Renaissance

With the Renaissance a new dialogue with the ancient tradition began. The movement reached Scandinavia early in the sixteenth century, but was soon overtaken by the Lutheran Reformation, itself a child of the Renaissance with its return to the original Bible. It remained typical of Renaissance influence in Scandinavia that the Reformation was transmitted via Wittenberg.

The Reformation was first embraced by Sweden, where King Gustav Vasa broke the ties to the pope in 1527. In Denmark the movement began in the church, and during the 1520s and 1530s a lively and sometimes violent dispute developed, almost entirely in the vernacular. Finally in 1536 King Christian III established Protestantism in all his lands. In Norway the change met little reaction, but the Icelanders were by no means ready to leave the Catholic Church, and the opposition was silenced only when bishop Jdn Arason was beheaded in 1550.

The main reformers, Olaus Petri (1493-1552) in Sweden, Hans Tausen (1494-1561) in Denmark, and Michael Agricola (1509-57) in Finland, all studied in Wittenberg, and so did their successors. There they were taught by Luther’s colleague and friend Melanchthon, mentioned again and again in Scandinavian literature of the period. One of Europe’s most competent Hellenists, he was intent on establishing a workable synthesis of Christian and pagan culture. In the efforts to have the Bible translated into the vernaculars, the scholars, of course, followed Luther’s German translation, but also the Hebrew and Greek originals. The Bible appeared in Swedish in 1541, Finnish (only the New Testament) in 1548, Danish in 1550, and Icelandic in 1584, whereas the populations of Norway and the Faroe Islands were supposed to read the Danish Bible, a fact that for centuries hindered the development of their respective vernaculars as written languages. The universities had not functioned during the upheavals, but when they were reopened they included chairs of Hebrew and Greek.

Lutheran reformers insisted on service being read in the vernaculars. Nevertheless, the second half of the sixteenth century brought a tremendous revival of classical Latin. In poetry all the classical genres - epic and elegy, didactic poetry, pastoral, satire, iambics, and lyrics - were used, as well as typical neo-Latin forms such as propemptica (valedictory poems), hodoeporica (poems describing a journey), panegyrics, and praises of cities. Paraphrasing the Bible, an activity well-established in medieval times, achieved new importance, with the psalms in particular being recomposed again and again. It was somehow disquieting that God seemed to have given to pagan authors a finer sense of stylistics than was to be found in the Bible; at the same time, to unite biblical content with classical form was at the heart of Melanchthonian ideology.

A recurrent motif was that of inviting the muses. Already in antiquity these goddesses had moved from Greece to Rome, and while Italians still considered them at home in their country, poets north of the Alps had been inviting them northwards from around 1500. Now young Scandinavians offered them a refuge from war-ridden Central Europe, and their arrival symbolized poetry in classical meters. Among the first were the Danes Johannes Georgius Sadolinus (1528-1600) and Johannes Franciscus (1532-84) as well as the Swede Laurentius Petri Gothus (1529-79). Sadolinus (1552), Franciscus (1554), and Gothus (1561) all issued collections of elegies, with Ovid’s letters from his exile as the great model. Gothus also composed an historical poem over an incident in Herodotus, Strategema Gothici exercitus (A stratagem of the Gothic army, 1559) with allusions to the poet’s own times: the Scythians are identified with the Swedes and the tyrant Darius with the Danish King Christian II (Aili 1995: 137).

In the following decades conditions for poetry were more favorable in Denmark, where King Frederik II supported art and literature, than under the more turbulent years of Gustav Vasa’s reign in Sweden. Especially Sadolinus developed into an interesting poet who composed on many different topics and in a variety of meters, inspired also by poets who were not yet much read in Scandinavia, such as Catullus and Martial (Jensen 2004: 153-7). In Norway, a small group of scholar-poets established a humanist milieu around the Latin school in Oslo (Ekrem 1995: 70-3).

In some cases poets identified closely with classical models. This is especially evident in the case of Erasmus Laetus (1526-82) and the astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). Laetus became the Danish Vergil by composing bucolics, a didactic poem on shipping, and two national epics, as well as quite a few other poems, most of them in hexameters. Tycho Brahe, on the other hand, chose Ovidian forms. Already in his first publication, De nova stella (On the new star, 1573), he included an elegy in which he relates how he met the muse Urania, who entrusted him with the mission of elevating the study of astronomy to the level it had had in antiquity. Later in life he composed other elegant imitations of Ovid, for example a heroid (letter from an abandoned heroine) composed in the name of his sister Sophie. And when toward the end of his life he lost royal support and left Denmark in search of new patrons, he expressed his frustration in an elegiac letter addressed to the personified Dania, taking on the role of the exiled Roman poet (Zeeberg 1994).

One of the common features underlying this exuberant outpouring of Latin poetry was the wish to demonstrate that Scandinavians were as fully civilized as any people in

Europe. This same impulse lay behind the monumental descriptions of the Scandinavian peoples by the Swedish brothers Magnus, who had emigrated to Italy to escape Protestant persecution. Johannes Magnus (1488-1544) composed Historia de omnibus Gothorum Sueonumque regibus (A History of all the Gothic and Swedish kings, printed 1554), and Olaus Magnus (1490-1557) wrote Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (A history of the Nordic peoples, 1555), an ethnographic description of Scandinavian culture. Polemic against erroneous ideas about his nation dominated the works of Arngrimur J(Snsson (1568-1648), Brevis commentarius de Islandia (A brief note on Iceland, 1593) and Crymogaea sive res Islandicae (Crymo-gaea; i. e., Iceland, 1609), describing Icelandic conditions and history in elegant modern form (Benediktsson 1991; Petursson 1995: 104-6).

The nationalist drive took a special turn in the competition over history that developed between Sweden and Denmark. Already in 1434 when the Swedish bishop Nicolaus Ragvaldi had represented the Scandinavian union at the international church assembly in Basel, he had demanded special honors with a reference to Jordanes’ Getica (ad 551). Here the island of Scandza is described as the home of the Getic/Gothic people. The island was identified with the Danish province of Scania, and the fact that the component ‘‘Goth-’’ exists in the names of various Swedish landscapes pointed in the same direction. Now Johannes Magnus used the same argumentation to stress the venerable old age of the Swedish nation. According to him, Noah/Janus had lived in Scythia. He divided the world between his sons, of whom Japhet/Atlas received Europe. His son Magog had three sons: Suenno, ancestor of the Swedes, Gothar, progenitor of the Goths, and Ubbo, founder of Uppsala. The Danes were also Goths, but descendants of Swedish criminals who over the years had been sent southwards in exile. Magnus’ work provoked an official Danish answer, Refutatio calumniarum cuiusdam Ioannis Magni (Refutation of a certain Johannes Magnus’ slanders, 1561), composed by Johannes Svaning, and two years later an anonymous Swedish reply, De iniusto bello a Danorum rege contra Suecos gesto (About the unjust war of the Danish king against the Swedes). A decade later both of Erasmus Lotus’ two epics propagated the Danish views, and in 1612 the Swedish historian Johannes Messenius (1579-1636) published a new answer, Retor-sio imposturarum (Rejection of the deceits) (Borst 1957-63: 1100-1; Skovgaard-Petersen 1991, 1993; Hillebrecht 1997; Skovgaard-Petersen 2002: 91-124). A similar conflict was fought over the history of the runes.

All power and prestige were concentrated in Latin literature. But an interest began in recording the vernacular ballad tradition common to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and the Faroes. These poems are mostly concerned with Nordic themes, but the story of Paris and Helen also occurs. In 1591 the Danish Anders S0rensen Vedel published the world’s first printed ballad collection. In Finland a collection of pious Latin songs, Piae cantiones, was published by Theodoricus Petri in 1582. In spite of its title, the collection also contains a great many secular songs and is related to medieval students’ poetry as known in other parts of Europe. It may be considered another recording of an oral tradition.

While the handling of ancient traditions in literature extended rather broadly through the various social classes, their place in art and architecture was mostly restricted to monarchs and nobility. As a result of the Reformation, decorations left the church walls, but princes and noblemen invited foreign artists, and elegant castles were constructed and decorated, often with themes from ancient myth or history. Medieval castles in Bergen and Oslo were modernized in Renaissance style. When Oslo was destroyed by fire in 1624, King Christian IV had the city moved and rebuilt, modestly changing its name to Christiania, a name it retained until 1925. Among the many splendid works of art commissioned by him are some painted ceilings (by Gerrit Honthorst) in his Elsinore palace, Kronborg, showing scenes from Heliodorus’ Aethiopica (1635). Court culture excelled in ancient motifs with regular use of classical figures such as personified virtues, when, for instance, processions were organized through the streets to celebrate birthdays, coronations, or funerals.