Baroque

Toward the end of the sixteenth century, almost all the surviving ancient authors had been introduced in Scandinavia, and poets mastered the classical forms. A certain mannerism made itself felt with a growing interest in various kinds of formal games, such as chronosticha, acrosticha, and telesticha. For example, with great virtuosity the Norwegian Halvardus Gunarius (ca. 1550-1608) celebrated the crowning of the Danish King Christian IV in Oslo with a hexameter poem in which every single word begins with a ‘‘C’’ (printed in the collection Akrostichis, 1606). The Latin parodia, a form combining extremely close imitation with new content, appeared in such works as the parodies of Horace’s Odes (1615) by the Danish Bertil Knudsen Aquilonius (1588-1650). Epigrams, preferably of the type that contains a pointed ending, became trendy, and anagrams, mostly built on personal names, flourished. An especially happy one was that of the Swedish king “GVSTAWS” to ‘‘AVGVSTVS,’’ an expression of the widespread appeal of translatio imperii (power transfer): the power of imperial Rome had gradually been transferred toward the north and was now finding its natural home in Stockholm (Tengstrom 1973: 55).

Both Denmark and Sweden involved themselves in the Thirty Years’ War - with catastrophic results for Denmark, while it inaugurated Sweden’s ascent as a great power. Foreign poets composed huge epics to celebrate King Gustav II Adolph’s military prowess (Helander 2003). Under this king and his daughter Christina, with the nobleman Axel Oxenstierna as their chancellor, the Stockholm court became a magnet for artists and other intellectuals from all over Europe: Johann Comenius, Isaac Vossius, Rene Descartes, Nicolaus Heinsius, and Hugo Grotius all had close contact with the Swedish court, and in 1667 Samuel von Pufendorf was appointed professor at the new university of Lund. There he composed his main work, De iure naturae etgentium (On the laws of nature and the peoples, 1672). Christina was praised by local and foreign poets as the quintessence of both learning and the more usual female virtues, and identified with Minerva and Diana (Kajanto 1993).

Sweden also had a great many native authors in this period. Johannes Messenius (1579-1636) composed a description of the five oldest towns of the nation, Sveopentaprotopolis (1611), and also transmitted his learning to a broader public in a series of vernacular dramas on the nation’s history (1611-14). Because of Catholic sympathies he spent his last 20 years in prison, but nevertheless succeeded in writing a huge description of Sweden, Scondia illustrata, published in 1705. The adventurous Lars Wivallius (1605-69) is generally acclaimed as the first Swedish lyricist, and his Latin poetry is of the same high standard. Olof Verelius (1618-82) left a manuscript containing Sweden’s first novel (closely following a Spanish-French model), Peregri-natio cosmopolitana (A journey to the city of the world, published 1730). The first pages, in which the first-person narrator tells of the gentle education he received as a child, has been seen as an influence from Comenius. The protagonist visits a symbolic city in which hypocrisy reigns supreme and also has the choice between the steep path of virtue and the broad road of vices. He soon ends in hell, but manages to escape (Bergh and von Platen 1994). The most famous Swedish implementation of the theme of the crossroads, however, is the great didactic poem Hercules by Georg Stiernhielm (1598-1672), in Swedish hexameters.

Whereas in the Danish empire there was still only one university, that of Copenhagen, the Swedes opened universities in the areas under their power, such as in jAbo/ Turku, Finland, in 1640, and in Lund, in the recently conquered Scania, in 1668.

In Iceland the vernacular still coexisted with Latin in a specially balanced way. Most popular were the vernacular narrative poems rtmur, of which more than a thousand survive in written form. The bishop Brynjolfur Sveinsson (1605-75), although Lutheran, composed a Latin hymn in various meters to the virgin Mary (Petursson 1995: 117), while Hallgrimur Petursson (1614-74) composed his Fifty Passion Hymns in Icelandic (Magmisson 1989). The learned Thorsteinn Bjornsson (1612-75) worked to copy all sources for Icelandic history in a single collection, and when as an old man he lost his eyesight, he composed Latin poetry (Springborg 1991).

In the rest of Scandinavia the vernaculars only now began to establish themselves as a serious written medium. Experiments were made with composing Latin literary forms, such as panegyrics, satires, didactic poetry, or biblical paraphrases, in the vernaculars. Claus Christoffersen Lyschander (1558-1623), Anders Arrebo (1587-1637), and Thomas Kingo (1634-1703) in Denmark, Petter Dass (1647-1707) in Norway, and Georg Stiernhielm in Sweden composed their most important works in their own languages but retained the ancient frames of reference dominated by Roman mythology. For instance, Arrebo’s main work is a Hexaemeron (A poem of the six days), and when Kingo started out composing love-lyrics in pastoral form praising the charming Chrysillis, he followed a well-known ancient pattern established by Vergil and imitated by innumerable others; Kingo, however, did it in Danish. Dass, in contrast, distanced himself more from ancient models. He composed a vernacular praise poem, The Trumpet of Nordland, but used the form to celebrate not a city, but everyday life in the countryside. The title of Stiernhielm’s collected poems, Musae Suethizantes (1668), is significant, not least its Swedish subtitle: ‘‘That is, the goddesses of song now at last learning how to sing and play in Swedish.’’

The question of metrics became important. Classical Latin poetry is based on syllabic quantities, while the rhythm in Nordic verse depends on stress. Aquilonius argued that composers should follow the quantitative system even when they composed in Danish, but his opponents won the day, and both in Sweden and Denmark poets worked to establish rules for a vernacular poetics, able to compete with the classics. Peder Jensen Roskilde (1571-1641) wrote a Prosodia Danica lingua (Prosody of the Danish language, 1629) and published a translation of Vergil’s Bucolica in Danish meters in 1639. Andreas Arvidi (ca. 1620-73) published his Manuductio ad poesin Suecanam (A guide to Swedish poetry, 1651).

The controversy over origins developed into a question of languages. Throughout the Middle Ages Latin had undisputedly been the sacred language, but when it was gradually realized that the Bible had originally been composed in Hebrew and Greek, Latin lost some of its authority, and which language was the original one gradually became an important question. This international discussion had its special Scandinavian variants. In De Danicae linguae cum Graeca mistione (About the fusion of the Danish language with the Greek, 1641) Aquilonius argued that Greek was derived from Danish, referring to the fact that in Homer the Greeks are called Danaoi; besides, the Greek language is full of Danish words, of which he listed a multitude of examples. Georg Stiernhielm argued that the European languages, including Greek, Latin, Armenian, and Persian, all go back to Japhet’s language, Scythian, which is the same as Gothic or Swedish. Stiernhielm also provided an edition of Wulfila’s Bible, the only important witness to the true Gothic language, which had been brought to Uppsala as booty from Prague. Another Swede, Andreas Kempe (1622-89), advanced an especially charming version: in Paradise, God spoke Swedish to Adam and Adam answered in Danish, but the serpent spoke French to Eve! Gothicism reached its peak with Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702), who in his Atlantica (1675) maintained that Sweden is not only the home of Japhet’s/Atlas’ descendants, but also the place that Plato called Atlantis. Petrus Bang introduced the Finns into the genealogies, suggesting that they might be descendants of Japhet’s oldest son Gomer (1675), whereas Daniel Juslenius in his history offAbo/Turku (1700) argued that this town had been founded by Magog in person, and that the Finnish language went right back to the tower of Babel (Borst 1957-63: 1335-40; Kajanto 1995: 181-3).

Much energy was invested in historiography. The monarchs engaged historians to write their national histories, and in Denmark the final result was two monumental Latin descriptions, both inspired by Tacitus: Isaac Pontanus’ knotty production, full of quotations and discussions of sources (1631), and Johannes Meursius’ eloquent work (1630-8) (Skovgaard-Petersen 2002). The Icelander Thormod Torfaeus (1636-1719), who lived most of his life in Bergen, composed a huge Historia rerum Norvegicarum (History of Norway, 1711). It was gradually realized that Icelandic manuscripts were a treasure trove of information about early Nordic history and myth, and again there was a competition between Sweden and Denmark to get hold of the valuable books and of Icelanders able to read them. In Denmark Thomas Bartholin (1659-90) and Arni Magnusson (1663-1730) cooperated over Antiqui-tates Danicae (Danish antiquity, 1689), which all over Europe became the standard handbook of Nordic mythology.

In architecture noblemen and monarchs excelled in having fabulous castles built, decorated by the best painters and sculptors of northern Europe. In Sweden the architects Nicodemus Tessin, father and son (1615-81 and 1654-1728), were preeminent. Both contributed to the royal palace Drottningholm, just outside

Stockholm (1662 onward), inspired by classical monuments and decorated with symbolic figures from antiquity. Their style still dominates the center of Stockholm, where they erected several important buildings.