Grundtvig and Golden Age CopenhagenBy Flemming Lundgreen-NielsenThe article has originally been given as a public lecture at the University of Copenhagen during the Golden Days in Copenhagen festival in September 1994. By way of introduction the question is posed to which extent Grundtvig belongs to the Golden Age period in Danish cultural and artistic life. Though he lived in the capital for 65 years, he never orientated himself towards the places that interested most other educated Copenhageners. The University rejected his applications for a professorate, and he in return vehemently attacked the dead learning of the institution. He hardly ever went to the Cathedral or other of the city churches, since he was at odds with most of the clergy. The art of acting he considered to be organized hypocrisy and accordingly avoided the Royal Theatre. He had good relations to the Kings (and Queens!), but did not involve himself in the affairs of the Royal Court. Unlike most contemporary writers and artists, he never took the Grand Tour of the Continent, in fact apart from four journeys to England (1829-31 and 1843) and one to Norway (1851), he stayed at home in his study, travelling in time through his comprehensive readings rather than in actual space. As he grew older, he got quite popular among his younger followers and ended up becoming one of the tourist attractions of the city, as witnessed 1872 by the young English poet Edmund Gosse briefly before Grundtvig’s demise.Grundtvig cared little for the kind of elite culture that dominated Copenhagen for most of his life. Though singing of national ballads was inaugurated during his 1838 lectures and since then has been a part of Danish tradition for public meetings, he had no ear for music at all and never communicated with the fine composers who set music to his texts. Sculpture and painting he rejected as base materialistic arts, only acknowledging the Danish sculptor of European fame, Bertel Thorvaldsen, because of his unassuming and genial personality, not on account of his reliefs and statues. Even his fellow poets he in general criticized harshly, excepting a few works by B.S. Ingemann. On the whole he did not think that, the first third of the 19th century constituted any Golden Age: it was a period filled with drowsiness and shallow entertainment, devoid of anything but sensualistic or even materialistic pleasures.Inspired by writers from Classical Greece and Rome, older humanists such as professor K.L. Rahbek nourished a hopeless longing for a lost Golden Age. Modem romanticists, however, such as the philosopher Henrich Steffens, the poet Adam Oehlenschl.ger and the above mentioned Thorvaldsen strove to regain or recreate a true Golden Age in the near future. Spurred on by Norse mythology as well as by his Christian belief, Grundtvig from around 1824 increasingly came to share this attitude. He distinguished between Guld-Alder (Golden Age) as a thing of the past, and Gylden-Aar (literally: Golden Year) as a state of earthly and heavenly happiness soon to be achieved or even existing in the present moment-the word refers to the Biblical Year of Jubilee as rendered in a medieval Danish translation of the Old Testament. Unfortunately no all-encompassing examination of Grundtvig’s use of these terms has been executed, but from his secular poetry a series of instances are given in the following, starting with a somewhat overlooked poem called »Gylden-Aaret« from January 1834, celebrating three moments in the life of King Frederik VI: his recovery from a serious illness in Schleswig and his triumphant return to Copenhagen in August 1833, hisbirthday in January 1834 and his 50 years’ jubilee as a ruler in the following April. The modem Gylden-Aar is defined as happiness for all of the people through enlightenment about life, procured by the king and all the fine poets surrounding him. Thus Grundtvig gives a unique priority to the art of poetry. No matter what occurred to Denmark in the rest of Grundtvig’s life-time, he managed to interpret the events as pains of child-birth heralding the approaching Gylden-Aar rather than as death throes. Instead of confining himself to the refined small-scale topics of most contemporary poets, he time and again energetically prophecied about the expected Gylden-Aar as a solid historical fact. In a period where elitist art according to the doctrines of romantic poetics was literally idolized, he maintained that the highest form of art consists in organizing society and the lives of common people so that all innate talents and latent possibilities are being developed in the due course of time. He believes this to be happening under the benevolent reign of the present Danish kings, among others things because the Danes have been reared to pay attention to each other and are generally uninterested in pursuing power and glory, honour and greatness. Grundtvig deduces this attitude partly from the role played by the peasants in the formation of the modem Danish national character, partly from the influence of the exeptionally loving, loveable and lovely Danish womanhood. Even the geographical position of Copenhagen between the Sound (the scene of the heroic battle against Lord Nelson in 1801) and the impressive beeches of Charlottenlund Forest (a beautiful and peaceful idyll of nature) becomes symbolic of Denmark’s state of mind, demonstrating a harmony between nature and history, reality and dream, simplicity and majesty, people and royalty. Though Grundtvig remained much of an outsider in Golden Age Copenhagen, his interest in the common citizen, in family and home and everyday life, relates him to the then current concept of ’cozy’ (hyggelig) Biedermeier art after all. Because of his view of universal history, he was able to give depth and significance even to the smallest and most trivial elements in his environment. Grundtvig simply could not help converting the exclusive Golden Age of the poets and artists into a fruitful Gylden-Aar for the whole nation.
Grundtvig i guldalderens København
