Den første grønlandske bog

Abstract

Flemming A. J. Nielsen And Thorkild Kjærgaard:
The First Greenlandic Book

Ever since the arrival of Norse peasants in south-west Greenland in the second half
of the tenth century there have been links between the immense island (2.2 million
km2) in the north-eastern corner of the American hemisphere and the Scandinavian
world. At the end of the twelfth century, the ancestors of today’s Inuit, a whale- and
seal-hunting people speaking a language of the Eskimo-Aleut group, migrated from
Ellesmere Island across the narrow Smith Sound to northern Greenland. Within two
and a half centuries, the Norse peasants had, it seems, been exterminated by the Inuit,
but Greenland was never forgotten in Scandinavia. In the European world it was generally
recognised that Greenland was Norwegian territory. In 1380 Norway entered
into a union with Denmark, and the dream of restoring connections with Greenland
therefore became a shared Danish-Norwegian dream, although it seemed less and less
practicable as time went by and the Davis Strait between Baffin Island and Greenland
began to teem with Dutch and British whalers and trading ships.
However, in 1721 the course of history changed. A Norwegian priest, Hans Egede
(1686‑1758), who had been offering his services for more than a decade, was appointed
‘Royal Missionary in Greenland’ and was given the necessary support for an expedition
aiming to re-establish the old connection and to reintroduce Christianity into Greenland.
Egede’s Greenlandic adventure succeeded, and over the course of the eighteenth
century Greenland was reintegrated, bit by bit, into the multicultural, multinational
Danish-Norwegian state and society.
In 1814 Norway was divided as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. Mainland Norway
(what we know as Norway today) was ceded to Sweden while the remote Norwegian
islands in the North Atlantic (Greenland, the Faroe Islands and, until 1944, Iceland)
were annexed to the kingdom of Denmark.
Being a true officer of the Danish-Norwegian empire, where every child had to
be taught to read and appreciate Luther’s Small Catechism, Egede struggled from
the outset with the exotic Greenlandic language, not just to learn to speak a vaguely
understandable ‘kitchen-Greenlandic’ but also to acquire the deeper understanding
of phonetic and grammatical structures that was needed in order to develop a written
version of the language.
During Egede’s fifteen years in Greenland (1721‑36), all the documents pertaining
to the mission were handwritten. This was true also for the basic Christian texts in
Greenlandic which Egede and his helpers began to produce and distribute among the
growing number of converts from as early as 1723. Back in Copenhagen in 1736, Egede founded the so-called Seminarium Groenlandicum. The purpose of this institution was
twofold: to teach basic Greenlandic to new missionaries and catechists before they went
to Greenland, and to produce books printed in Greenlandic in order to have a more
major and focused impact on Greenlandic society than the sporadic effects obtainable
with handwritten texts that were constantly being altered by being laboriously copied
out by hand again and again.
The first book published in Greenlandic as part of this programme was a spelling
book containing reading exercises based on Luther’s Small Catechism in addition to a
collection of prayers and eight hymns translated from the Danish, comprising a total of
forty pages prepared by Egede and printed in Copenhagen in 1739 to be sent to Greenland
the same year. As a bridge between written and printed culture in Greenland, this
small book marked an important milestone in early modern Greenland. Until now it has
been known only from uncertain and elusive bibliographical sources – sceptical voices
have even doubted whether it ever existed, but two copies of the book have recently
been located and identified in the holdings of the Royal Library. Our article provides
a thorough study of the book: how it came to be forgotten, how it was rediscovered,
the nature of its contents and details of its typographical layout.
Less than a century after Hans Egede’s arrival in Greenland, almost everybody in
western Greenland had learned to read and write, and the local vernacular had become
a literary language. Later, in 1861, Greenland’s first newspaper was established.
It was written and edited from the outset by Greenlanders eagerly discussing their own
affairs. As a result of the discussions, scattered groups of individuals throughout the
enormous but thinly populated island coalesced into a nation, and, thanks to Egede’s
endeavours and those of his many successors throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, Greenlandic is today the only native American language that is used for any
and every purpose by its speakers, whether it be literature, pop music, government,
church services or legislation.