The A to Z of Norway by Jan Sjåvik

Author:Jan Sjåvik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2008-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

LITERATURE. Norway’s earliest literature consists of runic inscriptions made on stone during the Viking age as well as alliterative poetry that was mostly orally transmitted and is known in writing only from later Icelandic manuscripts. The Icelandic sagas of the 13th century also indicate that there was a Norwegian oral prose tradition that continued among the Norwegian settlers in Iceland. As Christianity arrived in Norway, missionary monks and priests brought with them both the writing technology and the alphabet that enabled large-scale creation of texts. During the High Middle Ages, there were writing traditions associated both with the royal court and the residences of religious leaders; for example, King Sverre Sigurdsson arranged to have a saga of his life composed. The finest literary text from medieval Norway is a handbook for kings called Konungs skuggsjá (the King’s Mirror), which may have been composed around 1250, and that seems to have influenced the legislative work of Magnus VI Lagabøte. With the arrival of the Black Death, however, Norway lost so much of its population that the native literary tradition dwindled to almost nothing.

The medieval representatives of the church used Latin as a medium of writing, but this changed with the coming of the Lutheran Reformation. Lutheranism privileges the individual’s relationship with God, and reading sacred scripture is a primary means by which that relationship can be developed. The New Testament was translated into Danish as early as in 1524, and the entire Bible was available in Danish by 1550. The Danish Bible translation was also used in Norway, which had entered into a union with Denmark in 1397. Many Lutheran ministers studied abroad and brought intellectual impulses with them when they returned home. Thus such general European movements as the Renaissance and humanism came to play a role in Norway as well, where there was a resurgence of interest in the literature of the Viking period as well as an outpouring of topographical descriptions. During the Baroque period, Norway had a great poet in Petter Dass, who wrote within a general European aesthetic. By the time of the Enlightenment figure Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), there were established conduits of artistic and literary communication between Norway and the rest of Europe; however, the flow was generally northward rather than the opposite way. The influence of neoclassicism can be observed in Johan Herman Wessel’s comedy Kierlighed uden Strømper (1772; Love without Stockings).

The northward migration of ideas is even more clearly visible during the period in literary and intellectual history that is referred to as romanticism. Such figures as Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1689–1755), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), and Albrecht von Haller (1708–77) laid the groundwork for the ideas and attitudes that inform this movement. Some of these ideas, further developed by the German philosophers Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), made it possible to regard the literary artist as a kind of prophet who communicated with the divine found in nature. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) emphasized both the role of the nation and of language and its connection to this divine spirit, thus giving romanticism a national slant.

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