Omkring Grundtvig-Selskabets tilblivelse

Abstract

How the Grundtvig Society was founded

A paper read by Henning Høirup to the Annual Conference of the GS on 15th January 1988

This paper was given close to the fortieth anniversary of the date when the GS made itself known to the public with a press notice announcing its foundation at a meeting, held at Vartov on 13th January 1948 when the Society was formally constituted. The notice includes the names of the fifteen founder members. The reason why the GS has nevertheless insisted on 8th September 1947 as the date of its foundation is given by Bishop Høirup in this paper. The latter date is the correct one, and the place where the GS was founded is the episcopal residence at Ribe, but the six founders (who had come together at a meeting of Grundtvig scholars) agreed to widen the circle so as to include nine co-founders who were present at the meeting on 13th January 1948.

Concurring with Albeck Høirup maintains that the renewed interest in Grundtvig began in the Thirties when the literary historian Georg Christensen had completed Svend Grundtvig’s edition of his father’s Poetiske Skrifter, which had come to a standstill after the Editor’s death in 1889. Approximately at the same time the Haandbog i N. F. S. Grundtvig’s Skrifier by Ernst J. Borup and Fr. Schrøder was published. It was also the time of appearance of Edvard Lehmann’s book on Grundtvig in Swedish with a Danish version following later on. All this occured about ten years earlier than the so-called Grundtvig Renaissance launched by Hal Kochs university lectures on Grundtvig in 1940.

However, to Høirup the most important event in the Thirties was the appearance of the eleventh edition of the song-book of the folk high school with the scores for tunes by Carl Nielsen, Thomas Laub and Thorvald Aagaard, which gave new life to Grundtvig’s songs and hymns. Høirup’s pastor colleague of the adjacent parish in Funen, Kaj Thaning at Asperup, had started a card index on main concepts in Grundtvig’s work, and the two clerics got permission to take out Grundtvig mss. on loan pledging that they would keep the invaluable fascicles in the fire-proof safes of their vicarages. Bishop Hans .llgaard of Odense supported research on Grundtvig’s theology as when he convened a working synod of his diocese in 1946, where both Thaning and H.irup presented results of the research projects that led to their doctoral dissertations. At the Royal Library in Copenhagen Høirup met other Grundtvig scholars, Steen Johansen, William Michelsen and Helge Toldberg. In September 1947 those three and Høirup came to Ribe to meet Bishop C. I. Scharling and Villiam Grønbæk, the Diocesan Dean, both known as “High Church” men. But all misgivings about them were soon laid aside. Scharling was able to present his book on “Grundtvig and Romanticism”, that appeared in the same year. At this meeting the idea to set up a society for the advancement of cooperation in research and in the editing of documentary scholarly editions of Grundtvig’s writings was discussed along with a proposal from Bishop Øllgaard that a future yearbook be called Grundtvig-Studier. On the following day, Grundtvig’s birthday, regulations were drafted, just as it was agreed to widen the circle so as to include Bishop Øllgaard and Professor Poul Andersen and Hal Koch, as well as the literary historians Gustav Albeck, Georg Christensen and Magnus Stevns. Helge Toldberg was appointed Secretary and Høirup himself Editor of Grundtvig-Studier. The meeting at Ribe was not convened with the foundation of the GS as its aim. The resolve tofound it grew out of a feeling of the value that working together would entail. The proposed co-founders were all in favour and were joined by Pastor Balslev of Vartov. At the meeting at Vartov, where the Society was constituted, Bishop Scharling was elected President. When he died in 1951, Ernst J. Borup, the Warden of Vartov, rightly said that thanks to Scharling the Society “had been taken beyond the limitations of the partisan dominance to which it might otherwise have been confined.” The circle of co-founders were further augmented with Kaj Thaning and Holger Kjær, a folk high school teacher. An invitation to membership was issued, and at the first annual conference in 1948 the membership stood at 333. At the conference Magnus Stevns lectured on “The Kingo Hymn and Grundtvig”, though he was already hampered by the disease that was to bring him to his grave shortly afterwards.

After some remarks about the activities of the Society over the past forty years Høirup pointed out that new scholars constantly have come forward including undergraduates, as those who wrote most of the chapters in the book “For the Sake of Continuity” (1977), which was published as a double-volume of Grundtvig Studier.

The 1988 volume of Grundtvig Studier opens with an obituary on P. G. Lindhardt. He was a professor of ecclesiastical history in the University of Aarhus and a member of the Committee of the GS from 1956. He is the author of a biography of Grundtvig in English and contributed an article “Some Light Thrown on Grundtvig’s Trip to England in 1843” to Kirkehistoriske Samlinger 1972. He made an edition of Grundtvig’s sermons 1854-56 with a commentary (1974-1977). His monumental scholarly work was chiefly concerned with the rise of the revivalist movements in the 19th century. The obituarist is J. H . Schjørring, D.D ., who was elected a member of the Commitee of the GS in 1988.

The Grundtvig Manuscript .Fragen aus Dänemark an die Universitäten Deutscher Zunge., an unpublished fragment lodged in the Grundtvig Archives of the Royal Library in Copenhagen (fasc. 168), dates from the period 1816-1820. It contains an appeal to the professors of German universities that they offer themselves to the German princes as intermediaries between these and their subjects in setting up constitutional rules of government after the Vienna Conference 1815-1816. As the situation changed, when the writer August von Kotzebue was murdered on 23. March 1819, the manuscript was probably written shortly before this date.