Chapter 2: Norway

And the Sun Rises with the Farmer

(Og solen står med bonden op)
The Philosophical History of the Nordic Folkhighschool

CHAPTER TWO: NORWAY

“So strongly, so truly it appears to me that the folk of the North, and especially we, must be recruited from below, to give the idea of democracy reality in the eyes of the world. This is the great social poem of the North.”
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson in a letter of September 29, 1871, to Gotfred and Margarete Rode.

PROLOGUE

“There is no future for the country which scorns its past.”
Michio Morishima, Professor of Economics, London School of Economics

Everywhere in l9th century Europe strong national currents were flowing, aimed at resurrecting national consciousness and identity. In this develop-ment, Norway has a privileged place. In no other land was the struggle to return to the nation’s roots so closely attached to the farmer class, and here more than in any other land, the farmers themselves were active participants in the shaping of the country’s political structure.

Today, oil-rich nation Norway is in the process of stepping out of its geographic isolation and becoming a sought-after cooperating partner in the inter-national economy. Perhaps it may therefore seem somewhat out-dated to offer the historic background of what was long a people of peasants, clinging tightly to the mountainsides in a land where 70% of the area is uninhabitable.

I don’t entirely share the view expressed by one of my Norwegian friends, who declared that the discovery of oil in the North Sea was the greatest mis-fortune which has struck Norway since the Black Death! But to prevent this unexpected wealth, which has rolled in over the land and caused deep-going structural changes, from bringing the catastrophic consequences that some fear, it may be wise to go back to a history which in my eyes is especially fascinating. It is this history that creates the background for the first Norwegian folkhighschools, Sagatun and Vonheim, and that is why it is presented here, although in a very abbreviated form.

Norway’s Tragic History

“There is a Sweden, there is a Denmark, but there is as yet no Norway.”
P.A. Munch to Bjørnson, 1860

Almost a century would still pass [after Munch’s comment] before this “ash-heap of nature” – as Saxo Grammaticus described Norway – became the equal of its brother peoples, equal and similar, although so fundamentally different.

Clearly, Norway’s “greatness” lay in earlier times, in the “saga-time”, writes the historian J. E. Sars, when the land stood high in outward power and inward well-being, as it has never stood [since,] until the very most recent time.

The decline was primarily caused by the devastation of the Great Plague (the Black Death, 1349-50) which in such a far-stretched-out and thinly popul-ated land as Norway had catastrophic consequences. According to the old Icelandic sources, which later research seems to have confirmed, only a third of Norway’s population were alive when it was all over. The nobility and the priesthood were especially hard-hit, and “the whole farmer class fell away from each other into numerous scattered village societies, lacking a mutual connection” (Sars). For a long time, great portions of Norway lay almost deserted: “It is as though a night-time frost suddenly iced over all the sources of the people’s life, causing them to be struck dumb.” Even two hundred years later, the land was too impoverished and powerless to oppose effectively Christian III [of Denmark] , who declared on the 3d of October 1536: “Since Norway’s inhabitants aren’t able by themselves to maintain their own master and king, and that same realm is thus bound to be eternally under Denmark’s crown … then it shall hereafter be and remain under Denmark’s crown just like the other provinces – Jutland, Fyn, Sjælland and Skåne, and hereafter not be or be called a kingdom for itself, but a portion of Denmark’s realm and under Denmark’s crown for eternity.”

“Eternity”, in actual history, is fortunately always of limited duration. As far as Norway is concerned, it ended in 1814, when Denmark had to surrender Norway [to Sweden, as part of the settlement of the Napoleonic wars, crafted at the Congress of Vienna by the winning powers - and predictably, with no thought of consulting the Norwegian people]. For a few weeks, the country enjoyed independence, before the union with Sweden was enforced. In this very short time, Norway pulled together a constitution inspired by French Revolutionary ideas, which was quite justly considered to be the most liberal in Europe. In the eyes of the Norwegians, the Constitution reintroduced the governing ideas of saga times, so that the new Norway was viewed (not completely without reason) as a resurrection of the old Norway… Norway seemed to be at once something very old and something very young.

As we shall see, the old Norway was a constant point of reference; but in contrast with Sweden, where the national feeling has always been retrospec-tive, Norwegians found in their ancient history a model for the present and for the future that was to come.

It wasn’t easy for the “brother-peoples” to understand Norway’s political development, especially not for the “cultural nation”, Denmark, which always looked upon this “peasantry” with poorly concealed contempt, and furthermore had not accustomed itself to having lost it. In the fairy tale “Laserne”, Hans Christian Andersen expresses strikingly the lack of understanding that existed between the two countries. “I am Norwegian,” said the Norseman, “and when I say that I am Norwegian, I think I have said enough! I am firm and stalwart, like the ancient mountains in old Norway, a land that has a Constitution, like free America! It pleases me in my inmost being to think what I am, and to let the thought ring like iron in granite words.” “But we have a literature”‘ said Danish Lass, “Do you understand what that is?”

Following the Congress of Vienna (1814-l815) and given the political climate of Restoration Europe, the idea of freedom didn’t have good conditions for development. Hartvig Lassen writes in his book about Wergeland (1866): “the much-sung ‘palm of freedom’ stood in a desert, like so many other palms, and a whole generation had to work at it, before there could be growth around the symbol.” Nevertheless, a ferment existed in the minds of the Norwegian farmer-class which constituted 90% of the population; and even before the great powers clearly understood what was about to happen, the farmers were preparing to take over the power positions of their former masters.

In contrast with Denmark and Sweden, which had a numerous nobility (largely of German origin, moreover), there were few noblemen in Norway. Nevertheless, the Storting [Parliament] maintained their 1815 decision to abolish all the privileges and titles of nobility. In spite of Karl Johann’s [King of Sweden, who secured the union of Norway with Sweden in 1814] sullen opposition, this anti-nobility law was unanimously passed in 1821. In a land with only 3% cultivable soil, there were no great land-owners. Thus, through-out the 19th century, the political and cultural struggle was between govern-ment officials and farmers. And the farmers’ discovery of the power which belonged to them, according to the Constitution, was largely due to a religious revival which spread like wildfire over the whole country – Haugianism.

Haugianism

The farmer’s son Hans Nielsen Hauge, born in 1771 on the farm Hauge in Tune, Østfold, experienced in his twenties a strong religious awakening, which came to leave deep trails behind it in Norwegian Christian life, and which also had great political and cultural consequences. For six years, from 1798 to 1804, Hauge traveled constantly around the country. His fiery preaching was marked with ethical seriousness, traditional pietism, and Lutheran orthodoxy, in reaction against the state church’s rationalism. Hauge was also a noteworthy man of action – everywhere he came, he established economic activity to improve the condition of the farmers. But his preaching against the church’s dogma was regarded as a provocation, both by churchly and secular authorities. In 1804, he was arrested for violation of the Conventicle Act of 1741, which forbade lay people to hold prayer meetings in assemblies. For the next ten years, Hauge was almost constantly imprisoned under miserable con-ditions. He died in 1824, only 53 years old.

It would be hard to exaggerate Hans Nielsen Hauge’s influence. The groups of Haugian friends, which sprang up everywhere he came, brought the individual farmer out of isolation. For the first time, the peasant discovered that he was part of a people, that he had a role to play in the country’s history. It is worthwhile to note that the first political awakening among the Norwegian farmers came as a result of a religious awakening.

From the beginning of the 19th century, opposition between the peas-antry and officialdom was aggravated by this movement. In his book Norwegian Peasant Uprising (1926), the historian Halvdan Koht writes:” The Haugian movement had strengthened and sharpened the opposition between the farmer class and the official class in the land. At the same time, it showed the farmers the way to a countrywide agitation which could unite them in struggle. Although in itself [the movement] had no political content, it encouraged the peasants to [undertake] political activity, so that they were able to adopt a political view more easily than would otherwise have been possible. Therefore, quite naturally, right from 1814 we meet many Haugians in politics.”

The Growth of Peasant Power in the 1800′s

It is hardly surprising that the beginning of the peasant uprising was viewed by the ruling classes as a threat to public peace and order. If Norway can find a Cromwell, it already has its Independents, wrote L. K. Daa in “Letter from Trondheim”, 1828.

Norway didn’t find any Cromwell; instead, a series of peasant leaders transferred the religious revival into the political sphere. One of the first was John Neergaard, who in 1830 published a pamphlet called A Free Proprietor’s Thoughts, the well-known “Ole Book”. This was printed in six hundred copies and distributed at political farmers’ meetings around the country. Here, a strong attack was directed against the misuse of power by the official class. In 1826, John Neergaard was elected to the Storting. Some years later, he was followed by another Haugian farmer, Ole Gabriel Ueland, who served in the Storting clear up to 1870.

At the Storting election in 1833, the peasants’ struggle showed a serious result; for the first time, the farmers had more representatives than the official class – 45 to 35.

Everyone in Norway understood very well that the peasants’ massive incursion into the political arena was quite unique in Europe. C. A. Fougstad writes, in The Norwegian Storting, 1833 (published in 1834): “there is no place on Earth where the common man has gained a comparable freedom, a comparable influence and independence…. This pheno- menon has awakened much attention. Some have called it the true develop- ment of freedom and the bringing of the Constitution to life in common minds. Others have called it the triumph of ignorance and the forerunner of barbarism.”

Wergeland and the Pro-Norwegian Party; the French Revolution, in Norwegian

“Hear me, Despot, I will be
your bane, as long as I last.
For Norway’s law, in the peasant’s hand
shall smash your slaves’ bonds.”
Henrik Wergeland – The Norwegian’s Catechism, 1832.

It was not only in Norway that writers and poets took an active part in the nation’s political life. Nevertheless, it is rare that a country’s poet-politicians make the people’s cause their own, placing themselves at its service, to the degree that happened at that time in Norway.

When “the farmers’ Storting” – as the new Storting was called – convened in 1833, it was Henrik Wergeland who gave the farmers’ battle new content and a new goal.

Once more the connection was made between the people’s new hope for the future and the proud past in saga history. In a speech which still holds an important place in Norwegian history, Wergeland said: “Our Norway and ancient Norway seem like two half-rings broken apart, which belong together exactly; the middle-ages [Meaning in this case the period when Norway was subject to Denmark, from about 1360 to 1815] gave only an imitation soldering, which we break away to heal the true link” (Eidsvoll, 1834).

While the cultivation of the past in other parts of Europe generally served reaction, in Norway it was, on the contrary, to give an ideological foundation to revolutionary ideas that antiquity was so strongly promoted . The Pro-Norwegian Party, with Wergeland in the lead, found inspiration in the French Revolutionary tradition. Henrik Wergeland was born at Eidsvoll, where his father was the minister [and where the assembly creating the Constitution was later held in 1814]. He had thus spent his childhood and youth at the very hearth of Norway’s freedom. After 1830, he traveled to France in order to come into direct contact with revolu-tionary France. Back in Norway, he wrote The Norwegian’s Catechism in 1832, challenging the farmer not merely to rebel against subordination, but also to read Snorre [the great Icelandic writer of the sagas which chronicle the ancient Norwegian empire] and to be true to Norway’s antiquity.

Wergeland was quite aware of the farmers’ ignorance and lack of ability to really take leadership in society. This, Fougstad had also described in his book about the 1833 Storting. Popular enlightenment was part of Wergeland’s program. But for him, who belonged intellectually to the Enlightenment period, this meant education, training and knowledge. He was unacquainted with the concept of “the folkly”, the most essential idea for the founders of the folkhigh-school.

The Intelligence Party and National Romanticism

“In the mountains live our art and poetry,
it dreams there still, in the land’s bosom,
there it has shown us the gleam of its wing,
in the valley’s stories, the valley’s melody.”
J.S. Welhaven, 1836.

Wergeland’s famous speech at Eidsvoll in 1834, in which he challenged Norwegians to strike out of their history the centuries when the country was united with Denmark and therefore had lost not only its independence but also its culture, scandalized those who maintained that they represented the country’s true countenance. The Pro-Norwegian Party was opposed by the Intelligence Party and, on the cultural level, by National Romanticism, the inspiration for which came from Germany. Asbjørnsen and Moe modeled their collection of folk tales on the Grimm brothers’ German fairy tales. Painting motifs were drawn from Norwegian peasant life; poetry enthusiastically described Norwegian nature.

Yet those who celebrated what was Norwegian in this way could not, after all, imagine a cultural breach with Denmark. To break the cultural connection with Denmark would be to open the sluicegates for spiritual barbarism, wrote the most famous of the Romanticists, Johan Sebastian Welhaven. The contradiction in this attitude was emphatically noted in the literary criticism of the times: “The Romantic movement which esthetically worshipped ‘that proud race that contains the sons of Tyr and Thor’ pulled back when these sons of Tyr and Thor began to write in Statsborgaren [The State Citizen]” comments a Wergeland specialist from the middle of last century.

In other words, when the “unenlightened” and “uneducated” peasant entered the political arena with his political and cultural demands, then the romantic lovers of the beautiful stole away.

The Language Battle

At the same time, in the 1830′s, a conflict began which still continues, though in a less virulent form: the language battle.

In the Constitution, “the Norwegian language” was mentioned. The difficulty was that it didn’t [seem to] exist… Wergeland, who was true to his revolutionary temperament also in this area, had issued a battle call in 1835 against “speech aristocrats”. The next year came Ivar Aasen’s first book, About Our Written Language. Halvdan Koht declares enthusiastically that even though Aasen’s “language program” arose under Romanticism, yet it had nothing in common with Romanticism’s philosophy. 1836, writes Koht, was the year for “the second great peasant Storting”: “It was the great peasant rising which carried [this movement] along. It was born in another society and another spirit than Romanticism. It helped to gather the peasants to revolt against the old rulers…. It tended to build peasant power.” And when The Norwegian People’s Language Grammar came out in 1848, Koht relates Aasen’s book to events in Europe: “It was a year of revolution in Europe” – in that year, the common people’s speech became the national language.”

The language battle would continue through the century. and little by little, the names appear in history of persons with whom those who created the first folkhighschools would identify – the names of those who will forever be attached to the folkhighschool’s philosophical foundation.

On October 10, 1858, Aasmund O. Vinje published the first number of the journal Dølen [The Countryman]. Dølen ‘s program was nothing less than a battle against Romanticism and for [the folk] language; the paper was to be “a mirror for Norwegian fighting life.”

As one might expect, the Romanticists opposed the right to offer books in landsmål [country-speech] , using both old and new arguments. The Intelligence Party fully understood the danger that the language battle presented, for the political and cultural privileges of “the educated classes”: “The Norwegian farmers’ national consciousness began to awaken and assert its struggle for power; with that, the participation of peasants in the life of the realm could first become dangerous for the Norwegian-Danish position of power.”

Grundtvigianism in Norway

“To the Norwegians, about a Norwegian Highschool”

In 1837, Grundtvig turned to the Norwegians, challenging them to create a Norwegian highschool: “To Norwegians, about a Norwegian Highschool”. The publication of this pamphlet was approximately contemporary with Werge-land’s and the Pro-Norwegian party’s connecting of the saga era with revolu-tionary ideas, and Ivar Aasen’s discovery that an authentic Norwegian language (landsmål) could be based on the dialects spoken by the farm people in Norway’s many more or less isolated valley districts. That the challenge came in 1837 is due to Karl Johann’s refusal that year to sanction the Town Council law, which would have granted communal self-rule in the districts and given the peasants a responsibility the king thought couldn’t be handled by “the unenlightened common people.”

“Norwegian Voice of the People! Be the first to show that a Folk still has courage to be itself ; that will give you both advantage and honor! Thus Grundtvig addressed a folk for whom he had always had great sympathy. At one time he even thought of settling in Norway, among a people that seemed to him to be closer to “a giant spirit” than “the soft Danes”.

Grundtvig’s pamphlet attracted an amount of attention quite unusual [in Norway] in respect to his work. Incredibly, it was also announced in the conservative Morgenbladet, [The Morning Paper], where on July 31, 1834 [This must be a misprint. It should certainly read 1837!] one could read the following: “A really remarkable little pamphlet … such a free higher school, set up beside the other [the University], could be made as an experiment, without risking barbarism. If the free one didn’t work out, education and learning would be preserved by the old one.”

However, Grundtvig’s appeal was not followed up. The greatest problem at the time lay not in Copenhagen but in the Norwegian coutryside. Norwegian peasants had greater political rights than in any other land – and we have seen to what a degree they were conscious of that – but in many places the farmers lived isolated and in extreme poverty. The material that the sociologist Eilert Sundt collected in the country provinces uncovered great social problems: alcoholism, uncleanliness, and immorality. First and foremost, something must be done on this level. Wergeland’s ideas of a country-wide campaign for popular education were revived, and in 1851 the “Society for Promotion of Enlightenment” was founded. How should the peasants be enlightened? Well, the farmer must learn to know the past; once more it was a question of bringing Snorre into the farm cottages. The work of enlightenment should be promoted through a newly begun newspaper, Folkevennen [The People's Friend] (1852) and the paper’s editor, Ole Vig.

Ole Vig
“I love everything that is truly Norwegian,
From the people’s life to herring and cod –
Which moves forward,
Even if it glides
A touch sluggish.”
….
“I love the peasant in his grey jacket
And the poor man, whose bed is straw,
And all the powers
That don’t despise
The simple small [people].”
Ole Vig, “The Norwegian’s Song”

With Ole Vig, Grundtvigian ideas were united with Norwegian reality: poverty and Haugianism. Ole Vig was born in 1824, the son of poor cottagers; his mother was a Haugian supporter. Like so many of his contemporaries, Ole Vig came in contact with Grundtvigianism while studying at Klæbu Teachers Sem-inary. He was a teacher in Kristiansund from 1845 to 1851. He helped estab-lish associations on the model of “The Danish Society”, where there would be singing, and lectures would be given.

As a convinced Grundtvigian, he undertook in 1852 to edit the newspaper Folkevennen, having moved to Kristiania. He declared that there was such a gulf between the people’s way of speaking and the manner of thinking of most book-learned people, that the latter often remains quite outside [the grasp] of the former, and cannot greatly influence them.

That was exactly what Ole Vig intended to [repair] . He wrote almost all the articles in Folkevennen himself, and he wrote in such a way that the farmer and the working man could understand him. It is said that people met together on Sundays, to hear articles from Folkevennen read aloud followed by dis-cussions. In this way, Ole Vig was “holding highschool” (to speak Grundtvigian).

He had, moreover, thought about the possibility of starting a folkhighschool at Hamar, but in 1857 he died, only 33 years old.

The Farmer’s Son and the Aristocrat’s Son

Poverty and Haugianism marked the childhood of a friend of Ole Vig, Ole Arvesen. The family were small-farmers in Smålenene; the father was related to Hans Nielsen Hauge. Ole Arvesen also became a teacher; between 1853 and 1857, he was in daily contact with Ole Vig. Both were central figures in the so-called “language battle” – although Arvesen was no partisan of Ivar Aasen’s “new-created” speech!

Through Ole Vig he had become acquainted with Grundtvigianism; dur-ing his theological study at the University, he came into conflict with Gisle Johnson, the theologian who finally stifled [religious] Grundtvigianism in Nor-way. Ole Vig had also shared with Arvesen his plans to create a folkhigh-school in Hamar.

In 1858, Arvesen met Hermann Anker for the first time, and told him about Ole Vig’s great plan. The young Hermann Anker, who was then 20 (Arvesen was 29), became enthusiastic about the plan, and the two of them got under way. These two represented the extreme ends of the social hierarchy. Her-mann Anker belonged to one of the country’s best-known families, which orig-inally came from Sweden, settling in Norway in 1668. In Copenhagen, Carsten Anker was a friend and adviser of Christian Frederik, who became king of Denmark as Christian VIII in 1839. Carsten Anker came to live at Eidsvoll in 1811; it was at his home that the Constitutional Convention met in 1814. So the Anker family were closely connected with the Constitution which was the pride of the whole country.

In 1829, Hermann Anker’s father, Peter Anker, bought the Rød estate near Halden, which has played an important role in Norwegian history. It was at Rød, following the Moss convention in 1814, that the first negotiations be-tween Karl Johann and Norwegian politicians took place. Peter Anker was thought to be Norway’s richest man. Artists and intellectuals took their inspir-ation from Germany, but commercial patricians had always turned toward England. At Rød, for example, furniture and fixtures were imported from England, and the family subscribed to three English newspapers: The Times, London News, and Punch.

It was in this milieu that Hermann Anker was born in 1829. At home, he met many of the best known men of the time, [such as] Bjørnson and the poet-priest Landstad; through his mother he came into contact with Grundtvigianism. In 1859, he participated, along with Ole Arvesen, in the Nordic Church Meeting at Lund. There they met two young Norwegian members of “the Little Theologicum”, who invited them to Copenhagen to celebrate Grundtvig’s birthday.

Their first contacts with Danish Grundtvigians were renewed and con-firmed when they visited Copenhagen from September 16, 1866 until April 14, 1867. They traveled there to hear Grundtvig’s famous lectures, later published under the title of The Church’s Mirror, or View of the Christian Congregation’s Career.

Every Tuesday, Grundtvig talked at his home on the Old King’s Highway to a public consisting of ministers, teachers, craftsmen, students, and university professors. From time to time, Carl Ploug and the dowager queen Caroline Amalie also joined the assembly.

Sagatun

Three years passed after Ole Arvesen’s first mention of the idea of a folk-highschool at Hamar to Hermann Anker. During these three years, they had been in practically constant contact with the Grundtvigian milieu. Now the time had come to act. Ole Arvesen wrote articles in The Church People’s Paper to announce the founding of the school. It is astonishing to realize his absolute opposition to “I” [the country speech, which Ivar Aasen and Ole Vig were promoting]. In an article of July 31, 1864, he writes that I [the book-speech] is of common Nordic origin. For hundreds of years, this language has “carried the entire spiritual development in Norway. It is our possession as well as the Danes’, we cannot cut ourselves off from it without at the same time severing the artery which for more than a fourth of the millenium was the only thing that gave the body of the folk its vigorous development… The language we call ‘book- language’ has thus become old among us; it has perfect historical prescriptive right, and can in no way be corrected or improved [either] through revolution or by grammatical claims….”

Thanks to Hermann Anker, the establishment of the first Norwegian folk-highschool suffered no economic problems. But since it was uncertain how far the newly started school would meet with interest, they were satisfied at first with rented locales. They were happily surprised to be able to gather 80 stud-ents from the whole country. Then the school was built, and given the very telling name of Sagatun[Saga home]. On the 2nd of October, 1865, the school was opened.

The Theologian

Anders Skrondal writes in his book Grundtvig and Norway (1929) that astonished as one may be by Arvesen’s defense of bokmål [the book language], the environment that was created to help Norwegians rediscover their Norwegian heritage is no less astonishing. In the great meeting-room [at Sagatun] there were busts of Grundtvig and Bjørnson (as was proper and fitting); the walls were decorated with frescoes showing the Nordic mythological world. A copy of Constantin Hansen’s famous painting “Aegir’s Banquet” hung right opposite Thorvaldsen’s figure of Christ. Portraits and busts of Ole Vig, Wergeland, Welhaven, Vinje and Ivar Aasen were tastefully grouped around the room. In the classrooms hung pictures by Tidemand and Gude, portraying what Bjørnson has called “Sunday peasants”. The Anker family’s rooms in the building were fitted out in upper-class taste: furniture in Empire style, Greek columns with gold decoration; in the painted ceilings, one could admire blue arching sky with light summer clouds, colors inspired by Pompeiian excava-tions. Above the grand piano hung a Madonna by Murillo, on a different wall was another Madonna by Raphael. These were the surroundings in which the two Norwegians were attempting to awaken the Norwegian folk-spirit….

Even though they were closely connected with the Danish Grundtvigian milieu, there were important aspects of Grundtvigianism that they quite simply didn’t understand. In the first place, a Norwegian folkhighschool couldn’t avoid taking a position with regard to the language struggle. This didn’t happen [at Sagatun], as we have seen. Even in 1871, Arvesen declared: Sagatun as a school doesn’t take sides in the language question. In the second place, note the explanation he gives for combining folkelighet with Scandinavianism. The article continues: It [the school] has always proceeded from [the premise] that the people of the North are not three, but one people, with three accents, not three languages; with boundaries, but not three nationalities.

Christopher Bruun was right when he wrote to Mix Anker (originally Danish, from one of the most influential Grundtvigian families): I do believe that the ideas here at Romundgard [where Bruun's school, Vonheim, was located] diverge from those at Sagatun. Has it never occurred to you that your way of thinking, here in this country, needs a fundamental translation to Norwegian? Christopher Bruun had lived at Romundgard for barely a year when he wrote that. He was not a Grundtvigian, at least he didn’t support the religious aspect of Grundtvigianism. With his ascetic nature, he felt more at home with Kierkegaard’s thinking. But even while he averred that “Grundtvig’s wizardry has no power over me”, he was better able than any other to carry Grundtvigian folkelighet over into Norwegian reality.

Christopher Bruun as Ibsen and Bjørnson Saw Him

Frederik VII, the king of Denmark, died November 15, 1863. War with Germany was approaching rapidly [in Denmark]. On December 12, 1863, Norwegian students appealed to the students in Uppsala [Sweden]: War threatened a Nordic country, now was the time to defend the “Nordic nationality.” Two days later, on the 14th of December, came Ibsen’s battle-cry: “Awake, strong and bold from sleep to action! A brother in need!”

On February 1, 1864, Prussian and Austrian troops crossed the Eider river. On February 5, the Danes surrendered Dannevirke. [The boundary between Denmark and Germany, defended from ancient times.] At this point, Christopher Bruun was in Rome with his mother, brother and their sick sister Thea. He left the Ital-ian capital immediately, and on April 2 spoke in the [Norwegian] Student Union: Look, that way a person dies a spiritual death, when he says farewell to his idealism…. It is not for Scandinavianism that I speak, … it is for truth; it is not for Denmark, but for Norway, for the victory of truth in my fatherland.

To his mother he writes: “With this, the situation has come to a point that concerns me much more deeply than the talk about Scandinavianism has done up to now. I will give my life to do what is right, even if it ends in ruin. If Norway fails here, those of our countrymen who think, will feel that it has betrayed an ideal… I feel driven to witness that there are ideas which give life beauty and meaning, and that they are well worth one’s maintaining them in the struggle of a lifetime, and even unto death…. I am ready to go to Denmark… precisely for that cause to which I have dedicated my life: to bear witness for truth and justice.”

On April 5, 1864, Bruun left Christiania, the same day that Ibsen left for Italy. Some days before, while Bruun was talking in the Student Union, Ibsen had celebrated his departure with a party for his friends. Bruun enlisted for war service as a volunteer. When the short war ended, he returned to Rome. All that summer, Ibsen was working on the draft for his epic drama Brand. The two of them often met during that time in Rome; Ibsen was plainly fascinated and attracted by Bruun’s strong personality. One day, Bruun asked him why the poet who wrote “A Brother in Need” had not himself taken part in the war. Ibsen answered: “We have another call, we poets. We are to sing for the volunteers.” “Yes, thank you very much,” answered Bruun, “You will sing about what we shall do.”

For Ibsen, Bruun was a continuing moral challenge. In The Wild Duck, the poet talks about “the challenge of idealism”; in Brand, he has the leading character require “all or nothing”. It isn’t easy to say to what extent Bruun was Ibsen’s model for Brand, as is usually claimed in Norwegian literary history, but it is quite clear that the poet’s acquaintance with Bruun was of great signific-ance in the development of the Brand character, which has many traits in common with the Bruun Ibsen knew in 1864-65:

“Remember that I am strict in my demand,
the challenge is everything or nothing.”

“But did you see how he grew tall, while he was speaking.”

“Say, who is it that wills, and believes, and sees -
who will strike for the same goal for which he burns?
I no longer see persons on the earth,
I see only guts, heads and hands.”

“I see that as a grown man you are fulfilling your childhood promise,
to be a whip for the world.”

The winter of 1873-74, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson was in Florence. From there he writes: “I need friends, close warm friends.” In a foreign country he had come to understand that I must not live in the city at home. I cannot, and I dare not come home to Kristiania. At Christmastime in 1873, he learned that for a reasonable price he could buy a farm in Gausdal, [near Bruun’s school] and seized upon the idea with enthusiasm. He had indeed wanted to settle near the sea, “but [in place of] this picture of eternal, changing infinity that flows freshly in from the unknown, I can go to infinity itself; and I think that up there with you, there is a piece of that infinity that can make my mind sail…. Certainly, this ocean that I have longed for is [to be found in] that great thunder of thinking, close to Bruun.”

In 1874, Bjørnson bought the farm Aulestad. “How far is it to Bruun’s place?” he asks in a letter. He had come to a very conservative neighborhood. “When Bjørnson came to Gausdal, that district of rich traditions and great families, the whole ancient culture reacted against him. Bjørnson came as an admirer of peasant life, as the narrator of peasant stories, he wanted to live with his models. He had described them with the warmth of romanticism, they met him with the coldness of reality”.

Disappointment wasn’t long in coming. “I have been accustomed to a strong need to consider all sides of life, and here there is only one” he writes to a friend. But even if everything here in Norway is boring, only the folkhighschool and the life that is bound up with it has my heart.” He still has confidence in Christopher Bruun, who, I believe, is the mightiest spiritual leader in our country, he writes in 1875.

But Bjørnson was accustomed to a rich and many-sided intellectual life, and began to be bored at Aulestad. “For myself, I sometimes have a strong longing for color, music, the noise of mankind, not as in Kristiania, which disgusts me, but as in Berlin, in Vienna, in Rome, in Naples… I have my own way through life… I am pursuing a strong development, and in this I have come far beyond the usual reading and thinking up here in Gausdal”. And what was worse, Bjørnson was beginning to lose faith in the peasants. In a lecture at the Student Union, he said: “One has to move out into the country to learn how ignorant our peasantry is. It’s true that our future depends on the farmer, to a great extent; and he is… immeasurably ignorant. When he awakens, he awakens [only] to reaction.”

Christopher Bruun, whom he had admired so strongly, he now reproaches because he “can make peasants out of both farmer and city material, but can’t do the least thing more. And Lord defend us from being peasants!” It was on the religious plane that the opposition between Bruun and Bjørnson came to crisis and finally led to breach: “I still have to live among long-haired, red-bearded, heavily booted, homespun clad, pietistic apostles of virtue,” he wrote in a letter from 1878. The immediate cause of the breach was – and this could only happen in Norway – a discussion about “the punishment of Hell”…

In a letter to his Swedish friend S. A. Hedlund, Bjørnson writes about his play Over Evne: “My new piece has forced me to investigate our relation to ideals.” Christopher Bruun, whom Bjørnson criticizes for his exaggerated demands, represents exactly the thinking which is the subject of the play.

Christopher Bruun himself describes his relationship to the authors and poets he had known: “I was not a poet in the ordinary sense, had no gift for it. And to tell the truth, I didn’t bother myself so much about it either. What I desired was merely the ability to live what the others had sung, as far as their song had struck down into my heart. It was that art that I wanted to discover. It appeared to me that I too carried a plan for a work of art, only one, but that one I wanted also to form imperishably, as in iron: my life, a work of art.”

Who Was Christopher Bruun?

Christopher Bruun was born September 23, 1839, the son of an attorney practising in the Superior Court, and so belonged in a milieu against which he would later direct violent charges. He thus came from a family that was distant from landsmål, and although he later defended landsmål warmly, he never spoke it himself.

His father died when the boy was only five years old. With her three children, his mother went to live in Hedemark. When Christopher was fifteen, the young students at the gymnas [academic secondary school] in Hamar were caught up in a strong pietistic revival, which would mark him for the rest of his life. In 1856, the family moved back to Kristiania, where the young student began his theological studies.

His first meeting with partisans of the Danish folkhighschool – members of “Little Theologicum” – took place during the Nordic Church Meeting in Kristiania in 1861. The next year, he took part in the Scandinavian Students Meeting in Lund and Copenhagen, where he again met co-students from “Little Theolo-gicum”. Leonard Holmstrøm and Theodor Holmberg, the future leaders of the Swedish folkhighschool, were also there, yet there was no contact between the three young students, although all of them were imbued with the Scandinavian enthusiasm that prevailed in the university milieus of that time.

Christopher Bruun finished his theological training in 1862; next year the family went to live in Rome. When he returned to Italy after the war, he was in great doubt about his future work: should he be a minister, or strike out on a quite different road? One of his teachers, Caspari , suggested that he should enter a university career in science, but Christopher Bruun declined. He explained later, in a letter to his mother, why he didn’t want to work at the uni-versity: It must be said that we would have changed the university’s lack of genuine learning. If I had found the learning there which I thirsted for as the noblest possession in earthly life, I would probably never have come over to the folkelige camp.

The Language Battle: Justification and Significance, 1866

Christopher Bruun went over publicly to “the folkelige camp” in 1866. Then for the first time, discussion of the language struggle was brought into the academic milieu. On November 3, 1866, Christopher Bruun spoke in the Stud-ent Union about “The Language Battle’s Justification and Significance”. His contribution to the debate must be seen in the light of the political struggle in the l860′s, which for no small part became a strife between different points of view about our farmers and … about our whole history.

In his lecture, Bruun threw himself with heat into the struggle for the country’s political and cultural future. From the very first, he turned against the Romanticists and their esthetic peasant-worship – although he was then unacquainted with peasants and unable to speak their language.

“Much could be said for the culture of the Danish-speakers, so foreign to the peasants, and to what I have presumed to call the peasants’ own culture, their own spiritual life. As I have said, there is to be found among the peasants a life-view inherited from their ancestors, with its own folk- customs, its poetry and its characteristic life-wisdom. The culture, like the language, of the peasants has grown here in this country, in a cohesive, even if subdued development. Our [that is, the Danish- or bokmål - speakers'] culture, on the other hand, has, like our speech, sprung up in Denmark, and has developed there under very foreign, especially German, influence. The division to be found here in this country thus hasn’t to do just with language. The fact that there exist two different cultures in the country is the reason that the transition from the one to the other cannot happen without a rupture which puts an appearance of affectation and caricature upon the whole nature of those concerned.”

For the first time, the language struggle was clearly and unequivocally viewed as a cultural battle. Bruun’s analysis of the peasant culture – which in many ways anticipates the cultural anthropology of today – was by contemp-oraries regarded as an “assault on civilization”. The lecture aroused con-siderable notice; some months later one could read in the conservative Morgenbladet [The Morning Paper] (2.2.1868) that Christopher Bruun’s lecture had imported the cause of the language struggle into the academic class, among young men who were by no means inferior educationally, although equipped with more emotion than understanding. But if Bruun paid allegiance to the peasant culture and emphasized its value, he fully recognized to what a degree the peasant was ill-equipped to take on the political responsibility with which he had been charged: It is clear that even our country’s institutions which give the farmer com- munal duties and send him to the Storting, make demands upon him which at his present stage of development he can only in the most meager way fulfill, so that our democratic constitution doubtless must be regarded as an anticipation.

This was in 1866. Bruun knew that there was a Sagatun and that other folkhighschools would come along: “Highschools will be established, designed to give the more able sons of peasants that education and that insight which will answer to their position.” A year later, he himself would found a folkhighschool, but at this point in time, he still didn’t know which road he would follow. His final choice was connected with thoughts and experiences from an earlier period in his life.

Christopher Bruun’s Road to the Folkhighschool

“As a Greek one must live
If Greek one would die.”
Grundtvig – Chronicle Rhymes, 1842.

While he was in Rome, Christopher Bruun was much taken by Greek history. Especially Leonidas awakened his interest, Leonidas who, with his three hundred Spartans was prepared to sacrifice his own and his men’s lives to save the fatherland. Bruun thought about the German-Danish war – which had certainly not been any Thermopylae. I came back, filled with thoughts about the true Greeks. But what I saw and heard here at home was not very Greek – and what I heard in the Norwegian Student Union didn’t sound very Greek either. (“About Being Human”. Speech at the Lillehammer meeting, 1878.)

From that time on, he thought steadily about what one could do to teach his people “to fight for their fatherland like the Greeks.”

And this fatherland, he viewed with other eyes than the Romantic poets: “I have loved, and I do love, human life as it has been lived ‘on Hellas’ bright mountains’, and in the colorful, wonderful lands of the East. I also love it in that subdued, crippled form, often only on a rather miserable cover of the mountainside – as it most often appears here in our poverty-stricken, beloved fatherland. In the spring of 1867, he again had to travel out of the country for family reasons. During the trip, he looked up a number of theologians in Switzerland, Germany and Austria, hoping to get help in finding his way of life, but came to understand that he wasn’t suited to the godly way… I became convinced that I would go out and try to teach Norwegian peasants to love their fatherland.”

In September, 1867, he went on foot through Gudbrandsdal, and found an old farm from the 1600s, Romundgard in Sel. It was there that the peasants had managed, in 1612, to stop a troop of Scottish soldiers, who had landed in Trondheim, from going through Gudbrandsdal to Sweden to join Gustav Adolph in the war against Christian IV [of Denmark. "The Sinclair Song "and "The Battle at Kringom" are the folk-remnants of this event]. So maybe that was a Norwegian Thermopylae?

Christopher Bruun rented the farm, and wrote to his mother:”The district is frugal and rather old-fashioned still, and you know I prize that… Here at Sel, everything is small except the mountains.” He visited all the farms in the district, to tell them about his plans and to learn whether any farmers could think of coming to his school. On October 20, ten days before the school opened, he wrote again to his mother: “Seven have said definitely that they will come, and a good many have talked about it. But even if the seven don’t come, I will begin. And even if nobody comes, I won’t give up the cause, but will stay up here.”

The school opened November l. Was it then a school in the Grundtvigian spirit? On the way home after the summer journey, Bruun had stopped in Denmark, where he first visited Christen Kold [one of the first folkhighschool teachers and perhaps the most famous pioneer of that kind of education], but he recognized that that wasn’t a model he could follow himself. “I could never walk in Kold’s footsteps; he had that unabashed peasant strength, which I perceived was not obtainable for me,” he wrote later to Ludvig Schrøder. After the meeting with Kold, he went to Askov: “I heard Schrøder talk… I felt that he had the whole listening flock in his hand… Could I ever learn to talk like that?”

Already in l867, Bruun had confided to Schrøder: “Grundtvig’s magic words have no power over me”. Pietist, Kierkegaardian Bruun – “Kierkegaard went through my soul like a fire through dry grass” – had not been converted to “happy Christianity” [theological Grundtvigianism] – and one may indeed ask oneself whether that would have been acceptable in the rigidly conservative milieu Christopher Bruun had chosen.

In l873, when the author Kristian Elster visited Grundtvig’s Highschool [at Marienlyst in Denmark] he described Romundgard, which he had previously visited, thus: “I came to think about Bruun’s school in Sel, which I saw one ice-cold spring day. The district there was sandy and barren, terribly poor and comfortless, scrubby, brown and cramped. The people went dressed in leather and looked depressed. How difficult to awaken spirited feeling here, how easy in these Danish plains!”

“The exciting springtime of the folk”

“First, when the exciting springtime of the folk
over forest and grove
awakens all the hundred thousand –
then comes the hour of trouble.”
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, 1872.

Two “poet-politicians” played an essential role in the country’s political development during the 19th century: Wergeland in the l830s, with the first victory of the peasants in the Storting; Bjørnson in the 1860s during the bur-geoning growth of democracy.

Already in 1859, when the farmers again held the majority in the Storting, Johan Sverdrup was struggling with plans to create a new political party, to the left. The Venstre [Left] party, an alliance between peasants and liberals, was founded ten years later, in 1869. Bjørnson welcomed the new party: “A great time – and we are with it! The greatest thing on earth is: to be where powers that are great from the beginning, take shape and place.”

“Life up here is so full of beginnings,” he wrote to Danish friends. Now it is in Norway as in Denmark, “not the capital that casts most of its opinions out over the land and conquers it…. It is the country which has approached so close, that it now finally lays siege to the city.”

“The folkelige camp” goes to attack upon all the dominating forces in Kristiania’s political and intellectual life: the Intelligentsia, the Scandinavianists, the Romanticists. In the battle against “the Copenhageners’ contempt for a youthful people”, the goal, as in Denmark, is to change the cultural currents. On December 4, 1869, Bjørnson was elected chairman of the Student Union [the culturally powerful alumni association of the University]. The time had come to bring the battle for “new beginnings in the North,” “the exciting springtime of the folk” into the citadel of reaction – Kristiania University itself. Bjørnson writes to Christopher Bruun and asks him to come to the capital to lecture.

The Norwegian cultural war. Christopher Bruun’s lectures in Kristiania, 1870.

Christopher Bruun gave his first lecture on May l, 1870. [There were] seven lectures, altogether, in three weeks, followed by three discussion evenings.

Bjørnson arranged open admission for everyone interested, and from the reports in the press, one would judge that the whole “folkelige camp” had agreed to be there. But the opposition was there too: Some selected people from the university and the [governmental] offices sat in corners and took note of every word that came from his mouth – ‘the control committee’ was what this knot of angry cognoscenti was called.

Christopher Bruun made an unforgettable impression. F. B. Wallem writes, in his history of the Student Union (1916): “There hasn’t been since Wergeland’s day such strongly moving life in the student world as when Christopher Bruun lectured. He came in to us, and with his power- ful calmness unfolded these great visions and bold ideas, which were to build Nor-way’s future. This life set the whole academic world in an uproar and went through the country like a strong Northern wind.” Forty years later Eivind Berggrav speaks of Bruun’s lectures in his book Norwegian Church Profiles and declares that the lectures in the Student Union “created a watershed in Norwegian cultural history.”

So what did this stern theologian have to say – “the prophet of poverty”- who came to Kristiania in his country clothes from his modest school in Sel? Some days after the lecture series, Christopher Bruun wrote in Bjørnson’s Norwegian People’s Paper: “What I wanted to do at the Student Union was mostly to appeal to the friends of the language cause and others who thought like them. I wanted to extend the horizon for this extreme nationalistic direction to which I myself belong. I want to try to clarify the Norwegian nationality’s – or, if I may use a more striking expression, the Norwegian folk-spirit’s requirement for other domains than [just] that of language.”

One of the many short-lived contemporary publications, Paa Forpost, [At The Watchpost] reported the lectures and noted the mixture of conservatism and progressive ideas which is so characteristic of Bruun. The magazine also pre-sented the main points in his gospel, the foundation pillars that the new Norway should rest upon: the language question, the folkhighschool, and friendship for the peasant class.

“What he said were quiet things, with no smack of revolution or loose think-ing. No bishop could have been more orthodox and tender toward the one redeeming Christian church; and mountain-conservatism with inheritance rights and the old Norwegian way of life were preached in solemn seriousness. And yet there was a strong declaration of war and a stout hint of wild attack, as he declared a new beginning of Old Norway, [resting] upon three foundation- pillars, each one a rock of controversy: the language question, the folkhigh- school and friendship for the peasant class. It was ultra-Norwegian peasant democracy which, tramping heavily, with the harshness of a purely practical view, overtook the foreign culture of officialdom from far in the rear, trampled over what was “fine”, like the idol-smashers of the Reformation, and cleared the way for a new time.”

The political movement in which Bruun placed his confidence – the ideas friendly to the farmer and the union with the friends of the peasants – was what Søren Jaabæk had created.. As in Wergeland’s time there were new peasant leaders in the Storting who represented the interests of the farmers, and once more the peasant view stood in sharp contrast to that of the official class. With Søren Jaabæk we meet again the conflict in Norwegian politics, continuous throughout the whole last century. Jaabæk’s most important mouthpiece was the newspaper Folketidende [The People's Times] , which he himself had started and which was published in 17,000 copies – an exceptionally high number for the time. Besides this, Søren Jaabæk arranged meetings around the country, and obtained support in this way from the majority of the farmers.

By the political establishment, Jaabæk’s movement was seen as a peasant attack upon “civilization”, not least because Jaabæk recommended the removal of all official support from education, except for the primary school, and because he opposed the law requiring an annual meeting of the Storting, on the ground that it was too expensive. In the neighboring countries, Jaabæk’s movement awakened notice, especially in Sweden, where the tendency was to look down somewhat upon peasant-Norway. The liberal [Swedish newspaper] Aftonbladet [The Evening News] described Jaabæk in words that filled the Swedes with dread – might such ideas infect their own country?

It was this Jaabæk then, that Christopher Bruun referred to in his lectures: “Jaabæk is the name [that stands] for the Norwegian peasant, in historical truth… a good Norwegian creature, ignorant and raw as the peasant folk are, but powerful, a true Norwegian.” That’s how the journal Svein Uredd [Svein the Unafraid] reported Bruun’s presentation of the peasant leader; the paper meant to emphasize Bruun’s intention to unite the common people and the national spirit.

Already in the 1866 lecture, Bruun had considered the language war in a cultural connection. The real Norwegian culture, freed of everything that Bjørnson called “Copenhagenry”, was the culture the folkhighschool wanted to teach its students to know. And the fight which must be waged, if Norwegian culture were to win [dominance] in the country, should stand “under Henrik Wergeland’s banner. In his time, ‘Norwegianism’ had been overcome by ‘the Intelligentsia’. Wergeland’s opponents got themselves into all the influential positions in the country, and many of them are still among the leading men. Now the friends of Norwegianism are again gathering to fight against European Intelligentsianism and will endeavour to take back the mastery in Norway.”

Language and culture – those were the first two pillars upon which the new Norway should be built. It was the third pillar that unloosed the strongest reactions. Bruun expressed himself thus: The awakening Norwegian national spirit has opened its eyes [to see] that the peasant’s language is the true Norwegian language. It will also bring people to look with other eyes upon that political movement which has begun to rise up among our peasants.

And Bruun spoke of Søren Jaabæk as “one of Norway’s great men. His greatness lies first, not in any extraordinary insight, but in an extraordinary strength. This strength has enabled him, despite persistent scorn in the Storting, to speak out what many peasants before him have thought, but hardly any have dared to stand for openly. That is how he has created a party in the Storting, with roots in our common people all around the country. In this way, he has done more than anyone to forward our peasant class’s progress toward independent political thinking and political life.”

It required a certain amount of courage to mention in such words and with such arguments the peasant leader who, in the eyes of “the intelligent” represented pure barbarism, both that which had existed before and that which would follow if one allowed the man free space for action. At the same time, Bruun commented with his customary clarity of vision upon the peasant movement’s “materialism” and persistent hostility to culture: “It is my belief that this movement, in spite of the decidedly materialistic char- acter it has, is … of quite overpowering value. It is mostly the result of an oppressive financial situation. But looked at more deeply, it is rooted in our social con- ditions. It is the beginning of a rising up of our peasants against our bureaucracy. This rising is justified. For the position the official class now has holds down the people’s strength and weakens the national character. We should work toward a situation in which officials (except for the ministers of churches) can be chosen without reference to classical education or civil service examinations, from among those men who live within the district to be served. This step should be prepared for by two others, which also, for other reasons, are part of the peasant party’s program. The first is that there should be salaries for community service. The second is that our involved legal system should be made significantly simpler and set out in more understandable language.”

It goes without saying that Christopher Bruun’s “program” was totally unacceptable to the University’s representatives. The national archivist Michael Birkeland expressed his own and his colleagues’ indignation in a furious letter to Bjørnson: “In Response to Mr. Chr. Bruun’s Agitations”. Bruun’s lectures, Birkeland wrote, “amounted to a denial of the fundamental conditions for civilized national life, and [a rejection] of the University as the representative of universal scientific learning, unconfined by national boundaries” After having “heard Søren Jaabæk glorified as one of our greatest men”, one had also to listen to Mr. Bruun’s presenting “the higher scientific education – or the bureaucracy, as he quite naively calls it… as something that has played out its role in our national life; and the peasant’s way of thinking offered as the highest regulator for our public life.”

Birkeland declares further that until then, politics had not affected the University. But Bruun’s lectures were a “call to the students”, which encouraged them “after filling themselves with the rich nourishment offered by the capital… to go out into the country districts and settle down as schoolmen, craftsmen or agitators….” And what was worse, according to Birkeland, was that “these attacks on officials, in the political agitation both within and outside of society, come from people who are themselves sons of officials.” If this continues, “we will actually come to see the sons of officials, themselves living like peasants, rising up to punish their fathers.” There was a real danger of this, for “soon Mr. Bruun’s ideas will spread over the country, and everywhere they will be approved [because they were] lectures held in the Norwegian Student Union.”

And that is what happened. Bjørnson had, already in 1869, declared that “the Norwegian student is the son of the people”. The journal Tiraljøren challenged the students to put themselves at the service of the peasants. “Let many go and study science, history, law, theology, [and then] some settle themselves as permanent schoolteachers, some travel freely, as wandering adult teachers, to the ends of the country, giving lectures to awaken the people, to make Wergeland’s and Vig’s thoughts actual; and to help this to occur, a great Norwegian and free association must arise.”

Some months later, the same journal explains the role the folkhigh-school should and must play in the culture war: “the folkhighschool is the greatest and most important institution of our time, and therefore it is also expected to have the great task of smoothing out the gap between the two cultural directions, cutting down all class distinctions and bringing the principle of equality into customary use. The folkhighschool will make the democratic idea real.”

The “European intelligence” which felt outraged by Bruun’s political and cultural program, undertook a counter-initiative. National Romanticism and pietism, with their well-known representatives Jørgen Moe and Gisle Johnson, created a united organization to gather means for founding “opposition schools” to counter the folkhighschool’s destructive influence. At first without result; but in 1875, county schools were founded with official support, with the obvious intent of drawing pupils away from the folkhighschools, of which there were by then some thirty.

The culture war – which in Denmark stood between “the new and the old education”, and which led to division among the official culture’s represen-tatives – was even stronger and more uncompromising in Norway. Perhaps the development in Norway shows more clearly than in Denmark, to what a degree the struggle to resume national identity is bound up with the fight for demo-cracy, and with ideas we today would call progressive. It is not surprising that the political and cultural struggle in Norway in the last century [now] finds echoes in countries in the third world. There too, the search for national identity is inextricably bound up with the struggle for political independence and self-reliance.

Christopher Bruun and Romanticism

Occasionally, Christopher Bruun and the folkhighschool in its earliest years are presented as a product of Romanticism. In my account, I have tried to show that Bruun never was an adherent of Romanticism. This appears as clearly as one could wish from his lecture “On Romanticism”, which I would like to summarize as the conclusion to this over-view of the historical background for the Norwegian folkhighschool.

In the 1870s, public meetings were regularly held in Lillehammer, and it was there that Bruun gave his talk about Romanticism. He began by referring to a literary announcement in Dagbladet, [The Daily News] which said that the folk-highschool was “romantic”. The word itself, he says, with its vague and indef-inite meaning, sounds in the ears of the peasant as “educated gibberish”: For my part, I wouldn’t like to call myself a Romanticist, in spite of all I owe to these people. There are others he is just as much indebted to, quite certainly Wergeland. When anyone accuses our school up in Gausdal of being romantic, the meaning is, to a great extent, the same as to call it reactionary. For – and Bruun mentions Welhaven as the most obvious example – all the Romanticists defended a reactionary politics. [Whereas], even though the folk-highschool certainly doesn’t outright belong to theVenstre [Left] party, he continues, I think that although we certainly can’t follow the political plans of that party all the way, – we certainly can match the members of that party in true liberal- mindedness.

Let us follow his thinking a little further: why does Bruun deny Romanticism so strongly? “The Romanticists, as is commonly known, have always allied themselves with the government and with the aristocracy; they have looked upon poetry and literature as the possession of the educated classes, and have opposed a [true] democratic spirit. But if there is anything that is characteristic of the folk- highschool, it must be that it doesn’t want poetry and literature to be the monopoly of any “educated class”. The Romanticists wrote excellently about the people, but they didn’t write for the people. They held themselves superior and distant from its life, except insofar as it was a subject of study.”

Romanticism’s esthetic cultivation of the peasant – here he mentions Welhaven – brings him also to think about Bjørnson: “I come at this point to think about something which has happened with another great poet. For many years, he wrote about peasant life, described it quite beau- tifully, became famous for this. Then one fine day he moved up into a country district and settled down among these peasants of his. And suddenly, twenty years after he began to write about the peasant, he made the discovery that ‘the peasant is enormously ignorant’. Well, that is a Romantic poet for you. One who was a little less romantic would have known something about how ignorant the peasant is, before he set out to write about him. At least, he wouldn’t have waited twenty years before making his discovery.”

What follows is a serious indictment on Bruun’s part: “There is, in Romanticism, a lack of truth. Therefore, many of them don’t have much faith in these peasants whom they describe so handsomely. Therefore, on the whole, they aren’t fully serious in support of the ideals they sing about. They select their ideals in such a way that the question of realizing them won’t come up – they can merely enjoy the pleasure of looking at them. The Romanticists … want life itself to be poetry…. But then they make a mis- take, when they undertake to “live poetry”. That requires that one have a high and noble aim to live for. The person who has found an ideal that he loves whole- heartedly and to whose realization he devotes all his powers, that person’s life, it seems to me, is poetry.”

For the Romanticists, then, “to live poetically” meant only “to enjoy poetry.” And further: The alliance they made with the government and the aristocracy was not of a merely spiritual kind; it brought them privileges and material advantages. Therefore Christopher Bruun insists on Wergeland’s bold motto: Make your ideals real. Folkhighschool men have learned a great deal from Romanticism. But they haven’t learned the art of working in unity with the mighty and obtaining posi- tions for themselves as a reward for the services they give to the establishment.

Of course “we have learned from Romanticism; that is, we have been taught under the Norwegian educational system. For since the victory of Welhaven and the Alliance over Wergeland, our prevailing education is romantic.” But the Romanticists have never learned our art: “of being able to carry on a life among the peasants”. In other words: “We work for the peasants whom the Romanticists have sung about. But there- fore, we also work so that these peasants shall have greater influence than they can now exercise, while the Romanticists have worked more to hold them down. We work so that the peasant’s life may have more of that beauty and of that rich content which the Romanticists have so handsomely shown us…. But here we come back to that contrast I spoke of at first: we can in no way agree with the Romanticists that poetry and literature should be the separate property of ‘an educated class’. We work to make poetry and all the best living qualities of education the common property of all in the country who have minds capable of taking it in.”

In connection with European Romanticism, he says:” The spiritual movement which has resulted from Romanticism has never been able to reach down into the depth of the folk.” One need only mention Welhaven, Tieck, or Novalis: “such men don’t have iron enough to create a popular movement.”

The language movement risks the same defeat, if its defenders don’t resolutely choose to proceed on the basis of reality as it is. That requires one to understand that “Norwegian peasants need their own speech in order to advance their own content. Whoever expects our farmers, just as they are, or as they by the help of the state’s schooling can become, to be able to get any good, speechwise, from our education, that person shows, in my opinion, that he doesn’t yet have a significant grasp of reality. His hope for the language movement is – if I may use the expression – only a romantic dream, which can’t expect to be realized. Apart from that kind of ‘Romanticism’, the language movement can [progress] only on the condition that it succeeds in finding a means to eliminate the extreme spiritual inequality which is one of the dark sides of the culture of our time. But such a means, we now believe the free folkhighschool has found.”

From the beginning, the real goal of the folkhighschool, as I have several times pointed out, was “revolt against the establishment”. It was quite different in Sweden, where the historical background was quite different.

According to my understanding, Christopher Bruun expressed the goal of the folkhighschool better than anyone else, and it was a goal which has [today] lost none of its actuality.

Finally, to justify this long consideration of former times, some words of Ebbe Reich: “To let the light of earlier times pass through today’s lens and throw light into the future.” (The Alternative Nordic Campaign, at Borups Highschool, November 10, 1984).

Notes

1. Johan Ernst Sars (1835-1917), Norwegian historian, whose chief work Overview of Norwegian History (4 vols., 1873-91) played a very important role in the struggle for self-government and the national culture. In contrast to older views of the Union time as a stagnation or break in national development, Sars asserts continuity in Norwegian history, represented by the free, democratic peasant society.

2. Henrik Wergeland (1808-1845), Norway’s first poet of world renown – as a lyricist, Wergeland hardly has his equal in Norwegian literature. In his work, romanticism and the ideals of enlightenment and revolution are united, and long after his death he was a standard-bearer for the democratic and national movement.

3. Halvdan Koht (1873-1965), Norwegian historian and politician, professor in history 1910-35 and foreign minister from 1935-41. Koht’s extensive authorship includes a long series of subjects from history and literature; in many areas, he has presented new material and new points of view.

4. Ludvig Kristensen Daa (1809-1877), Norwegian politician, historian and ethnologist, founder of an ethnographic museum, who became one of Wergeland’s many opponents. Wergeland took revenge by making his former friend the chief character in the farce English Salt under the name of Vinæger (Vinegar).

5. Peter Christensen Asbjørnsen (1812-1885), the craftsman’s son (later forest-engineer) and Jørgen Moe (1813-1882), the farmer-boy (later bishop) who became the most significant pair of writers in Norwegian literature – in the consciousness of Norwegians, they are inseparable. Together, they published the most important literary work in the 1840’s, Norske Folkeeventyr (Norwegian Folk Fairy-stories ), which to this very day is found in most Norwegian homes. In many ways, the collection is a product of national romanticism, but it had great consequences – both linguistically and literarily – for all later Norwegian literature.

6. Johan Sebastian Welhaven (1807-1873), Norwegian poet, whose lyrical authorship is of rare quality, leader of “the Intelligence party” in the culture war of the1830’s, by the side of the historian and language researcher P. A. Munch (1810-1863). The” Intelligence party” founded in 1836 the daily newspaper Den Constitutionelle (The Constitutional ), of which, among others C. A. Fougstad (1806-1871) was editor.

7. Ivar Aasen (1813-1896), Norwegian poet and language researcher. Aasen’s know-ledgeable work with language became the foundation of the whole movement for “landsmål” (now called “nynorsk”). To this day, all nynorsk is a variation of the written norm that Aasen created from his studies of Norwegian local dialects. Already in 1885, landsmål was approved by the Storting to be equal with the usual written language as “school and official language”.

8. Aasmund Olavsson Vinje (1818-1870), the other pioneer in the landsmål movement, was an author and journalist; from 1858 till his death, the editor and the only employee for the magazine Dølen (The Countryman). As journalist and author of the travel description Ferdeminni fraa Sumaren 1860 – (Travel Memories from the Summer of 1860) , Vinje is a satirist and ironist, whose characteristic “double vision” and equally characteristic humor, once and for all dispenses with peasant-romanticism and worship of the past. As a poet, he is an outstanding lyricist with a rich and varied voice – many of Vinje’s poems were set to music by Grieg.

9. Eilert Sundt (1817-1875), clergyman and in general viewed not only as the founder of sociology in Norway but also as a pioneer among the world’s great social researchers. In a series of writings, he described the living conditions and behavior of the indigent populations in city and country…. Sundt was also an active worker in folk-education work: editor of Folkevenn (The People’s Friend ), 1857-66, and founder of the Oslo Workers’ Association in 1864.

10. Gisle Johnson (1822-1894), Norwegian theologian and author, and as professor of theology a strict and rigid defender of confessional orthodoxy, with significant power.

11. Magnus Brostrup Landstad (1802-1880), collector of folk-songs, clergyman and hymn-writer. His Kirkesalmebok [Church Hymnal ] was authorised in 1869 for church-service use, and “Landstad revised” from 1926 was until recently the most common hymnbook in Norwegian churches.

12. Carl Paul Caspari (1814-1892), originally German, theologian and orientalist, professor of theology in Christiania for nearly 40 years, with great influence on his students. Friend and co-worker of Gisle Johnson.

13. Kristian Elster (1841-1881), Norwegian author, literary critic and journalist, pioneer of realistic literature.

14. Johan Sverdrup (1816-1892), Norwegian politician, who from his first term in the Storting sought close cooperation with Ole Gabriel Ueland and the peasant opposition, and afterward led the united opposition to the government, both in the Storting and among the people. Sverdrup was the leading power behind the institution of parliamentarianism in 1884 and from June of the same year was State Minister in Norway’s first Leftist government.

15. Eivind Berggrav (1884-1959), Norwegian theologian, publicist and bishop, author of a series of writings about religious, literary and cultural subjects. During the second World War, the leading man in the church’s opposition activity and after the war, the Norwegian church’s official leader.

16. Søren Jaabæk (1814-1894), at first, teacher and parish-clerk, later politician and member of the Storting from 1845 to 1890. His consistent economizing politics gave him the nickname of “No-sayer”. Following a Danish prototype, he founded in 1865 the first society in support of the peasants, which became a countrywide movement, with the magazine Folketiende (People’s Times) as its chief organ.

by Erica Simon, 1989
Askov Højskoles Forlag
Translated by Kathryn Parke, 1998

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