ERICA SIMON was a French scholar and teacher (of Scandinavian subjects in a French university) who was widely recognized in Scandinavia as the non-Scandinavian best versed in matters of the folk-high-school. She founded a kind of folkhighschool in France, where Scandinavian folk-highschool people and French rural people came together to discuss matters of interest to both. She has written and lectured extensively on this subject. This book, the result of graduate research, is a history of the early years (approximately 1843-1873) of the folkhighschools in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The Epilogue gives her observations about the extension of the folkhighschool movement in America, Israel, Nigeria and Australia, and closes with some opinions about the possible place of the folkhighschool in our "post-industrial society".

KATHRYN PARKE is an active Quaker, retired librarian, long-time student of folk education, and friend/admirer of Erica Simon. She was a co-founder of the Folk Education Association of America (IPEA) in 1976, served as its executive secretary, and edited its journal Option for 8 years. Kay has translated numerous articles from Norwegian and Danish, and two other books, including the autobiography of European Quaker leader/activist Sigrid Helliessen Lund (from Norway). She lives in Black Mountain, NC.

Foreword
Chapter 1: Denmark
Chapter 2: Norway
Chapter 3: Sweden
Epilogue

 

FOREWORD

Frederik Christensen's foreword identifies this as a re-working in book-form of a series of lectures given by Simon at the Nordic Folk Academy [Kungälv, Sweden] in 1985. These lectures in turn were drawn from her massive doctoral dissertation Reveil National et Culture Populaire en Scandinavie; La Genése de la Højskole Nordique 1844-1878, which has not been translated into any Scandinavian language [nor into English].

Frederik continues: "Nobody outside of the North has worked his or her way, as has Erica Simon, behind the outer frames and the visible form of the first folkhighschools, holding fast to the main idea. Therefore this publication - in spite of its historical distance - is a provocative and very timely response to the development in the Nordic folkhighschool today.

The Finnish folkhighschools aren't included, says Christensen, partly because this book deals with the development of the folkhighschool. during the earliest decades, while Finland's first folkhighschool appeared in 1889; and partly because the Finnish folkhighschools intended to give out their own history in connection with their centennial in 1989.

The national chapters are translated from French to each country’s language. The Danish translation was undertaken by Vilhelm Nielsen, the Norwegian by Solveig Schult Ulriksen, and the Swedish by Carin Cederblad-Hansen. The translators have supplied the notes.

The book is published with support from the Nordic Cultural Fund.

[The English translator has used square brackets to insert a number of small additions, for the benefit of English-readers who may not be familiar with some of the concepts that would be immediately understood by the Scandinavians for whom Simon's book was written.]

 

CHAPTER ONE: DENMARK

Prologue

"What is really new has its roots in tradition."
T.S. Eliot

It hardly escapes anyone's notice, that the need to find one's roots is everywhere valid: in personal life, at the national level, and not least in global perspective. Perhaps the often mentioned lack of history is about to be corrected. Can we hope that interest in the Nordic folkhighschool's historic, philosophical background may be awakened?

I have given two years of my life to research in this area, but since both of my dissertations were written in French, only a few have been able to read them. Therefore, it is with joy that I undertake to review - as briefly as possible - what I consider important to understand - why "the Highschool" exists in the North and not in other European lands.

Grundtvig declared, in his famous "Man's Memory" lecture (at Borch's Collegium in Copenhagen in 1838, printed in 1877) that the word "objectivity" doesn't exist in the Danish language, and that he himself didn't require himself to be objective in his works. Nor is objectivity to be expected in my presentation. Certainly, I have investigated original material, but the choice of sources and the interpretation of them must always be somewhat subjective.

I can very well imagine that not everyone will approve my interpretation of the Nordic folkhighschool's philosophical-historical background. It is indeed not only subjective, it takes its point of reference in a comparison of the North with Central Europe, first of all with France, naturally. In other words, it is an interpretation which can briefly be described as an attempt to explain the folk-highschool as a part of the history of the North, seen with French eyes.

N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783-1872)
How is Grundtvig perceived today? Do we think first about the poet who wrote hymns? He did indeed write about 1500.

Most people probably connect Grundtvig's name immediately with the highschool. [The word "high school" is, throughout writings about the Scandinavian folkhighschool, to be understood as meaning not "high school" in an American sense, but something more nearly comparable in America to the junior college.] But how many know that Grundtvig's thoughts and plans [about schooling] never became realized?

Although Grundtvigian research is very active in Denmark, the results hardly reach the general public. An Israeli student of Grundtvig tells me that he has asked many persons on the street in Copenhagen, what they knew about Grundtvig, and he got the impression that Grundtvig was quite unknown.

Meanwhile, one cannot escape [the fact] that Grundtvig has marked Denmark in innumerable areas. A certain atmosphere of "freedom", not the very theoretical French concept of "liberté", nor anything closely related to classical liberalism, but something which can hardly be defined, yet is found everywhere in Denmark.

What Georg Brandes (1842-1927) said in a talk in Sorø in 1902 continues to be true: "Grundtvig's life work is one of the chief cornerstones on which the Denmark of today is built."

The literary historian Vilhelm Andersen (1864-1953) writes that Grundtvig's authorship has become "if not the clearest, at least the strongest expression of the Danish folk and the Danish spiritual struggle for self-awareness."

Professor Hal Koch (1904-63) gave a speech about Grundtvig during the occupation in 1940, to strengthen Danish self-confidence. Why just Grundtvig? "I doubt that in any other country could one find a single person who has left such deep traces as he, in his people's life", he said.

But this deep influence cannot be programmed on a computer. The keyword to understanding Grundtvig is a word which is difficult to comprehend and accept, especially for people who continue to live in Auguste Comte's positivism - the word "obscurity".

"What pictures and words
sketch only as a shadow,
the smallest mirror of amber
impresses with life;
only in the way of obscurity
can the "mirror of dust" reflect everything
that the Word would express."

The poem is explicated by the Grundtvig researcher Helge Toldberg (1913-64) thus: "It is presumptuous to believe that a human being can see things really clearly as in a glass mirror".

This is exactly what is hard for Swedes to understand. After Grundtvig's death in 1872, August Sohlmann (l824-74) - to whom we shall refer several times in the Swedish section of this little book - wrote that "the obscure, the mystical, unexplained and unexplainable, what is expressed through obscure figures of speech, doesn't appeal to the Swedish people."

Perhaps we today are beginning to be more accepting of this Grundtvigian "obscurity" - the opposite of "the dead glossiness of clarity", as Grundtvig expresses it in his Literary Testament, 1827. Even Frenchmen, who have the reputation of being "Cartesian", are inclined to recognize other dimensions in mankind than just the rational. But beyond this is the problem that Grundtvig's language doesn’t make understanding easier, especially when one tries to translate it to another language. Hal Koch asserts: "There is often something prophetically-obscure about his poetry and speeches, which makes it difficult to re-cast them in another language. It is even more difficult to comprehend for one who is not familiar with the Danish language and with the Danish way of thinking."

If one abandons Grundtvig as a subject for research and instead tries to get nearer to him through a kind of existential approach, then one may discover that, even if one does not find "...that to all burglar-proof locks [there is] a simple master-key"

Yet the key word "obscurity" does show the way to Grundtvig's philosophy: "Obscurity is, for Grundtvig, life's own mystery, for anyone who really reaches that boundary," writes Hal Koch. "Therefore Grundtvig belongs to the world's Great Ones, for few have meditated and pondered more than Grundtvig, that is, meditated in a purely philosophical sense. Like the Great Ones of Poetry and Thought - Plato, Shakespeare, Pascal, Nietzsche, Dostoievski - he has pushed on to life's boundary, where everything is as though seen in sharper light, where evil and good, falsehood and truth, life and death, God and the devil, come to meet mankind. Here he has gathered some of human existence's puzzling richness, and out of these visions he speaks and writes, all his life."

Whatever one thinks about Grundtvig, everyone can agree with Hal Koch, when he writes: "Grundtvig was not content to remain in the dimensionless world of the narrow-minded bourgeoisie."

Grundtvig's language, his obscurity, don't make it easier to understand his spiritual universe; but behind this language can be glimpsed the human being who wrote: "Always I sang what I had in mind,
Struggle was my song, for there was struggling within." Behind "obscurity's philosopher" a deeply engaged nature is hidden, one of the few who never fail their obligations.

After having read this short presentation of N.F.S. Grundtvig, if one now thinks that it gives an entirely too positive picture of "the Old Man", I would like to close with a very well known Grundtvig quotation:

"And no-one has ever lived
who can become wise
about what he hasn't first loved."

Grundtvig's Road to the Highschool
If one tries to sketch the road Grundtvig traveled, before he reached his highschool ideas, one stumbles immediately upon some obstacles difficult to overcome. First one discovers that it isn't enough to become thoroughly familiar with the so-called "school writings". Grundtvig spoke - and wrote - about the institution that he called"Highschool" in his historical, his theological and his mythological writings, - not to mention in his poems, songs and hymns. Therefore it is necessary to search through large parts of an immense authorship, which nobody up to now has managed to investigate in its entirety.

Moreover, it is impossible to "systematize" Grundtvig's thinking without falsifying it. Didn't he himself say that he had "a great distaste for everything enclosed in school-buildings and auditoriums"?

It is yet more impossible to separate his thinking from his special way of speaking, a speech which is picturesque, concrete, poetic, obscure, sometimes confusingly simple.

In an attempt to clarify a few simple ideas about bold propositions, from that enticing Grundtvigian chaos - propositions which in my opinion still today hold their full current interest - I shall try as briefly as possible to outline the different steps in Grundtvig's thinking, which little by little brought him to sketch the institution which he called a "Folkly Highschool". ["Folklig, folkelige" cannot be translated exactly. The English translator has invented a word, "folkly" to approximate it - that which is appropriate to a particular people, usually a national people. It has more to do with our concept of "ethnic" than with the idea of "countrified, unsophisticated" which the word "folk" often connotes in English.]

I shall try to follow chronologically the development in Grundtvig's thinking about this area, fully aware of how artificial this manner of proceeding is. I think, however, that it may more easily open the way to some matters of importance, for people who are not accustomed to orient themselves in such an enormous authorship as Grundtvig's.

We notice right away that Grundtvig doesn't say "Folkhighschool", but "Folkelig Highschool".

"Folkelig" , with Grundtvig, signified something national - we shall see rich examples of this later - and here we have an important aspect of the institution he is talking about: It should be a fountainhead of national culture.

"Højskole" is Grundtvig's translation to Danish of the German word hochschule, which means university. How far hochschule-højskole answers to what one commonly understands by university will be seen also when, in speaking of the Greeks, he mentions the Alexandrian Library and its accompanying høi-skole".

So we already have here some characteristic aspects of the school Grundtvig is thinking of: It should be a counterpart of the university, a kind of anti-university, extending a different culture from the one cultivated by the traditional university, a culture which is called folkelig, that is, national.

In 1827, Grundtvig was in a period of deep depression. Two years before, he had turned against the state church, and in 1826 he came under censorship. After having spent seven years translating Saxo and Snorre - and Beowulf - in order to "awaken" the Danish folk to consciousness of their "national culture", he had to acknowledge bitterly that these translations remained unsold, or gathered dust on the shelves of libraries or schools. The folk, for whom they were intended, didn't read them.

He realized then that there was no connection nor understanding between what one tends to call the cultural elite - to which Grundtvig himself belonged, one must not forget - and the folk to whom he had turned. One might say there were two worlds that didn't communicate, as we say today, which were separated by what we call a cultural chasm.

In this year of depression, 1827, Grundtvig wrote his Literary Testament in which among other things we read: "...I was in despair about that chasm which even in the North has been dug by the pen between the ear and the tongue, between the folk and its teachers, yes, even between the folk and the poet, between the forest and the bird..."

He had acknowledged that it wasn't enough to write, to use the pen, in order to awaken the people. The contact between the folk and the poets had been broken off. How should one repair this? "In this I was certainly not wrong, that a bridge was necessary, over the river which a Thor, perhaps, might wade, but all ordinary folk drown in, a bridge where tongue and pen, where the common people and the book-learned can meet, learn to understand and respect each other..."

To cross over this cultural chasm, he then undertook to build "a bridge" between the cultural elite and the common people: "... to lay a bridge between the enlightenment of the learned and the life of the folk..."Now we shall soon see that there was a general problem for Grundtvig: "The enlightenment of the learned", culture, learning, imposed from the top, doesn't "come down" effectively to "the life of the folk". The common people continue to lack connection to that learning, with all it contains, which is cultivated on the higher level.

From the cultural plane, Grundtvig moves to the political. The July 1830 Revolution in France spread ideas over all of Europe, forcing governments to install more democratic instituions. Now the autocratic national government in Denmark proposed an Advisory Council, which came into effect in 1834.

Grundtvig, a royalist, was not particularly keen for such institutions: "With my knowledge of history, I neither am nor can be a friend of parliaments. But since they belong to the order of the day, one should at least realize that without an appropriate education of all who would be eligible to be members of the general assembly, they must become a misfortune for the state..." he writes in 1832. "I cannot understand anything else than that deadly revolutions must permeate this whole new folk-world, and disrupt both the educated and the lay society, unless one prepares them by reforming the school-grave to become a nursery for Life..."

Between 1830 and 1840, Grundtvig occupied himself thoroughly with these ques-tions: How can one establish connections between those who have access to culture and those who are shut out of it? How can one prepare the common people, who have also been shut out of political life, to take part in it intelligently? First of all, perhaps the question arose: What kind of culture were the common people "shut out" of? Clearly, it was the classical culture, circulated through the Latin schools and the University. "...the so-called academic enlightenment and education springs from foreign sources and never comes, living, to the people," he declared.

In our days, it is no longer the classical culture which must be acquired, but - as the Norwegian Olav Akerlie has said - our time's Latin which deepens the cultural chasm is the lingo of technology.

To reach the people, says Grundtvig, culture "must proceed from the people themselves." And this culture must pay attention to "the Requirements of Life".

"The Requirements of Life" means, among other things, that all the civil servants and officials that the common people come into contact with in their daily life, must be trained and educated in a culture that is accessible for the people, and that comes forth from the people themselves - an essential aspect that must never be overlooked. Formerly, these officials were all educated in a university, which disseminates a foreign culture, which precisely because of its foreignness is unattainable by the people. This results in a total lack of understanding between two worlds that have nothing in common.

"The Requirements of Life" means to be sure that all who are elected to the Advisory Councils should be able to participate in the affairs of state effectively.

"The Requirements of Life" concerns finally, above all and impartially, the people as a whole, without regard to the lines of division that separate rank and social position.

The Highschool's Students
"But if a Danish Highschool, as royal, as free and folkly as possible, is necessary for the education of civil appointees, can it be less so for that great part of the people who neither can nor want to be civil servants, but who must support both themselves and these? Barbarians and tyrants might believe that this folk's root and stem, tenants and self-owners, both great and small, tradesmen of all kinds, seamen and merchants, don't need any other education than what they get behind the plow, in the work- shop, before the mast and in the retail store. But it was never, either with kings or people, the Nordic way of thinking, and could never be so, because here, in spite of everything, we are all of 'one blood', so the same capacity for education is to be found in cottages as in courts."

But "the Requirements of Life" which the folkly highschool should undertake is not identical with what one usually calls "higher culture." Now and then one gets the impression that Grundtvig isn't much less an intellectual snob than his opponents. In an article entitled "About the Cultivation of Chronicles" he wrote in 1816: "The majority of the people will always lack both ability and time to practice literary art as a principal concern, and thus it follows that the majority can normally take no important part in the study of history."

His way of thinking was developed and is explained by the fact that it was essential for Grundtvig to alter the relationship between a culture born and formed in and by a people, and a learning which society needs but which is not accessible for all. "We must recognise that learning is one thing, and cultivation and capability for life, that of a human being and of a citizen, is another thing. Both of these can be united, but not in most people, and they must by no means stand in opposition to each other; but they must be considered separately, for otherwise they tend to force and necessarily bungle and corrupt each other."

In spite of what is customarily believed, Grundtvig was by nature pragmatic and had a sharp grasp of material realities. He suggests a new connection - which is at once a divi-sion and a cooperation - between a wisdom that is available and useful for the people as a whole and a wisdom that is exclusively held by a minority. But it is clear to him that it would be a mistake "to make a whole folk into professors, civil servants and social workers unless they could all literally live on air."

This quick overview of Grundtvig's thoughts about the folkly high-school can be summarized thus: Society cannot function, if the only officially recognized culture is imported from outside and transferred in a language that the common people don't under-stand. To avoid this dangerous situation it is necessary to create an institution, which he calls a folkly highschoo or university [italics added by the English translator], which should be open to all and become a hearth for a culture that the people as a whole can enjoy.

These ideas, which were published explicitly and in detail in the so-called "School Writings", in poems, in articles, in short almost everywhere in Grundtvig's writings, he presented to King Christian VIII, who had long been interested in Grundtvig, in an address dated February 9, 1843. In the Grundtvigian movement's history, this goes by the name "The School in Soer" or "the Sorø project".

The Sorø Project: The Folkly Highschool
[A translation into English of this seminal document appears in the Folk Education Association of America's journal OPTION, vol. 16/1/p. 2-6.]
Grundtvig was very well aware that this project "is barbaric in the eyes of most of the well-educated, and fantastic in the eyes of almost everyone". Nevertheless, he proposes it to the king, for "as a historian I have long seen, what is now as clear as the sun, that national- ities daily become more important in this century everywhere, both in actions and talk, and therefore that an institution for folkly enlightenment and education is necessary in every way..."

In the century of nationalism, then, it is no longer acceptable for education to be disseminated through foreign languages, and for culture to be imported from foreign coun-tries. (Grundtvig repeats this, and extends it to all nations.) The supporters of such foreign-based culture, all who are afraid of retrogression to barbarity if these projects should unfortunately be realized, these he invites no less to cooperate in the projects. It will certainly not be easy, because - as he wrote - "our best-educated men cannot share their knowledge except in a barbarous artificial speech and with a pedantry as if all their hearers were as much Professors in the subject as they themselves..."

Furthermore, the teachers who are needed to instruct in history, the mother-tongue, law etc., must not forget that at a folkly highschool "the chief concern must always be that which is not only useful and pleasurable for a few in a particular position and with special abilities, but for all".

In fact, all young people "without reference to class or employment" should be accepted at the folkly highschool. Thus, this Academy in Sorø, which originally was reserved for the children of noblemen, from now on must be open to all. The Academy should have a prominent, but yet "folkly" headmaster, for, as Grundtvig emphasizes "all the people's young folks need to have nobility and chivalry held up before them, and that part of youth most, who are in most danger of being vulgar".

These suggestions were really revolutionary in that epoch when they were presented, or [at least] they were very advanced. It isn't surprising that the American Myles Horton has characterised Grundtvig as a "Rebel" (Johannes Knudsen: Danish Rebel, 1955). But one can understand that with such a thorough opening-up of the folkly highschool, it wouldn't really be necessary to teach there what might be useful only for some, but not for all. For example, one must not emphasize instruction in literature, for what would it lead to, if "the majority of listeners became addicted to reading"? It must be remembered that "everything is not for everyone, that book-learning neither can nor should be a chief concern even for civil servants, let alone for the whole folk, if each one is to be capable in his own [sphere] and take care of his own niche, and if life's manifold daily activities are to be handled with enthusiasm and industry.."

There was finally a last point, which would increase the uncertainty of everyone who clung to the monopoly of culture, and make them irreconcilably opposed to the Grundtvigian projects: that was the removal of examinations. "In our country one can perhaps have trouble imagining an institution of learning, where tests (examinations) would not be required both at entrance and leaving; but it is nevertheless as clear as the sun that at the folkly highschool one must either give up them or give up it".

Although Grundtvig wrote an enormous number of pages about his suggestions for a folkly highschool, one finds no precise advice about this institution's construction. He thinks, in fact, that "In everything that is effected by humankind, in my opinion the main thing is not the precepts, but the people themselves".

It is not at all out of the way to criticize the lack of precision in Grundtvig's projects. But for him, it is a consequence of those circumstances that are valid for all human endeavours: "I really cannot enter into the [exact] arrangements for the Danish Highschool, for it is the same with everything livingly humane, as it is with us, that one must first be born, before one knows what hat will fit our head..."

The king set up a commission, consisting of persons responsible for advanced instruction, to investigate these suggestions. Grundtvig's request to be a member was disregarded. The commission was in no hurry, that's the least one can say. Not until March 27, 1847 did it give its opinion to the king. It recommended erecting at Sorø a modern high-school beside the scholarly one.

The divergence from Grundtvig's project is great. The word "modern" indicates very well what they wanted to avoid, namely the disappearance of the classical elite culture, by definition reserved for a minority. In that epoch when Grundtvig presented his projects, [people] were first and foremost interested in a broadening of instruction in science and modern languages. So there should be a "Sorø modern high-school" by the side of the scholarly school. The only concession to Grundtvig's suggestions - a significant concession to be sure - was that entrance to this modern high-school was open for all, and that it should be without examinations.

On December 31, 1847, a royal decree appeared concerning the conversion of the Academy in Sorø. But the king died the next month, and the Grundtvigian suggestions were buried. When the newly elected assembly, of which Grundtvig was a member, came together at the end of 1848, Grundtvig on December 9 asked the new minister of culture, Professor J. N. Madvig, what he planned to do with the Sorø project. The answer was final: The minister could not support an "educational institution limited in character to Danishness"!

The Gothenburg Project: The Scientific Highschool
In 1983 Denmark celebrated the 200th anniversary of N.F.S. Grundtvig's birth. People from many countries assembled in Copenhagen to remember a man whose ideas inspired an institution which has been used as a model not only in Europe but also in the United States, in Africa and Asia. This is quite remarkable, for none of the projects that Grundtvig sketched out have become actual. We have seen how it went with the Sorø plan. Grundtvig's other project, which he would have placed in Gothenburg and which was to have completed the Sorø project, wasn't even planned. Freed from the typical Grundvigian way of speaking, which makes understanding of his article "About the Scientific Union of the North" particularly difficult, this project nevertheless contains ideas which could still give us something to think about in our own days.

In Grundtvig's mind, the first project was inconceivable without the second, but the first condition for the two projects would have been a radical transformation of the then-existing school and educational system in Denmark.

Children should not be shut into school-prisons, but left with their parents, to live in their natural milieu. Take note that Grundtvig foresaw the total abolishment of the Latin schools. The education of civil servants should be separated from the University, and instead there should be set up "Nurseries" - today we would doubtless say professional schools. With the terrain thus cleared, the folkly highschool should take over citizenship education for young people from all classes of society, an education on the basis of the country's national values.

To pay attention to "the Requirements of Life" this "folkly" national instruction should, as already mentioned, omit everything that was not necessary for all. Grundtvig emphasizes that "the masses" - the majority of the people, who should take care of the practical duties necessary for society to function - neither needed nor had the ability to devote themselves to pondering about "Human-life's development and explanation in all its mysterious depth and wonderful diversity."

To undertake this necessary assignment, which is complementary to "The Require-ments of Life", a "Scientific Highschool" must be established, whose duty would be to try to solve "life's riddles". Only one would be needed, since each of the three Nordic countries, the three nationalities, or in Grundtvig's phrase "Folk-Hearts", the Danish, the Norwegian and the Swedish - Finland isn't included in Grundtvig's visions - was urgently challenged to set up a folkly highschool answering to the respective country's own characteristics.

It may be useful here to take note of the fundamental difference between Scandin-avianism, which was [being promoted] at the same time as the Grundtvigian movement, and which we will find again in the other Nordic lands, and this suggestion about the founding of folk-high-schools. The Scandinavian movement, like the Grundtvigian, belongs within the frame of the national awakening in Europe during the first half of the 19th century. But while Scandinavianism reckoned on one Nordic nationality, Grundtvig insisted especially on the differences between the Nordic nationalities, "the Folk-Hearts". Many misunderstandings have arisen from this, even in Grundtvig's own time. After having at first talked about "Mesopotamian Scandinavianism", Grundtvig himself decided not to use that word any more, but to replace it with "High-North", a translation of the Greek term "Hyperboreans".

This distinction is important, and it should be maintained in order to emphasize the dialectic relationship Grundtvig established between the Nordic countries' national differences and their universal mission, a dialectic which would be made concrete in the two institutions which were to complement each other.

How did he present this Scientific Highschool?

A mini-world of "professors" should be collected: two or three hundred individuals in their "best age", at least above the "thirties".

Students should have access to the scientific highschool only after attending the folkly one, an absolute necessity to assure "the right relationship between learned education and the folkly kind", a very important restriction which in my opinion continues to be actual, in order to avoid digging still deeper the gulf between those "who know and understand" and the rest, who don't know and don't understand.

So then, no break between what we ordinarily call "high culture" and the common people, but - also an important requirement - those who have the ability to devote them-selves to the higher culture, which with Grundtvig means a kind of philosophy, an overview of life's meaning, should first of all have learned a practical livelihood. Thus one would achieve a whole new system of education: "Let us imagine now the Latin schools gone, all the boys grown up as much as possible in their own home-place and God's free nature, in living exchange with the common people, trained to some occupation useful in daily life, so that even those who from childhood seem best fitted for head-work have also learned to use their hands, and that few or none expect to attend the scientific highschool except those who have already made themselves notable at the folkly, then..." etc. Grundtvig would be satisfied only if all that were accomplished.

Dreams, altogether? No way, he says. A year would be enough to found the three folkly highschools, and as far as the scientific one is concerned, he thinks that five years would suffice to get that functioning. But what a victory for the spirit of the North it would be, when one will have created "... a Nordic Highschool, free and open, without examination or direction toward particular vocations, in other words a spiritual Capital, with all barriers removed..."

Already in 1837, Grundtvig had sent an address to the Norwegians about setting up a folkly highschool in Norway, which we shall later mention. And already in this document he speaks for both projects: "Folkly education would certainly not take very many steps before it became the desire of the North to raise a great scientific highschool, of course not for Latinism and Roman law, but for the development and explication of human life in all its mysterious depth and wonderful diversity, in other words a University (an all-embracing inquiry)..."

A "university" defined as "an all-embracing inquiry" is a typical example of how Grundtvig explains the meaning of foreign words which he uses for convenience, fully aware that his own language would have difficulty to find an equivalent.

He sets forth no more precise plan for the realization of this "University" than he did for the Folkly Highschool - and for the same reason: "How, for that matter, such an actual 'University', as a learned republic... would take form in the North... can naturally not be described here, for the scientific, like every other career, must be a step ahead of its history..."

When the suggestion about the scientific highschool was printed in the first number of Frederik Barfod's Scandinavian magazine Brage and Idun in 1839, it was read and commented upon even in Sweden, as we shall later see - and as one would expect, inter-preted with irony and contempt.

It is interesting to observe that in the same year, 1839, Grundtvig published a poem which is still much sung, especially in folk-high-school milieus - although probably without a clear understanding of what explosive material it contains. The title, the first line, says: "Is light only for the learned -" So far, that is nothing new, only a protest against an elite culture reserved for a small minority. But some lines further, we read: "And the sun rises with the farmer, Not at all with the learned -" Light, culture originates in the farmer's world, which in Grundtvig's time meant the overwhelming majority of the people - and next: "Enlightens best from toe to top Whoever is most on the go -" So, this culture, born in and of the people, rises from "toe to top", from the lowest to the uppermost, from foundation to over-structure, and enlightens first and foremost those that work the most.

It strikes me that we have here, very simply expressed, an important aspect of the Grundtvigian "cultural revolution", which one could characterize as a "cultural turn of the tide". For as everyone knows, and as is unfortunately still the case, culture is normally formed on the peaks and trickles down - eventually - to the base.

We shall come to see how these ideas took root in the Grundtvigian movement, made up of a very miscellaneous collection of classes - politicians, theologians and farmers - and is carried over onto the political plane.

As we have said, the project about a Scientific Highschool did not become the subject of serious consideration when Grundtvig proposed it. But during the second world war some people who belonged to the Grundtvigian world drew this Grundtvigian project out of oblivion and declared that the time had come for the North to hear his voice. The folk-high-school rector C. P. O. Christiansen wrote a foreword and introduction to a book about this subject: In a deeply confused world "we must see it as one of the most important links in Nordic work to build that shared Nordic University that Grundtvig heralded. Here the great Nordic life- questions about the relationship between the different national Folk-hearts of the North and the shared Nordic spirit can and will be clarified. Here the call for the North [to participate] in world history will be acknowledged, take root and set flower and fruit in the intent to create a cooperating North out of a divided North, and a goal-oriented North that knows it has a message to bring to the aid of a lost world around us."

Thus, the initiative for founding what became the Nordic Folk Academy in Kungälv [Sweden] came from Denmark. But for these projects to be acceptable to the other Nordic countries, especially to Sweden, which on account of non-acquaintance or because of "amicable disagreement" - we'll come back to that later - always has been contemptuous of Grundtvigian ideas, it was necessary to water the wine, as they say. However, without further ado, one must concede that every realization in the second half of the 20th century of projects introduced in the first half of the 19th is a risky venture.

Finally, to close with a Grundtvig quotation, if one goes from the ideas to the realization, it is probably difficult if not impossible to follow his advice: "In everything that is effected by humankind,... the main thing is not the precepts but the people themselves..."

The Folkhighschool and Scandinavianism: Rødding
The Vienna Congress of 1815 began a new epoch for the Nordic countries. These small monarchies felt themselves distanced from the world scene and placed in a peripheral position. Shouldn’t they now, since the bases for their old rivalries had disappeared, try a reciprocal approach to each other on the Nordic plane? This became easier, when a sea-crossing between Denmark and Sweden was established in 1828. From then on, the famous steamer "Caledonia" crossed the Øresund between Copenhagen and Malmø. This approach, to be sure, was limited to contacts between intellectuals, especially through the many student meetings between Danish and Swedish students. And from 1840 on, the Danish students tried to make the Swedes aware of their difficult Schleswig problem.

South Jutland’s enormously complicated political position between the King’s River and the Ejder can be followed throughout all of Denmark’s history. What interests us here is only the language problem - the fate of Danishness - of the folk culture - in the southern part of the monarchy. The official language was German, even though the people spoke Danish. A German text from the year 1800 is a perfect illustration of the situation: "In the northern part of the Schleswig Duchy and most of Jutland, one can speak German to whoever doesn’t ordinarily use wooden shoes, or whoever drives with a mounted harness or has a hood on his carriage or rides with an English saddle, whoever is a royal or church officer or dressed in modern clothes. They understand the German language. All others talk Danish." (A. v.Essen - Portions of the Diary of a Foreigner.)

The status of the Danish language couldn’t be better described. It was a language used by uncultivated people. Would it be possible to change this situation by appealing to the Grundtvigian ideas that proclaimed "equal dignity in castle and cottage"?

Nobody seemed to worry about this situation until the concept of nationality, the idea of a national language and a national culture so strongly defended in the Germanic countries, crossed the boundary and appeared in Southern Jutland. On November 11, 1842, Peter Hiort Lorenzen, a merchant from Haderslev, spoke Danish to his colleagues in the Schles-wigian citizens’ assembly - although he had full command of the German language. The minutes of the Assembly noted: "He continued to speak Danish."

This apparently insignificant occurrence was reported in all the magazines and newspapers; and suddenly the capital discovered that there was a nationality problem in Southern Jutland. Danish culture was in danger of being wiped out. Something must be done. At an 1843 festival In Copenhagen, the National-Liberal leaders and Peter Hiort Lorenzen addressed the officials. Grundtvig did too. For the moment, what separated Grundtvig from the Scandinavians, who believed in one Nordic nationality eliminating national differences, seemed to have been forgotten, although Grundtvig still insisted on the individual national characteristics, which in his speech were called "The Folk-Hearts". Hadn’t he recommended a national-folkly highschool for each of the Nordic lands, respecting their national peculiarities?

Nevertheless, enthusiasm about Southern Jutland caught on. Grundtvig takes part in the great1844 meeting on Skamling’s bank, where again he cooperated with the National-Liberals and the Scandinavians. The two parties were united. Remember that it was in 1843 that Grundtvig had written to the king about his Sorø project.

The National-Liberals set up a committee "the Seven Stars" with the job of collecting money. Soon they had more than 50,000 riksdollars. Now the question was, how should this money be used for Southern Jutland? "The Seven Stars" naturally thought first of a Latin school. But who would enroll in it? Certainly not the city people, who had been entirely won over by German speech and culture. Still less the public officials, who either voluntarily or under compulsion carried on their functions in German. Well, the farmers then? It was plain that they too must be able to talk German, if they were to be successful. What to do?

The problem was solved in an almost miraculous way, through a quite exceptional person: Christian Flor. During his studies in Copenhagen, he had heard about Grundtvigian ideas, had joined the coterie around Grundtvig, and continued faithful to this choice even after becoming a professor of Danish literature at the University in Kiel. Christian Flor, who on the strength of his education and his appointment belonged to that class which bore an almost ineradicable hatred toward the prophet from Vartov - he it was who proposed Grundtvigian ideas with much diplomacy, convincing both National-Liberals and Scandin-avians that there was only one acceptable solution for Southern Jutland - to found a Folk-highschool in that part of the country. [Vartov was an institution, a "hospital" for 450 elderly (and indigent?) persons in Copenhagen. Grundtvig had become the chaplain there in 1839 and continued in that post until he died in 1872.]

The 50,000 riksdollars were used to buy a farm in Rødding, where the school was opened on November 7, 1844.

In 1845, Christian Flor abandoned his professorship in Kiel and became the director of Rødding. The school had to close during the war that broke out in 1848, and was re-opened in 1850-51. At that time one of the best-known Grundtvigian politicians, Sofus Høgsbro, became the director, a Grundtvig disciple in all areas except the churchly one. He led the school until 1862, after which he devoted himself entirely to politics. From 1862 until 1864 the young Ludvig Schrøder led the school until it was closed when war broke out again in 1864.

The first Danish "highschool" thus became led by great personalities from the Grundtvigian movement. Meanwhile, one gets the impression that in Grundtvig’s eyes it didn’t answer to his expectations of a folkly highschool. In 1847, when Rødding had been in existence for three years, he declared in An Address at the Nordic Celebration: "As surely ... as in the North there is an honest intention to give life to historical folk-memories and to revive the old folk spirit, so surely, sooner or later, folkly Highschools will be founded..."

So wasn’t Rødding a folkly highschool, in his eyes?

Christen Kold and "The Awakened"
Probably Grundtvig ignored Rødding because he still hoped that his Sorø project would become a reality. As we know, his recommendation was finally buried by the Minister of Culture’s negative answer in 1848. Did Grundtvig then realize that he must give up a school that would be open for all, where the folkly culture would be created by the whole people and by definition must affect the whole nation? One is tempted to believe it, when one reads a letter which a Grundtvig disciple wrote to Kold in August,1849, just a few months after the Sorø project was definitely lost: "We need a man, arisen from the midst of the Folk, who is more at home among them than we..."

"The midst of the Folk" at that time was, to be sure, the farmers. Was Grundtvig clear at that time that only the farmers had escaped the "cultural estrangement" that the Latin schools produced?

And who was this Christen Kold, then, whom Grundtvig wanted to meet in Copenhagen?

He was born in Thisted in 1816, the son of a shoemaker, and was sent to a teachers’ seminary by his mother, who recognized that he wasn’t likely to inherit his father’s craft. He was converted to the pietistic movement, the "godly" assemblies, as a young man. Meet-ing the well-known revival preacher, the farmer Peter Larsen Skræppenborg (1802-73) determined his religious point of view for life.

At the seminary in Snedsted, meanwhile, he met for the first time a disciple of Grundtvig, the later clergyman P. K. Algreen (1807-77), who was then a teacher at the seminary. Pietism and "happy Christianity" [promoted by Grundtvig] were, as is well known, awkward to combine, but still they did unite with each other in many places in Denmark, during the first half of the 19th century.

In 1838 Christen Kold became a home-teacher in South Jutland, in the Knudsen family, to which one of the great Danish Grundtvigian writers, Jakob Knudsen, belonged.

1838 was the year when Grundtvig gave his famous lectures at Borch’s College in Copenhagen, speaking in public for the first time - he was then 55. In the process of sketching the history of the last fifty years, he told his own life, revealing his spiritual universe and, of course, his Highschool ideas, to a steadily growing flock of listeners. There was such great enthusiasm that the audience began to sing spontaneously. What would later become the folkhighschool’s cultural pattern - lectures and song - arose of itself. It is not by chance that Grundtvigians date the birth of the highschool to the lectures at Borch’s College in 1838.

After these lectures, "Danish Societies" gradually spread throughout the country. People came together to listen to lectures and to sing.

Christen Kold started a kind of Danish Society in South Jutland in 1840. Every Wednesday evening, he gathered some young farmers and read Ingemann’s historical romances for them. [ B. S. Ingemann (1789-1862), a teacher at Sorø Academy from 1822, was best known for his historical romances from Denmark’s Middle Ages.] Apparently, their minds were opened only by concern for this "national awakening". Kold told his listeners: "There are only three things that people here talk about, when they come together... - the trouble they had last year, the trouble they have this year, and the trouble they expect next year. But here there will soon be something else to talk about." The farmers were furious! In my French experience of "popular enlightenment", if Kold had said the same thing in my country town, nobody would have been offended by it.

As a home-teacher, Kold came into open conflict with the church, because he refused to use the textbooks authorized by the church. So when the parish priest of the place, Pastor Hass, proposed that he should accompany him to Asia Minor, where he intended to settle as a missionary, Kold agreed. Before he embarked on this adventure, he learned the craft of book-binding in Copenhagen, so that he would be able to support himself in a foreign country. And there in Copenhagen, he met the Grundtvigian milieu.

Already on the journey to Smyrna, good relations between Kold and the Hass family were destroyed. Not all Grundtvigians, apparently, lived according to the master’s ideas about "equal dignity in castle and cottage". Hass treated Kold with the condescension which the "educated" were accustomed to use toward their servants. After a year and a half in Hass’s service, Kold left him and installed himself in

Smyrna as a book-binder. He got along very well, but nevertheless wanted to return to Denmark. After staying for five years in Asia Minor, he decided to go. He sailed to Trieste, there bought a pushcart and walked with it all the way through Europe. When anyone asked him where he was going, he answered, "I have come from Trieste, and am going to Thisted."

War with Prussia broke out in 1848. Kold had found work as a teacher at the home of some Grundtvigian friends, but in the long run this appointment didn’t satisfy him, even though the war hadn’t helped him understand what his real call was. He explains that what he wanted was that "the feeling and enthusiasm from 1848, and the awakening that took place then, should continue and be confirmed. I wanted through the Word, in a school , to make all the Danish people permanently enthusiastic."

Christen Kold believed that "the folk-spirit" was finally awakened. What Grundtvig had hoped to accomplish in Sorø, Kold did in miniature - very small measure, really - but isn’t it always necessary to begin modestly? In July, 1849, he wrote to another of his Grundtvigian friends, Pastor Birkedal, who had just moved to Ryslinge on Fyn: "My plan, in brief, is this. I would like to be a home-teacher at your place this winter, for 25 riksdollars salary plus room and board; I hope you will find me at least five pupils, farmers’ sons from other parishes in Fyn, so that we can immediately begin a modest highschool.... Naturally, the people whose children I am thinking of are the ‘awakened’..."

Just as the Scandinavians were connected to the highschool project at Rødding - the Scandinavians, whose ideas about nationality, as we have said, were fundamentally different from Grundtvig’s - now we see that Kold’s project was directed to the "awakened" - that is, that part of the population who had been won for the "godly", pietistic movement, whose ideas were just as fundamentally different from Grundtvig’s. It’s a question how far Kold understood the message from Vartov - or at least, how much of it he agreed with.

Similarly, it must be emphasized that Kold thought first and foremost of children of confirmation age. On the contrary, Grundtvig wanted neither "Christian revival schools" nor "children’s schools".

The pupils’ age, moreover, became a stumbling block at the first meeting between Grundtvig and Kold.

As we have said, Kold’s former teacher, P. K. Algreen, invited him in August 1849 to come to Copenhagen, for now was the time to "create a folkly awakening in the land".

But Kold was in no hurry. He was to begin his work at Birkedal’s in November, 1849. Birkedal had found six boys and two girls of "confirmation age", whom Kold should try to "inspire".

He also organized a "Danish Society", meeting regularly on two evenings each week. He brought together two groups of 10-15 farm-workers from the neighborhood. We have an account from a Swedish teacher, who was present one evening, when "the Folk Spirit" was offered in a room full of smoke from the pipes of the farmers present.

But already Kold was thinking of buying a house. He needed money for that, and he thought that perhaps Grundtvig could help him. Therefore, nearly a year after receiving Algreen’s letter, Kold decided to go to Copenhagen to meet the Vartov prophet.

Apparently Grundtvig had never heard of Kold. In any case, neither Grundtvig nor his friends were aware of his deeply pietistic engagement. They assumed that he was a Grundt-vigian.

Christen Kold himself describes his first meeting with the Vartov prophet thus: "‘This is Kold from Fyn,’ said Algreen. ‘Oh,’ said Grundtvig, ‘is that so?’ and immediately we were uncertain about each other. I wanted to have my fellows in school when they were newly confirmed - 14, 15, 16 years old, but Grundtvig said: ‘It doesn’t work before they are 18.’ I well remember that I said: ‘Grundtvig probably doesn’t know how the farmers are at home. When they are 18, they’ve already begun to go courting, are smoking tobacco, thinking about pipes and watches, and we won’t be able to inspire them.’ ‘Oh yes,’ answered Grundtvig, ‘we can.’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘as I understand the situation, my opinion is the only right one.’ I’ve always been sure, even when I was wrong.... The conflict between Grundtvig’s opinion and mine was resolved by Grundtvig’s giving in - otherwise nothing would have happened, for I wouldn’t have given in."

The result of the conversation nevertheless was that Kold got what he wanted. Grundtvig agreed to help him raise the money that was needed to buy a house. Kold installed himself in Ryslinge in 1851. In 1853 he opened the school in Dalby, and in 1862 he built the school in Dalum which became famous, and where he died in 1870.

Grundvigian Farmers’ Highschools
From about 1830, seminarians who were disciples of Grundtvig’s religious ideas began to get appointments as pastors in Danish country parishes. Some of them became known and famous as members of the Vartov prophet’s group. From about 1858, a circle of such theological students met at the home of one of them. In the Grundtvigian world, they have become known as "the Little Theological Seminary". Directors for the best known highschools were recruited from this circle, creating the picture of "highschool" that history has preserved.

The "national awakening", which in spite of all Grundtvig’s efforts he never suc-ceeded in bringing about, eventually found fertile ground, when Denmark’s defeat in the war of 1864 deprived it of two-fifths of its richest countryside and a million of its inhabitants. The motto originated by the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér after Sweden lost Finland, was adopted in Denmark: "What is lost outwardly shall be reclaimed inwardly." The heather moors in Jutland were put under cultivation. A welling-up of energy seemed to seize the whole country, and the ground was prepared for the founding of high-schools. The Rødding school, which lay in the area now annexed by the Germans, was re-founded in Askov, three kilometers north of the new boundary. Rødding’s director, Ludvig Schrøder, took over the leadership. In the same year, Ernst Trier opened the school in Vallekilde in Sjælland, and in 1866 Jens Nørregaard founded the school in Testrup.

Here we have the three historic highschools, all three led by members of the Little Theological Seminary - in other words, by clergymen. That explains why the Danish highschool - quite contrary to Grundtvig’s wishes, as he had many times emphasized that he did not want a Grundtvigian highschool in the religious or churchly meaning of the word - partly was founded in milieus marked by religious Grundtvigianism, partly was led by similarly Grundtvigian theologians.

Christen Kold and "The Prophets"
These Grundtvigian theologians, who had decided to settle on the land among the farmers, but who culturally and socially belonged to the class of officialdom, apparently didn’t find it as easy as Christian Kold did, to bring their message to the pupils who attended their schools. So one understands very well why many of these first highschool directors looked to the master in Dalby [Kold] for inspiration. Ernst Trier had known him since 1858. After founding Vallekilde, he often turned to Kold. In a reminiscence published in Højskolebladet [The Folkhighschool paper], Nov.14,1882, he tells about his relationship to Kold: "From 1864, I visited him regularly at his school. At first, I was somewhat arrogant when I visited him, but I afterwards I became humble with regard to his gifts; more and more, my eyes were opened to what was great and signif- icant in his work, until at last it came to be the shining model for mine."

"The prophets," as Kold tended to call all these learned theologians who were starting farmers’ highschools in many places in Denmark - the prophets didn’t make much of an impression on him. Humility wasn’t one of Kold’s prominent traits. During a visit from Schrøder and the Askov teacher Nutzhorn, he told them at parting: "Well, now I have been with you for a little while and taught you a little. I wish you good luck in the work. I have faith in you, that you will do no harm. The only thing is, if you take some of the fellows that I ought to have, for I want to have the best ones."

According to Harald Holm, the Danish correspondent to Bjørnson’s paper (November 25,1871), Grundtvig is supposed to have said that "...this man... was really the first who understood the philosophy of the highschool, and brought it to life..." Holm continues: "... while Grundtvig pointed to the purpose of the highschool, it was Kold who showed the way. So he gave all the present Grundtvigian highschools their characteristics, while all our well-educated highschool directors, however independently most of them accepted Grundtvig’s thinking, are more or less his apprentices."

One may raise the question, whether Grundtvig consciously accepted the fact that his ideas, such as he had formulated them for the Sorø project, were brought to reality in so different a form. But we must remember that Rødding was the result of a compromise between National-Liberals, Scandinavians, and Grundtvig’s disciples. Now Kold had created a school for the "religiously awakened", the pietists. And the theologians from the Little Theological Seminary recruited their students among the farmers who had been won for the religious or churchly ideas of Grundtvigianism [which were much more liberal than the prevailing Lutheran theology].

Let us then pose the following question: Which Grundtvigian ideas do we find in the many highschools that grew up in Denmark in the 19th century? It’s really clear - I have already said it, and I repeat - that it is the small "farmer highschools" that formed the image which still in our own days typifies the historical, traditional highschool. The Sorø project was definitely forgotten.

The Highschool’s Spiritual Universe
I. "The awakening"

In the 18th century. "Enlightenment" had everywhere in Europe brought about an understanding that "popular enlightenment" was necessary. However, nobody had dared to raise doubts about the hieratical division of culture according to which only elementary instruction was thought of, for the people as a whole.

The enlightenment ideas which were widespread in France by the Revolution in 1789 didn’t extend beyond the theoretical level- as is so often the case in this country. They were known in Denmark, they were not unknown to Grundtvig, but "the Light" which according to his understanding should be bound up with "the Life" had nothing in common with that "enlightenment" which the 18th century held so dear.

After the 1848 Revolution, these ideas were revived, at the same time that, in all the Nordic lands, attempts were made to improve the education of the farmer class. But an odd phenomenon - which continues to be actual - pops up: those who are uneducated are in no hurry to correct the damage! Teachers in the adult-education field know this only all too well. These culturally "deprived", "left-out" groups are not "motivated", as we say.

This "motivation" is what in Denmark during the last two centuries is identified with the word "awakening".

Let us first emphasize that we are talking of an epoch when religion still largely colored the people’s whole existence. To understand what happened in Denmark at that time, we must forget our present secularised cultural society and be clear that before every-thing else, the farmer class was and continued either to be faithful to official Protest-antism, or were won over for the religious revival movements, or for Grundtvigianism.

It is in relation to this that one must understand the "awakening" that now occurred so noticeably, and quite apart from the official efforts to educate the common people. And the central figure in this unusual pedagogical direction was Christen Kold.

For four years he had worked in his new school in Dalum. We have already mentioned that "the prophets", the Grundtvigian theologians who had founded highschools, made pil-grimages to Dalum to learn the difficult art of "awakening". In 1866 Grundtvig invited this "leader of humane and folkly enlightenment from Fyn..." to speak at the "Meeting of Friends" in Copenhagen. [These "Meetings of Friends" began in celebration of Grundtvig’s 80th birthday in 1863, and continued almost annually, even after his death.]Grundtvig, the poet of "the living Word", who all his life had done nothing but write, was very much aware that "in spite of being so impatient about paper learning, he himself hangs on books both early and late". Christen Kold, on the other hand, was not accustomed to write or talk publicly. Grundtvig adds this admonition to his welcoming speech: "... I will make one request, which I have never done previously to any speaker, namely that he won’t confine himself to too short space; for this man has kept still so long that he certainly has a good deal to tell us, and I believe we have plenty of time to listen."

Toward the end of his long lecture, wherein he told his whole life, Kold said something which has become a classical text in the rich highschool literature: "... I have hardly as good grip on Enlightenment as on Experience. I Experience first, and Enlighten afterward; or in any case, I Experience and Enlighten at the same time. And that I believe is right, for Experience is what one needs... When anyone asks me how I could come on [the idea] of experiencing first and enlighten- ing later, or in any case enlightening and experiencing at the same time; or how I, who am not among the Prophets because I haven’t gone through any proper schooling, could become an enlightener of the folk, then I answer, it comes of this: that when I began to want to teach, I found myself among people who couldn’t accept Enlightenment until they were Enlivened. They were simple people, who so to say didn’t know about Enlightenment, but must first be Enlivened..." [The watchword of the Danish folk-high-school has long been "awaken, enliven, and then enlighten."]

The subject content of Grundtvig’s spiritual universe was significantly simplified by Christen Kold, being limited to Bible- and Danish-history. Deeply engaged in the religious awakening as he was, he could hardly have imagined that awakening could come through myths. But myths, the whole great Nordic mythology, was for Grundtvig the fullest expression of the Nordic spirit. They hold a central place in his spiritual universe. His disciples understood that very well, and Chr. Flor in Rødding, Ludvig Schrøder in Askov, to mention only two especially notable examples, regularly used myths as subjects of their instruction.

One of the most noteworthy personalities in this Grundtvigian mix of farmers, theo-logians, professors, and politicians, the farmer and parliament member N. J. Termansen (1824-92), to whom we shall later return, couldn’t spare six months for a highschool stay in Rødding. However, he covered on foot the 25 kilometers between his farm and the school, in order to hear Chr. Flor’s evening lectures about Nordic mythology, offered to the people of the area.

Another example, even more striking, reveals a practical effect of the mythological "awakening". When Askov Highschool celebrated its 50-year jubilee in 1915, the farmer Niels Petersen Vittenbjerg said that it was those lectures about Nordic mythology, heard in Askov, that taught him how to run his farm scientifically.

The Grundtvigian vision which the culturally elite had prevented from realization in Sorø and Gøteborg, found a practical place among the farmers. It is well-known that alumni of the Grundtvigian high-schools contributed fundamentally to the Danish spiritual movement, and thus to the improvement of the country’s agricultural economy.

II. The Living Word

The Renaissance and the discovery of printing resulted in the massive production of books, creating the "cultural gap", the abyss between those who could read and those who could not. And - what may be even worse - the dominance of the book smothered the oral tradition and enforced on the people a cultural model which was foreign to them. In other words, it is the old story of an elite culture pervading society, a cultural model which comes down from above, from the top to the bottom.

A current French author, Jacques Ozouf, declares that "the book ended the life of the centuries-old fellowship created by the oral tradition." Grundtvig would probably have been very much surprised to find such an exact echo of his thoughts in the France to which his connection was very ambivalent.

For him, the mother-tongue, one of the foundation stones of the folkhighschool, belonged "home in the Folk-Mouth" as he said. And he warned against the danger of "listeners becoming addicted to reading." As the communication method to be used for listeners, for highschool students, he recommended above everything else "Conversations"; for these conversations "... would be both more living and more fruitful than the public addresses we call lectures. But only by trying can we determine whether the right conditions are in place, both with leaders and with youth. A good lecture will naturally always be better than a poor conversation."

I quote from the Sorø plan. At first, Grundtvig did not foresee the model, lectures and song, which has characterized the Danish high-school until approximately 1960. This model took on spontaneous reality only after the renowned lectures at Borch’s College in 1838 which led to the rise of Danish Societies. So it isn’t surprising that the Danish highschool dates its birth more from these lectures than from the founding of Rødding, that compromise between opposing parties, which more and more faced each other in an unconquerable struggle, National-Liberals and Scandinavians on one side and Grundtvigians on the other.

But this model, as seen by foreign eyes, has fundamental significance, in relation to the question: why did these remarkable institutions called highschools arise just in the Nordic lands, first and foremost in Denmark, and nowhere else? It seems to me that the pattern is the Protestant church! Ever since the Reformation, people have been accustomed to sing in church and to listen to the minister’s sermons. In the folkhighschool, song and lecture were accepted without hesitation, because they were consonant with centuries-old habits.

If somebody - as a venture - tried to import such a model in France, it would be impossible even in our days. The habit of listening to a long sermon or singing five or six hymns every Sunday has never existed in France, and the highschool’s traditional model would be just as inapplicable in this country - even in our own days.

III. Folklihood

As justification for converting the Sorø academy to a folkly highschool, Grundtvig wrote in his proposition to the king: "As a historian I have long seen, what is now as clear as the sun, that Nationalities in this century daily awaken everywhere, both in action and in words; therefore an institution for folkly enlightenment and education is necessary in every way."

Even in Denmark there is a tendency to use "folkly" exchangeably with "common" or what is rather scornfully called "popular". The confusion is not of recent date. Georg Brandes tells in his memoirs that in July 1860 he met two of the theologians from the Little Theological Seminary, Ernst Trier and Jens Nørregaard. These two young men - Brandes was himself only 18 then - talked with him about B. S. Ingemann and the "folkliness" of his romances. Brandes observes that this "folkliness" is not the same as "popularity".

Plainly, the concept of "folklihood" and the central place it holds in the Grundtvigian cultural pattern is what in our days most interests outsiders, whether it has to do with opposing a dominating and foreign culture, as the situation was in Denmark in Grundtvig’s time, or rediscovering one’s own cultural roots, as is the case, for example, in Israel or even in America.

Let us look at some of Grundtvig’s definitions of this concept, so important in his spiritual universe. He declares to the Nordic students who attended that Scandinavian meet-ing in the summer of 1845: "In the last century, when I was born, "Nationality" was far from being translatable as "Folklihood"... In our century, with every year that passes, yes with every day, the truly National is ever better understood as the Folkly".. etc.

In those famous lectures at Borch’s College, he had spoken of "... a new time that begins to understand itself..." and in the church-history lectures of 1861-63 (The Church’s Mirror, 1871) one reads: "In the 19th century it is clearer every day that all the Folk-groups in Christendom feel more and more the impulse to arise from the Dead".

This highschool that calls itself "folkly" had then as its first task to help the folk to "resurrect". A difficult job, as Grundtvig very well knew, for the Folk had lost their folklihood in the course of their history. The highschool should be a sort of "artificial" tool, which "...comes to the aid of folk nature, weakened by age."

Well might Grundtvig say that an "institution for folkly enlightenment and education" was needed to help the folk find again their folklihood. The task would perhaps be comparatively easier in the Nordic countries. In modern terms, Grundtvig’s explanation of his vision would be that it is because the population in these countries was more homogeneous than elsewhere. Of course the Nordic folk certainly had experienced "emigrations" - a reference to the folk-wandering times [in the 4th and 5th centuries] - but they had not been affected by "immigrations".

In Grundtvig’s words the situation is described thus: "If we study the Folk-groups in Europe, we will find none that escaped that great mixture in the morning-hour of the Middle Ages, except the Folk in the North, where, far more divided from others through emigration, than they absorbed into themselves, therefore we rightly conclude that the basic source there must have the same unity or similarity as the Word, or the Mother- tongue. But if it is therefore reasonable that folk-education in the North can attain a much more organic and harmonious character than elsewhere in Europe, yet it [folk-education] is a task in which even good heads can make mistakes Here we sit approximately at the world’s end, and haven’t even the same kind of multiplicity to order up or differentiate, as that people [the Germans?] from whom we most nearly held our education, and with which our natural tendency is to be reconciled or even combined, and by whom in the beginning of the 19th century it [folk-education] was not at all mentioned nor would it have been known what such talk was all about."

For as one striking example to emphasize Grundtvig’s invincible opposition to a concept that excludes the folk, the nation’s immense majority, from culture, we cite his judgment of Italian culture’s great period - Titian’s, Raphael’s and Michelangelo’s century. He writes in the third volume of Handbook of World History: One "can... not leave Italy, without casting a glance at the artistic glory that in the 16th century contrasts so strikingly with the natural powerlessness and misery. Here it is again Rome, Florence and Venice which we must especially study, for here the most beautiful buildings were erected, and the three great schools of Italian painting blossomed, which still command the world’s admir- ation. One only needs to mention the Florentine Michelangelo Buonarotti, the Roman Raphael Sanzio and the Venetian Titian Vercelli, and all worshipers of art kneel before these Italian demigods, who filled the peninsula with their miracles. While Savonarola’s pyres reddened the clouds wildly, while blood flowed in streams under the swords of foreigners, and while practically all human productivity died out under that heavy tyranny... The present-day his- tory of nations must teach the rightly enlightened school, both to value Italian art as it deserves in its kind, and to explain the coming together of its glory with the defeat of the life of the Folk. Even at the risk of being called barbarian, all peoples should be advised to reject a praise and glory that must be bought at such a dear price. When all the heroes and saints are dead, then it is only a poor comfort, that they got a matchless St. Peters Church and a thousand beautiful palaces as their memorials."

It occurs to me that analyzing the concept of "folklihood" gives us a basis for identi-fying the most characteristic feature of the Nordic highschool, a feature that goes like a red thread through its history: the cultural concept which contains a sprout of protest, protest against the elite culture of Grundtvig’s time, protest in our time against the dominating cultures that crush the "folkly" cultures, protest against the political privileges that go hand in hand with cultural ones.

The aspect of "folklihood" inherent in political developments exploded in Denmark after 1870 and has entered history under the name of "the Culture War".

The Culture War
The culture war’s political framework

Apprehension about increased power for the farmer class, a class which Conserva-tives and National-Liberals viewed as lacking culture, led these two parties in May, 1870 to unite in a party called "the United Right". In the same month, the farmers and Grundt-vigians created the party called "the United Left".

This latter union wasn’t to everyone’s taste. "Right-Grundtvigians" couldn’t reconcile themselves to an alliance between the "materialism" of the farmers and Grundtvigian "spirituality". Pastor Birkeland expressed his serious opposition in the mythological terms which the Grundtvigians loved: "When the Aser [the gods of Valhalla] accepted a Giant’s help in building Valhalla, it was the downfall of that "United Left" and cost Odin an eye." Or, expressed in more earthy terms, "Should the Grundtvigian ‘wine’ be polluted by a mixture of the farmers’ movement’s ‘beer’?

Grundtvig supported "the Left Grundtvigians". But the "Right" did not lay aside their weapons, in spite of the United Left’s political success. Even at the "Friends’ Meeting" in 1874 [two years after Grundtvig’s death], the Grundtvigian professor Fr. Hammerich characterized this party as "an alliance between Spirit and Lack of Spirit."

"The Old and the New Education"

In January 1870, before the two political Right and Left alliances were formed, Parliament was confronted by a recommendation concerning the higher schools, a recom-mendation whose explosive effect nobody could foresee, and which came to set off "the culture war".

The proposal was simply to reduce the number of Latin schools, in order to lower public expense and at the same time decrease the flood of students into the University.

A committee was charged to investigate this question. Not only were some of the best-known Grundtvigian politicians appointed to this committee, but Sofus Høgsbro even became its chairman. Here was the opportunity for the Grundtvigians to introduce some of their ideas about culture into public education. Quite modest suggestions, to be sure: the com-mittee limited itself to recommending the introduction of a Nordic curriculum alongside the Classical one and a scientific one proposed at the same time.

This recommendation, reduced by the Minister of Culture to some lessons in Old Norse, was presented to the Parliament on May 29, 1870. But even in this mutilated form, it stirred up such violent opposition that a French observer is reminded of the passion of the opposing parties who more than a hundred years ago thundered at each other in connection with the French "school struggle".

Centralized Jacobin France can never admit that all children can be shaped over the same last - never mind worrying about whether this pattern fits all levels of the popula-tion. The problem of the Grundtvigians: one culture, which is not the privilege of one social class but belongs to the whole folk, concerns the whole nation - this problem has never so much as grazed French thinking.

Let’s turn back to that interesting time, and make an excursion to France. In 1870, when the concept of one culture, born in and from the folk, was gathering speed in the discussions of the Danish Parliament, the French revolutionary politician Gambetta (1832-82) declared that the peasants "intellectually were several centuries behind the enlightened part of the country."

In Denmark, what Gambetta would have called "the enlightened part of the country", the Conservative and National-Liberal party, would have subscribed to his position joy-fully. Hadn’t one of them, Orla Lehmann (1810-70) proclaimed that power should be reserved to "the gifted, the educated and the wealthy"? If power should fall into the hands of peasants, what would people say abroad, asked the representatives of "intelligence"? Carl Ploug (1813-94), editor-in-chief of the liberal newspaper Fædrelandet, [The Fatherland] said in 1873, when the fever was still far from diminishing: "It is not yet a hundred years since the dissolution of serfdom; among still- living farmers, the older ones are sons of freed slaves; they have grown up in an environment and under conditions in which the memories of serfdom are preserved."

To introduce what the Grundtvigians called Nordic humanism into the public cultural and educational institutions, wasn’t that to force the country back into barbarism? Nobody had anything against this Nordic humanism enlivening the teachers and students of the folk-highschools, but that this "humanism" should assault the public culture, that was really intolerable. Take notice that even in Norway, such measures had not been suggested.

That’s how tense the atmosphere was in the Danish Parliament, when one of the Grundtvigians, the farmer representative N. J. Termansen, whom we have already met in connection with Rødding, entered the debate.

N. J. Termansen's Plea: "Is Light only for the Learned..."

Termansen frankly attacked the official culture, which had been transplanted with the help of a foreign language, and so was inaccessible to the overwhelming majority of the people. According to the ideas of the so-called "educated" class, all who had not gone through the institutions that spread that culture were by definition doomed to be without culture. But contrary to the opinion of the official culture’s representatives, Nordic humanism - in Grundtvigian terms - wanted to set up a culture, born of and in the folk, the common inheritance of the whole nation, a culture which should rise up from the common people to the elite. Thus the common people would no longer struggle in their daily life against clergymen, judges, officials and teachers, who were all educated in a culture that was foreign to the folk; only so could a truly national culture develop.

Thus was the Vartov prophet’s message expressed in very simple terms, that message which had not been realized through the Academy in Sorø, but which little by little had permeated the Grundtvigian world, to which, as we have said, farmers, clergymen, and intellectuals all belonged.

What the representatives of the official culture especially resented was that there had occurred, so to speak, a class betrayal. The Grundtvigians too were products of the University, how could they betray their own camp? How could they recommend a "cultural turning of the tide"? For that was what the Grundtvigian program would lead to, if what Grundtvig had expressed in his song "Is light only for the Learned..." was actually realized. He said, "the sun rises with the farmer, not at all with the Learned..." If this sun, this "Light" really enlightens the feet first and only after that the head, in other words if - as we have seen numberless times - culture is born in and of the people and rises up to the elite, it will end with a "cultural turning of the tide" which horrified the cultural elite - and not just for noble reasons!

While the debate continued in Parliament, Sofus Høgsbro wrote in Dansk Folketidende [Danish People’s Times] on February 17, 1871: "It was to be expected that the struggle about these suggestions would be very warm. The National-Liberal Party, which has its chief strength in the official class educated in learned schools and the University, was fighting, in a way, for hearth and home".

Cultural privileges insured basically material privileges. That is nothing new, and neither has it ceased to be true.

The Grundtvigians lost the battle in Parliament, because some of the farmers’ representatives voted against the reform recommendation. But the debate had been so violent that it echoed far outside of Parliament and well into the neighboring countries.

Thus, in October, 1871 - a few months after the defeat of the Grundtvigians - Harald Holm, the Danish correspondent to Bjørnson’s paper, Norsk Folkeblad [Norwegian People’s Newspaper] wrote an account of the conflict-filled situation in Denmark: "So far as an essential view of life is concerned, there are really only two main directions with us, which fight each other for life or death - they are the old classical and the new folkly education, or if you will, the University and Folk- highschool education. They struggle with each other, one pushes down from above and wants to control the whole nation, the other fights its way from within and wants to develop the Folk’s innermost being. University education rules here, not only among professors, university students and officials, but through all layers of the people. For the whole educational structure, from the highest to the lowest, has up until now rested on the same foreign foundation; the same way of thinking has ruled among the teachers in the learned school and the common one... On the other hand, the new education has on its side only a little flock - and largely as yet deserters from the camp of the old education, who can hardly be depended on, when push comes to shove. But as compensation, it rests on home ground, has its root in the folk themselves and therefore has life on its side and the future before it."

As we see, this article doesn’t deny the power struggle between the two wings, as one says in today’s political terms, but neither does it conceal the view of the future.

And the fight continued. The culture war took on political dimensions to a steadily higher degree. Dansk Folketidende in May 1874 gave the word to P. Rønne, who declared, "For us, the current struggle is a fight against the old National-Liberal educa- tion and way of thinking, a fight between the old time that placed the government in the hands of a few privileged people, and the new time, that wants to lay just as much government as responsibility upon the Folk".

In 1848, the year before the February Revolution in Paris - the only Socialistic revolution in France, which lasted three months - Grundtvig had interpreted in his own way, in a well-known poem, the famous battle-cry: Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood: "Folklihood is a Nordic word, gently it solves Equality’s riddle..."

In 1874, a Grundtvigian member of Parliament re-stated Grundtvig’s message. "No political party except the United Left has the ‘program’ of carrying out Grundtvig’s special philosophy - that the whole common Folk must work together - that the right ‘culture war’ has as its mission to open the way for ‘Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood’, yes, ‘gently to solve Equality’s riddle’".

C. P. O. Christiansen, one of the very great personalities in the Grundtvigian move-ment, who with some friends took the initiative to actualize Grundtvig’s project about a Scientific Highschool, CPO as he is called in Denmark, once decided to go to Norway, to study the Norwegian folkhighschool. When he queried one of the directors, he got an answer that was amazing to him as a university-educated man, but very characteristic for the Norwegian folkhighschool. "I put Heimskringla [The classic Old Norse history, written by the Icelander Snorre Sturlasson, about 1235.] in my knapsack, take it on my back, and wander over the mountains," said this director.

The Norwegian folkhighschool in fact does carry in its knapsack all the 19th century’s moving history, a century in which Norway - by looking into all its former greatness - tried to find its genuine national character, its folklihood (to use Grundtvig’s word). And in these strivings, the folkhighschool played an important role.

Notes

1. School Writings: "The Danish Fourleaf-Clover", 1836; "To the Norwegians, about a Norwegian High-School, 1837; "The School for Life and the Academy in Sorø", 1838; "Petition and Ideas about a Danish High-School in Sorø", 1840; "About the Conversion of Sorø Academy to a Folkly High-School", 1843; "Good Luck to Denmark with the Danish Fool and the Danish Highschool, 1847; together with "About the Scientific Union of the North", 1839. All printed in K. E. Bugge: Grundtvig’s School-world in Texts and Outlines I-II, 1968.

2. Assemblies of the Classes (Advisory Provincial Classes) set up in 1834, meeting every other year in Roskilde, Viborg, Slesvig and Itzehoe, laid down in 1848.

3. Sorø. Cloister founded in 1162, changed in 1586 to a boarding school for 30 noble and 30 middle-class boys. In 1623 was connected to a "Knightly Academy", which was laid down in 1665. The school stopped functioning in 1737. The Academy was resumed through a donation from Ludvig Holberg in 1747, but was laid down in 1793. In 1822, the present school (a Latin school) was founded, to which in 1826-49 an Academy was connected, where among others Ingemann and Hauch were teachers.

4. Ingemann, B. S. (1789-1862) - Danish romantic poet, teacher at Sorø Academy from 1822. Best known for his historical romances from the Danish Middle Ages, and his hymns.

5. Vartov, foundation or "hospital", built in 1726-44, originally with place for 450 persons, closed in 1934. Grundtvig was the minister at the foundation’s church, 1839-1872. The church is now a free-congregation church and the building is owned and run by the Grundtvigian "Church Society of 1898".

6. "Friends Meetings". The first was held September 9-10, 1863 in connection with Grundtvig’s 80th birthday on September 8. Later ones were held in 1865, 1866, 1868, 1869 and 1871, when Grundtvig had a 60-year jubilee as priest. In 1872 it was a funeral celebration, as Grundtvig died September 2. The meetings continued after Grundt-vig’s death as a kind of annual meeting for the Grundtvigian movement. They were nation- wide and at times gathered more than a thousand participants.

 

 

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, wrot