Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 121
V Nordic debate in the period of Scandinavianism
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national breakthrough in Norwegian letters. In much the same way as
Magnus Brostrup Landstad, Peter Christian Asbjømsen and Jørgen Moe
rescued from oblivion popular legends and ballads, or Ivar Aasen re-
stored Norwegian as a written language on the basis of the rural dialects,
Keyser, Unger and Munch vindicated Old Norse literature as a Nor-
wegian national heritage by their editing of texts and their theoretical
constructions. The nation’s great poets, such as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
and Henrik Ibsen, responded to the national appeal by creating a nation-
al drama based on the sagas and on popular legends.
In the same way as Keyser is a representative of the “national break-
through”, it seems to me that Sophus Bugge is an equally typical repre-
sentative of the “modem breakthrough”, which called into question a
series of time-honoured ideas.51 Industrialism was about to take the lead
over the old agrarian society, the means of communication were devel-
oped, and foreign trade gained in importance - and for a while poets
tumed their backs on older history52 and treated instead the problems of
the day in realistic novels and modem drama. This modemism shows up
in a reform of secondary education in Norway (1869), where the teach-
ing of science and English was reinforced - together with the introduc-
tion of Old Norse - all to the detriment of the study of Latin.
In the history of letters the “modern breakthrough” in Scandinavia is
usually associated with the name of one of its most eloquent Danish
spokesmen, Georg Brandes and his famous leetures on European litera-
ture in 1871. In the introduction to these leetures he succinctly defined
his subject as “the reaction which, in the first decades of the 19th cen-
tury, was directed against the literature of the 18th century, and the sur-
mounting of this reaction”.53 Translated into our perspective this means
51 In his history of Old Norse literature Gustav Neckel stressed that this was a reason for
the relative success of Bugge’s theory. It was welcomed because it “umstiirzlerisch, skep-
tisch gegen Hergebrachtes war, was der allgemeinen geistigen Einstellung der Zeit ihres
Auftretens (um 1880) entgegenkam. Die Geschichtschreibung der Zukunft wird Bugge
mit Ibsen und Kjelland und weiterhin mit Spencer und Comte zusammen nennen” (Neckel
1923: 40; cf. Buil 1960-63: 236).
52 Cf. Steen 1976: 13, where there is a table showing the decrease in national history as
subjects of Norwegian plays from about 1865.
53 “Den centrale Gjenstand for disse Foredrag er den Reaction, som det 19de Aarhundre-
de i sine første Aartier førte mod det 18des Litteratur og denne Reactions Overvindelse”
(Brandes 1872: 7-8).