When during the first decades of the nineteenth century, Romanticism came to dominance, it meant a total reversal of values. The respect for originality led to an admiration for whatever was first and oldest, but paradoxically it also gave priority to everything new. The Danish philosopher S0ren Kierkegaard (1813-55) was part of this movement, although he remained deeply affected by his classical learning. In his novel Either-Or (1843), the dialogue between aesthetics and ethics is at the same time between pagan and Christian ideas.
In everyday practice Latin and the grand constructions it had been connected with were gradually rejected. This involved a criticism of ancient mythology and an attempt at introducing Nordic mythologies instead. Nationalism was nothing new, but it changed form and spread to broader sections of the populations. The leading personalities were poets, the Danish Adam Oehlenschlager (1779-1850) and N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783-1872) as well as the Swedish Esaias Tegner (1782-1846) and P. D. A. Atterbom (1790-1855). (Tegner was also a professor of Greek at the University of Lund.) They shared an enthusiasm for everything Nordic and for the common people - although the latter were felt to need suitable education. Grundtvig invested great energy in establishing a new kind of people’s high schools, primarily meant for youngsters from the countryside.
For the artists a new goal arose: to give visual form to the mythic figures. Whereas ancient mythology had consisted of both stories and images and there was a firm tradition of how Jupiter, Minerva, and Diana looked, artists now had to determine how to represent Odin and Vainamoinen - no mean job. That they did so in naturalistic ways was ironically a survival of ancient tradition. This was also the case in Greenland when the Danish governor Hinrich Rink (1819-93) met Aron, an Inuit from Kangeq (1822-69). The Inuit had no traditions for drawing or painting, but Aron was quick to learn the various techniques, and the brilliant series of illustrations he produced, both for old stories and for the everyday life of his own times, had as their model the naturalistic way of painting that via the Renaissance goes right back to antiquity (Thisted 1999, 2001).
An unusual ancient influence was that of Homeric scholarship on the composition of the Finnish national epic. Elias Lonnrot (1802-84), who collected oral traditional songs among the poorest inhabitants of Karelia in eastern Finland, was well informed about German criticism, and F. A. Wolf’s ideas about how the Iliad and the Odyssey had been built on the basis of the performances of illiterate rhapsodes were productive in his own creative work. As another Homer, he arranged the songs he had recorded so as to form one long, continuous narrative, changing as little as possible in the process. In 1835 he published the Kalevala.
With the Napoleonic Wars the conflict between Sweden and Denmark had lost importance. Compared with the threat from great powers such as Russia, Britain, and Germany, internal Scandinavian disagreement paled into insignificance, and a wave of pan-Scandinavian feelings supplanted old rivalries.
In the universities, the emancipation of classical scholarship developed further. This was the period of the great Johan Nicolai Madvig (1804-86), professor at Copenhagen University for half a century and for long periods its rector, also serving as Minister of Culture in an especially critical period. He embraced all aspects of encyclopedic philology, and especially in the fields of language studies and textual criticism broke new ground.
The story of the classical tradition during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is one of gradual retreat. The central debate concerned the place of Latin in the schools, and it is still going on. Traumatic descriptions of the Latin school abound in autobiographies, and bitter criticism was launched especially by the Norwegian Alexander Kielland in his novel Poison (1883) and the Dane Hans Scherfig in The Neglected Spring (1940). In the nineteenth century professional classicists such as Madvig were among those who were the most critical of undue idealization of ancient culture and had purely rational reasons for wanting to keep Latin in the educational system. In more recent times, classicists have mostly argued for retaining the last remnants of this tradition in the school curriculum. The older universities still have chairs of Greek and Latin, and classical scholars have become energetic participants in interdisciplinary projects. In his studies of Latin syntax, the Swedish Einar Lofstedt (1880-1955) was inspired by general linguistics. In Iceland, Jakob Benediktsson (1907-99), with his encyclopedic knowledge and precise classical scholarhip, was a central figure in the humanist landscape.
Characters from ancient mythology or history have now and then been called upon in contemporary conflicts, such as in the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen’s drama Catilina (1850) and in the Swedish Viktor Rydberg’s novel The Last Athenian (1859). The historical novel has had interesting representatives in Scandinavia: the Danish Nis Petersen’s The Street of the Sandalmakers (1931), the Finnish Mika Waltari’s Sinuhe the Egyptian (1945), and T. Vaaskivi’s The Autocrat (1942) as well as the Swedish Eyvind Johnson’s The Clouds over Metapontion (1957).
Exactly when the ancient tradition disappeared as an undisputed common frame of reference cannot be determined. But its afterlife has been more and more dependent on translations, and especially Greek authors are richly represented in the Scandinavian languages. In Denmark Christian Wilster’s translations of Homer (1836-7) have become national classics in their own right, often alluded to in later literature. He chose hexameters and modeled his language on Oehlenschlager’s, but showed great creative energy in his coining of new words to represent the characteristic Homeric epithets. Twenty years later Sveinbj0rn Egilsson chose an Old Icelandic meter, fornyr-dislag, for his translations. There is still a market for new translations, and Attic dramas are often played in modern staging.
In art and architecture ancient themes are mainly allusive or indirect. Now and then mythological motifs turn up, sometimes to add an extra layer of meaning to a picture, as when the Norwegian Edvard Munch called a painting of a naked couple Amor and Psyche (1907), in other cases ironically, as in The Judgment of Paris, a picture by the Danish Harald Giersing showing the painter with three models (1909). The Scandinavian ‘‘villa,’’ normally a modest house meant for a single family, has little in common with its Roman model. A special variation, though, the ‘‘atrium-house,’’ is actually modeled on the typical Roman house, closed to the outside but opening into a central courtyard.
World History
