Grundtvig og den danske rimkrønike

Abstract

Grundtvig and the Danish Metrical Chronicle. By Helge Toldberg.

A characteristic feature of present-day Grundtvig research in Denmark is a number of attempts at ascertaining important dates in the literary career of Grundtvig. In particular the Rev. Kaj Thaning has stressed 1832 as the year that Grundtvig made the absolute division of Christianity and human development. In a preliminary sketch of this theory in last year’s Grundtvig- Studier, he objects to my suggestion in Grundtvigs symholverden (1950) that the main change in Grundtvig’s outlook occurs in Et Blad af Jyllands Rimkrønike (“A Leaf of the Metrical Chronicle of Jutland” , a great poem written in 1814, but revised — a good deal, as it seems — and printed in 1815). The present paper brings in new evidence, viz. information that at the same time Grundtvig began his lifelong study of the Danish Metrical Chronicle, and that this may have influenced the poem, in particular the section on Amleth (Hamlet), as the rhyme of the latter in the original Chronicle was in later years the dearest to Grundtvig.

Apart from Laws and Folk Ballads and, above all, the historian Saxo Grammaticus, who wrote his Gesta Danorum in the early 13th century, Danish medieval literature is considerably scarcer than that of the other Scandinavian countries, the only original work of some importance being the Metrical Chronicle, the first book printed in Danish, published by Gotfred of Ghemen, the Caxton of Denmark, in 1495, and perhaps at some earlier date, too. The next generations saw several reprints, but during the 17^th century it fell into oblivion, and about 1800 it was rather scorned by scholars. That accounts for Grundtvig’s not being familiar with it in early youth, though studying a number of historians just then.

As far as can be gathered from statements of Grundtvig’s in 1834 and 1841, he plunged into a study of the Chronicle as a means of consolation after the septennial war with Great Britain from 1807 to 1814. Investigations among the heaps of papers left unpublished after his death give with hand that during a general study of Langebek’s Scriptores rerum Danicarum mediiævi (vol. I, 1772) Grundtvig almost unawares came across a few quotations from the Metrical Chronicle, among which was a very vivid description of a queen being choked like a hen by a hero’s belt.

To Grundtvig’s thinking all Swedish metrical chronicles, which he knew beforehand, were greatly surpassed by the Danish one. In his opinion the most important feature was its tracing of the ancestry of the Danish kings from Japhet, so that they partook of the divine blessing promised to him. In attempts at remouldings of the Chronicle in later years, he stuck to this assumption, apart from one rough draft from 1834.

Up to 1826 Grundtvig contributed very useful research on the Chronicle, which has been sadly neglected by historians. Kristian Erslev presupposed a lost prose chronicle in the vernacular as the common source of Latin prose chronicles and the metrical one in the vernacular, a mistake adopted from P. F. Suhm in the late 18th century, and failed to heed Grundtvig’s dry remark that the missing chronicon vulgare was the metrical one. This statement is born out by present-day research not yet published.

In 1825 the Danish Metrical Chronicle was re-edited by Christian Molbech, a member of the staff of the Royal Library, a scholar similar to Sir Frederick Madden, whose friend he was (cf. Orbis Litterarum V (1947) PP. 280ff., 309f.). In their youth Molbech and Grundtvig had been intimate friends, but the harsh subjective judgments on several renowned men’s attitude towards Christianity in Grundtvig’s “World History” , published in 1812, had set them at variance. Molbech’s edition was circulated privately, and Grundtvig was not among the subscribers, but got hold of a copy somehow, and was inspired to write a poem on Brother Niels from Sorø, the supposed author of the Chronicle, paying homage to Molbech, too, for his enterprise. Molbech now presented Grundtvig with the glossary, and immediately after Grundtvig published a long, well prepared review in Nyt Aftenblad, a Copenhagen periodical, without any reference to Molbech’s having bracketed as spurious the verses concerned with the inherited blessing of the Danes.

A recent monograph on the Metrical Chronicle, Johannes Brøndum-Nielsen’s Om Rimkrønikens Sprogform og Tilblivelse (On the Language and Origin of the M. C., 1930) examines Grundtvig’s idea that the Chronicle was the work of more than one author and adds supplementary evidence of this theory until then rejected by scholars, but is not quite willing to acknowledge Grundtvig’s philological command of the subject. Brøndum-Nielsen is not to be blamed for that, because in his anxiety to avoid even the slightest shade of pedantry Grundtvig re-wrote long sections of his paper several times before publishing it, thereby cutting out important comments on the frequency of individual words and various parts of speech in the beginning and the end of the Chronicle, and on characteristic changes in orthography. Besides comments and emendations, the present paper examines Grundtvig’s preparations as displayed in his unpublished papers, and proves that apart from one slight mistake his division of the chronicle into parts according to changes of the arrangement of rhymes is the same as Brøndum-Nielsen’s. Furthermore an unprinted passage is quoted to prove that Grundtvig was well aware that the limited number of Danish medieval texts then available reduced the chance of exact statements.

But Broder Niels fra Soor, the poem written in honour of Molbech’s edition, inaugurates a new phase in Grundtvig’s work at the Chronicle, too. The idea of its several contributors working at it for generations enabled poets of later ages to remodel and continue it. Grundtvig’s greatest achievement was the Rhyme of Skjold. In the original chronicle this section is not outstanding; but Grundtvig, the first modern translator of Beowulf, was greatly charmed with the account of Scyld Scefing, ending with the stately description of the dead king leaving his land on board a vessel, just as he arrived there as a little boy. On this background Grundtvig created a myth that is by most Danes of to-day looked upon as an ancient and genuine one. The etymology of the patronymicon conveyed to him the notion that the boy had been resting his head on a sheaf at his arrival. After a couple of attempts not printed, in or about 1826, he made his outstanding text of 1834, printed in Nordisk Kirke-Tidende. Both the printer’s manuscript and a rough draft are preserved; a close comparison of the latter and the printed text illustrates Grundtvig’s enormous labour at procuring a national history to suit the taste of all classes. In 1865 this main section of Skjold’s rhyme was enlarged to a song, which is as popular now as then.

A recent discovery has brought to light Grundtvig’s personal copy of C. J. Brandt’s edition (1858) of the Metrical Chronicle; it is now preserved in the Library of Vartov, the Copenhagen stronghold of the Grundtvig Movement. Brandt, who became Grundtvig’s successor as chaplain to Vartov (then an establishment for old people), had paid a visit to Sweden in 1851 to examine the stock of Danish MSS. preserved there, one of the most important events in the history of Danish medieval research. Among the achievements of this journey was the knowledge of the MS. K 41 of the Royal Library of Stockholm, a fragment unfortunately, containing about one half of the Metrical Chronicle, lacking both the beginning and the end. The fact that it contained many satisfactory variant readings caused Brandt to choose this text for the middle of the chronicle, whereas the rest mainly follows Ghemen’s printed version, as Molbech has done throughout, and Grundtvig, too, in publishing selected parts in 1816 in his periodical Danne-Virke. Brandt was, however, prevented from giving a critical text, because he knew that Grundtvig (to whom the book was dedicated) demanded a popular version like the one presented in 1841 by C. S. Ley and greatly lauded by him. Grundtvig does not seem to have been quite pleased with the book. While yet a young man he had been keen on tracing variants, but in his old age he stuck to Ghemen as a Vulgate, and corrected the K 41 readings to accord with this. But apart from that he remodelled a few of the later rhymes omitted in 1834, the most important being that of King Valdemar II (1202—41).

In the original the Rhyme of Valdemar the Second belongs to a group the morals of which are influenced by the Secreta Secvetovum by Pseudo- Aristotle (cf. E. E. T. S., Extra Series no. 66, 1894, or Roger Bacon’s Opera hactenus inedita, vol. V, 1920) ; the moral question is that a king should of all men not infringe his oaths, as Valdemar did most gravely when after being ransomed from Count Heinrich of Schwerin’s prison he fought the latter, and was defeated. The Holsteinische Reimchronik, written against the Danish one, but not sufficiently heeded by scholars, is one attack on Valdemars tyranny towards Holsatia and his immoral behaviour in breaking his promise not to fight his enemies. It appears from excerpts among unpublished papers that Grundtvig knew the Holsatian Metrical Chronicle; and most likely he remodelled Valdemar’s Rhyme so thoroughly, stressing everything to glorify him from the very starting-point of his surname the Victorious, to reject the Holsatian slander.

A paper on Grundtvig and the Danish Metrical Chronicle is naturally concluded by a reference to his poem in 1840 in honour of the 400th anniversary of the invention of printing, where he asserts that the very first book to be printed in Denmark was the Metrical Chronicle. As an ardent advocate of the principle of contradiction, he felt convinced that the first book must either have been a Latin or a Danish one, and it was lurgent to him to prove that it was the latter.