In the early eighteenth century, one figure towers over everybody else in Scandinavia: the Norwegian Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754). He was a prolific writer in both poetry and prose, composing scholarly works as well as fiction. Inspired by Samuel Pufen-dorf, he wrote in Danish Natural and Popular Law (1712-14). His mock-epic about the shipwrecked merchant Peder Paars (1719-20) could not have existed without the Aeneid, but the epics of his close contemporaries were probably his main target. From 1722 onward he composed a long series of Danish comedies, inspired by Moliere and, at a slightly greater distance, by Plautus and Terence. His satirical epigrams in Latin are in the tradition of John Owen and Martial, and his Moral Epistles were inspired by Seneca and the younger Pliny. His utopian Latin novel about Nicolaus Klimius (1741) has, again, both modern and ancient models, notably Jonathan Swift and Lucian.
In Sweden the most remarkable personalities, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), Carl von Linne (1707-78), and Olofvon Dalin (1708-63), were very different in kind. Swedenborg, who by education was a scientist, developed into a religious mystic. Linne established a classification of the world’s flora, which is still the basis for modern botany. His Systema naturae (1735) uses a binary nomenclature directly inherited from Aristotle. Dalin, however, worked for the education of his fellow countrymen, among other things publishing a national history in Swedish (1747-62).
The enlightenment implied a critical attitude toward classical models in literature and scholarship, and brought an end to the more irrational phenomena. But the mere fact that almost all professional discussions were composed in Latin meant that ancient categories still kept a firm hold on the minds of educated people, and, in the long run, what happened was less a movement away from antiquity than a change in the way antiquity was perceived. Other authors were selected or other aspects studied, and especially, a new interest in Greek rather than Latin appeared. Greek had been well known ever since the Renaissance, but it never achieved a status equal to that of Latin. Greek authors had been studied mainly in Latin translations. Many attempts had been made to master ancient Greek as a spoken and written language, and some individuals had become proficient at expressing themselves in Greek. For instance, the Finnish Johann Paulinus Lillienstedt (1655-1732) composed a Greek poem in 379 hexameters, praising the wonders of his nation, Magnus principatus Finlandia (The Grand Duchy of Finland, 1678). But Latin was still the language chosen by default for science, scholarship, and prestigious literature. Now, on the contrary, an enthusiasm for everything Greek arose. Greek ideas of democracy and political liberty, including freedom of speech, were taken as the great inspiration for social progress in modern societies, and the originality of Greek literature was celebrated in contrast to the imitative quality of Latin works. Vergil lost ground to Homer.
German ‘‘new humanism’’ became very influential in Scandinavia and led both to an intensified study of ancient Greek and to a professionalizing of classical studies in general. While antiquity gradually lost influence as an immediate model, there was a growing interest in historical and philological research on ancient themes, and in the universities the chairs of Greek and Latin grew independent of theology. The Norwegian Georg Sverdrup (1770-1850) was a professor of Greek in this modern sense at the University of Copenhagen before he proceeded to Oslo, where he was one of the founders of the new university in 1813. He was also a member of the commission that prepared the constitution of Norway after it became independent.
In another field the new admiration for originality had a tremendous impact: in the growing interest in the literature of the noneducated, the socially or geographically marginalized. At the university of Turku, Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739-1804) was professor of eloquence, and in a series of dissertations on Finnish poetry (1766-78, well before Herder’s Popular Voices in Song, 1807) he argued that the tradition of stories and poems existing among illiterate Finns was of great artistic value. In his works on rhetoric he taught pastors how to preach in Finnish, and his voluminous notes to the Chronicle of the Medieval Bishops of Finland (1784-1800) were the first serious study of Finnish history. He put an end to speculations about the biblical pedigree of the Finnish people by demonstrating that they had immigrated from Russia, and in 1801 he even sketched a study of Finnish dialects. This whole achievement was performed in Latin (Kajanto 1984). However, Rasmus Rask (1787-1832), the first modern linguist in Scandinavia, published his study of the history of old Norse (1818) in Danish. During this same period, the learned Faroese J. C. Svabo (1746-1824) worked on a dictionary of the Faroese language with translations into Danish and Latin, and was the first to collect ballads in the Faroe Islands.
A revolt against classically inspired rationalism took place in some of the lyrical poetry of the day, for instance with the Danish Johannes Ewald (1743-81). But poems such as The Beatitudes of Rungsted (1772) and To the Soul, an Ode (1780) are formally inspired by Pindar and Horace, and Philetus, a Narration (1770) is modeled on Vergil’s first eclogue in its celebration of contemporary agricultural reforms (Friis-Jensen, unpublished).
In the meantime ancient tradition had become dominant in art and architecture. In Sweden the neoclassical sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel (1740-1814) won international fame with his representations of classical themes, but his masterpiece is a colossal statue of the Swedish King Gustav III in central Stockholm. His friend, the Danish painter Nicolai Abildgaard (1743-1809), also preferred ancient subjects for his pictures. His painting The Wounded Philoctetes (1774-75) is a remarkable interpretation of the Sophoclean figure with its concentrated expression of wild desperation. Abildgaard worked regularly for the absolute monarch, but it has recently been argued that in his own choice of motifs he revealed his sympathies for the French revolution (Kragelund 1999). No Scandinavian artist has, however, been more internationally respected than Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844). Among his best known works are Jason with the Golden Fleece, Venus, and The Three Graces. He spent four decades in Rome, where he became a central figure among local and foreign artists, and still today his works decorate many European cities. In Munich he was entrusted to restore the sculptures from the temple of Aphaia in Aigina. When in 1838 he returned to Denmark, he was welcomed as a hero and given his own museum.
Neoclassical art was often commissioned by well-to-do bourgeois patrons. Houses, furniture, and indoor decoration took on classical garb. Great creative architects, such as the Danes C. F. Harsdorff (1735-99), C. F. Hansen (1756-1845), and Gottlieb Bindesb0ll (1800-56), worked during this period. In Copenhagen most of the center was rebuilt after catastrophic fires in 1794-5, and this was when the city center achieved the dominant neoclassical character it still retains. Harsdorff and Hansen were also called in to remodel the center of Christiania, together with the Norwegian H. D. F. von Linstow (1787-1851). Another type of neoclassicism came to dominate the center of Helsinki. To celebrate Finland’s new status as an autonomous duchy within the Russian empire, Czar Alexander I sent his German architect Carl Ludvig Engel (1778-1840) to plan a suitable center for the new capital, and the result was truly monumental, dominated by the great church of St. Nicholas.
World History
