others Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard.
The fantastic tale was developed further in the 1950s and 1960s by the poet and cultural philosopher Villy Sørensen (b.1929-2001), for instance in Strange Stories (1953, Eng. 1956). Along with Klaus Rifbjerg (b.1931), Ivan Malinovski (1926-1989) and Peter Seeberg (1925-1999) he is the main figure of Modernism. The Anglo-American influence, which was evident already in the 1920s in the novels and literary criticism of Tom Kristensen (1893-1974), for instance the novel Havoc (1930, Eng. 1968), inspired by James Joyce, now flourished in Rifbjerg‘s large and varied oeuvre. At the same time, he and Villy Sørensen became the leading figures in the reformulation of the cultural radicalism that had been passed on from Georg Brandes to the cultural criticism of the 1930s which was then restated as an alternative to the post-war welfare society. Of the above-mentioned authors especially Villy Sørensen, with his orientation towards German philosophy and culture, has found readers outside Denmark.
The Years Since 1970
Among other things, Modernism gave rise to fantasies based on a kind of formalist thinking as seen in the completely unique absurd-humoristic and at the same time existentialist stories of Svend Åge Madsen (b.1939), such as Suppose the World Exists (1971) and The Madness of Seven Ages (1994), and the minimalist prose of Peer Hultberg (b.1935). The poet Inger Christensen (b.1935) has moved from the formalist poetry of for instance the linguistic creation poem It (1969) towards a symbolist interpretation of art and life in the poetry cycle The Butterfly Valley (1991). Along with the inscrutable, Janus-faced Per Højholt (b. 1928), she has inspired major new names. Højholt, who writes both formalist and popular poetry, is known especially for his Gitte Monologues (1981 and 1985). In Danish poetry the inspiration of Christensen and Højholt is seen for instance in the work of Pia Tafdrup (b.1952) and Søren Ulrik Thomsen (b.1956), who represent Post-Modernism in the cross field between poetry-oriented selfreflection and sensuous intimacy. The poet Henrik Nordbrandt (b.1945) has gone his own way both geographically and formally. He has lived in Greece and Turkey for many years and was inspired by the light and mood of the eastern Mediterranean, but with over 20 collections of poems he has influenced aspects of Danish poetry of the 1990s as well.
Danish literature at the turn of the millennium
In 1987 a Danish education for authors was founded, with poet and critic Poul Borum as the head. A number of the school‘s students have made their mark as experimental poets and prose writers. With Solvej Balle as one of its representatives, the last decade has offered up phenomenological, often minimalist, prose fiction, which has severed the ties to the more traditional and social causal explanations. However, Jens Christian Grøndahl has seen new possibilities for psychological exploration in the realist tradition. In a series of novels he has described the identity problems of the modern human with a sure touch. Some of the older, established writers have written their main works in the 1990s and in the new millennium; this goes for Peer Hultberg, known for his particular brand of stream of consciousness, Vibeke Grønfeldt, who has had an impact with her original novels criticizing civilization, and system poet Klaus Høeck, who has placed himself as the master of the lyrical grand scale with his monumental suites of poetry. The travel books of cultural critic Carsten Jensen have breathed new life into the essay genre in the same period. Diversity in mode of expression, genre and subject matter are thus characteristic of the varied picture of Danish literature on its way to the new millennium. With psychological novels based on a thriller concept, such as The Snake in Sydney (1997, Eng. 2000) and The Fifth Sun Is Burning (2000), Michael Larsen (b. 1961) has been translated into many languages.
International Figures
Writers such as Henrik Stangerup (1937-1998), Ib Michael (b.1943) and Peter Høeg (b.1957) have attracted particular international attention. From Neo-Realism cultivated alongside Modernism in the 1960s and 1970s, Stangerup‘s novels gradually approached an internal, mythologising style which found expression in a culturally critical and existentialist trilogy starting with The Road to Lagoa Santa (1981, Eng.1984). Like Stangerup, Ib Michael is inspired by Latin American culture, and in his novels and short stories, such as the novel Prince (1997, Eng.1999), he has created magic realism on Danish soil. The international success of Peter Høeg‘s novels and stories is unprecedented since Karen Blixen. Høeg‘s novel Miss Smilla‘s Sense of Snow (1992, Eng. 1993) was filmed by the Danish director Bille August (b.1948) in 1997.
Danish children‘s literature has also evoked an international response in the 20th century. One of the major names in this genre is Cecil Bødker (b.1927), whose 14-volume series about the boy Silas (1967-2001, three of which have been translated into English 1978) reached a large international readership. Among the new authors, mention should also be made of Bjarne Reuter (b.1950), who has likewise created modern classics of children‘s literature, such as Zappa (1977) and Buster‘s World (1979, Eng. 1988), both filmed by Bille August. In his later works Reuter has stepped into the fantasy genre.
On reflection, it gives food for thought that the three literary names which today represent Denmark internationally Andersen, Blixen and Høeg have all cultivated the fatasy tale. In that connection, the French encyclopedia, which in 1859 praised Andersen‘s originality referred to ‘la reverie du Nord‘ (the Nordic daydreaming). It is a fact that the geographically rather flat Denmark has its proven literary strength in dreams and fantasy.
Johan de Mylius
Director of the Hans Christian Andersen Centre,
University of Southern Denmark,
dr.phil.
Further Information
The Danish Literature Information Centre
Christians Brygge 1
DK-1219 Copenhagen K
(+45) 3332 0725
www.litteraturnet.dk
danlit@danlit.dk
The Danish Writers‘ Association
Strandgade 6, st.
DK-1401 Copenhagen K
(+45) 3295 5100
www.danskforfatterforening.dk
danskforfatterforening@danskforfatterforening.dk
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