Har Grundtvig-Selskabet forsømt Digteren Grundtvig?

Resumé

Has the Grundtvig Society Neglected Grundtvig the Poet?

By Gustav Albeck

This paper, also read to the annual Conference of the Grundtvig Society, involved a detailed survey of the literature on Grundtvig as a poet, both before and after the foundation of the Grundtvig Society. Initially the three grundtvigians Frederik Nielsen, Frederik Rønning and Holger Begtrup were dwelt on, and next the chapter on Grundtvig in Vilhelm Andersen’s Illustreret Dansk Litteraturhistorie III is mentioned along with Hans Brix’s account in Danske Digtere and the important monographs on Grundtvig by Edvard Lehmann, the historian of religion, and Hal Koch, the ecclesiastical historian, which books have little to say about Grundtvig the poet. Indeed, as Albeck points out, for long Grundtvig was not rated on the literature exchange of Copenhagen. To Brandes he was nothing but a pest, though he recognized that he ranked among the giants of Danish intellectual life. H. S. Vodskov, the critic, was among the first to afford Grundtvig recognition, as did L. C. Nielsen, the poet. It is, however, Paul V Rubow, who as a professor of literature called for research on Grundtvig based on true scholarship that might bring to light new knowledge about Grundtvig, and particularly about the poet.

Albeck claims that research on Grundtvig already began in the Thirties with minor contributions by Emil Frederiksen and Magnus Stevns. Owing to the German occupation 1940-1945, however, the interest in Grundtvig increased, and in 1947 the Grundtvig Society (hereinafter GS) was founded by a group numbering as many literary scholars as theologians. The registration of Grundtvig’s unpublished papers, running to thirty volumes, was completed 1956-1964, the feat of a team-work including philologists and theologians, which had the support of the GS and the Danish Society for Language and Literature. Scholars in the humanities were in special pursuit of papers that might throw light on Grundtvigs profane work, and particularly his poetry. An edition of Grundtvig’s diaries and books of excerpts, undertaken by Gustav Albeck and published in colloboration with the Danish Society for Language and Literature, was one achievement, but so far one has not succeeded in bringing out a complete edition of Grundtvig’s letters. Chr. Thodberg has published the bulk of Grundtvigs sermons. But Albeck misses studies of Grundtvig’s poetry after Helge Toldberg’s doctoral thesis. The poet Poul Borum’s book on “Grundtvig The Poet” (1983) he considers an exception, while pointing to Flemming Lundgreen Nielsen, Det handlende ord (1980). Particularly Albeck regrets the omission of attention to Grundtvig as a poet in the book that was published in English, French and German by the Danish Society under the editorship of members of the GS for the Grundtvig Bicentenary in 1983. He does admit, though, that Grundtvig the poet, is present both in Flemming Lundgreen Nielsen’s chapter, “Grundtvig and Romanticism” and in Chr. Thodberg’s two chapters, “Grundtvig the Hymnwriter” and “Grundtvig the Preacher - the Poet in the Pulpit”.