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, wrote the most famous of the Romanticists, Johan Sebastian Welhaven. The contradiction in this attitude was emphatically noted in the literary criticism of the times: "The Romantic movement which esthetically worshipped 'that proud race that contains the sons of Tyr and Thor’ pulled back when these sons of Tyr and Thor began to write in Statsborgaren [The State Citizen]" comments a Wergeland specialist from the middle of last century.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Farmer's Son and the Aristocrat's Son

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher Bruun as Ibsen and Bjørnson Saw Him

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher Bruun's Road to the Folkhighschool
"As a Greek one must live
If Greek one would die."
Grundtvig - Chronicle Rhymes, 1842.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The exciting springtime of the folk"

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

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

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

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

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

The Norwegian cultural war. Christopher Bruun's lectures in Kristiania, 1870.
Christopher Bruun gave his first lecture on May l, 1870. [There were] seven lectures, altogether, in three weeks, followed by three discussion evenings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

CHAPTER THREE: SWEDEN

PROLOGUE
"The small patriotism, which we can still find among our Swedish folk, has been of the old sort, [stemming] from the national pride of the 1600’s . On the other hand, our people have completely missed what was meant by "national awakening" in the 1800’s. That instinctive popular struggle to express one’s innermost character in every circumstance of life, has been something unknown to us."
Gustav Sundbärg: The Swedish Folk Temperament, 1911.

'The Power of dreams in a people who once were great"
(Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, 1899)

In Denmark, one is particularly aware that the folkhighschool’s most charac-teristic effect has been, and continues to be, its rebellion against what Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson called "the establishment". A protest directed against an elite culture in Denmark, of foreign origin. It was unattainable by the common people, reserved for a small minority which as a result were guaranteed all privileges. This cultural as well as political protest, which in Norway was even more violent than in Denmark, was wi doubtless disapproved, or more likely inconceivable in Sweden.

Sweden’s historical backround is so different from that of its neighboring countries, that this fact, in my opinion, must explain why the Swedish folkhighschool right from the beginning was marked, if not by its opposition, at least by its dissimilarity from the Danish model.

The current explanation for the founding of folkhighschools in Sweden is the district associations in 1862 and the reform of representation in 1866, when the organization of Riksdagen [the parliament] was changed from four classes to two chambers. The peasants, through these reforms, obtained so much responsibility in all aspects of society, that a better understanding of citizenship was needed. This argument can of course not be completely denied, it is above all valid in explaining why the peasants turned to the folkhighschools. It hardly explains, however, why the first folkhighslchool principals, who were academicians as in Denmark and Norway - thus not theologians - often resigned from extraordinary career possibilities, to settle down in the peasant milieu, under unbelievably difficult conditions, handicapped by isolation and often by aggressive hostility.

What motivated these academicians to make such a difficult choice? They did not belong to a movement which supported their engagement, as in Denmark,and they were not, as in Norway, active opponents, struggling to win back what today we call national identity. Nevertheless, these men too were seized by the burning Nordic enthusiasm, which permeated the whole 19th century.

In an essay collection, the Scånian author Ola Hansson (1860-1925) revives the memory of the previous generation, the men of the 1870’s: "The best, and the most representative of them were shaped by what was then called ‘the New Nordic Renaissance’; they wanted to create an independent Scandinavian culture, they studied Icelandic and founded folkhighschools."

So why did they reject the Danish and Norwegian model for an educational institution, which in those neighboring countries were in the front ranks of the battle for what Ola Hansson calls "an independent Scandinavian culture"? In my opinion, we must look for the answer in the fact that in Sweden, "to return to oneself" - to use an often quoted expression of Erik Gustaf Geijer - it wasn’t possible to free oneself from such strong traditions that Bjørnson, even in 1899, expressed them in the phrase "the power of dreams in a folk that once were great". [Erik Gustav Geijer (1783-1847) in his Collected Works I, declares that it is unprofitable to try to return to old ways of thinking, but at the same time he maintains that a people, like an individual, cannot develop unless they absorb the former times. "There is a ‘return’ that is ... both legal and useful - that is ‘a return to oneself.’" Geijer’s lectures in history at Uppsala University, his poetry, and his noticeable political change from conservatism to liberalism gave him a position in the Sweden of his time which has been compared with Grundtvig’s in Denmark.]

The Nordic Renaissance developed in Sweden during the 1870’s, that is, somewhat later than in the other countries. It is somewhat surprising to discover in this movement an echo of Swedish national feeling’s two fundamental components: the Gothic myth and enthusiasm for the hereditary peasant.

These notions of history, which today we smile at, did not seem so remarkable at the time when they were being worked out. What gives them a special character is that they have played a role as compensation myths. In this quality, they have survived oblivion.

De omnibus Gothorum Sveonumque regibus - that is, The history of all the Gothic and Swedish kings is the name of the monumental work that the last Swedish Catholic archbishop, Johannes Magnus, prepared during his exile in Rome. It was published there in 1554 and served as the official state ideology in Sweden from the time of Gustav Vasa’s son’s rule until the death of Charles XII (1560-1718). It has been said of this "Gothic Iliad" that "no book by a Swedish author (has) exercised a greater influence upon our country’s imaginative life and fate than this exiled patriot’s historical work, in later times [so] severely judged" (Johan Nordstrøm - The Island of the Foreignborn Ones, 1930).

National pride, in that century which in Sweden is unapologetically called "the time of great power" (1611-1718), complemented the Gothic myth, which stood parallel with the Swedish successes on the political plane. "The Lion of the North", Gustav II Adolf, had led Swedish armies from victory to victory during the Thirty Years War. Sweden had raised itself to the rank of a great power, the country sought an earlier history worthy of this new honor. Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie founded the Antiquities College in 1666, to support research about Sweden’s past. Scholars of that time - Bureus, Stiernhielm, Verelius - competed eagerly to prove that the island Elixoia, which in ancient times was inhabited by "the Hyperboreans", was none other than Scania, Scandinavia. When this conclusion was reached and became recognized everywhere, according to the learning of that time, a new step forward was taken. Through continued research in antique texts, it was imagined possible to prove that Apollo, born in the country of the Hyperboreans, returned there every ninth year and took up residence in a stately temple, which couldn’t be anything but the sacred area in Uppsala. From this place, he [is said to have] sent a messenger named Abaris to the Greeks, to indoctrinate this folk in Hyperborean temple mysteries. We are far from the Grundtvigian vision - a construction of which the mainly founded on the Bible, with one wing built in Greece while the other came from the North! Swedish pride wavered up and down on these cultural currents, a Sweden which had been despised by the scholars of the Renaissance now declared itself to be the cradle of culture. Greece had received its culture from the Hyperboreans. What a revenge for the land where Descartes [complained that he] had perished from the cold!

These ideas were topped off by the famous Olof Rudbeck , whose influence can still be recognized in Uppsala’s city seal. He tried to prove in four volumes, with the support of Plato’s great work Atlantis that the legendary island Atlantis, combined with Elixoia, was Sweden. The first volume was published in 1679. Rudbeck’s work was known and valued outside of the country. A well-known French newspaper of that time contained a review in 1685, formulating only one critical comment: In France it wasn’t possible to accept that also the Gauls came from Sweden!

We recognize with amazement that what from our height can only be con-sidered a compensation myth, in Louis XIV’s century agreed with what was accepted and expected as history.

With Charles XII, enthusiasm for the dispersed Goths - Gothi ex Patria - came to an end. But during the 1700’s, Swedish national feeling could find nourishment from other sources. Hadn’t the French philosopher Montesquieu declared in 1748, in The Spirit of Law that freedom was born in the North? And what did Rousseau say in his famous answer to the question: "Has progress in science and art resulted in improved morals?" Didn’t he praise the moral values of primitive men, insofar as civilization had not destroyed them?

This[primitive] man was to be discovered in the hereditary peasant, the Swedish peasant, who was a free man, owner of his land and represented in the Riksdag. Those who were filled with ideas of Freedom and Gustavian Sweden, enlightenment and refined French culture, began to sing the praises of "the hereditary peasant":

"Thou, Sweden, thou, the honored country,
The freedom the countryman found with thee
With thee alone the Citizen,
Slave in almost every country:
At the prince’s throne, at the statesman’s table,
He often determined the fate of the realm;
The law he obeys is one he created,
The earth he plows is his own earth."
-N. L. Sjöberg: The Peasant, Stockholm, 1791

During the 1800’s, the principle of nationality was developed everywhere in Europe: Should Denmark, Norway and Sweden meet this century in the same spirit? Should Sweden be able to leave aside its ancient dreams and the "return to itself" praised by Geiger, and unite with Denmark and Norway in a "return" which also contained an element of "agitation", a protest against a society which carries privileges for some and excludes others? The hereditary peasant who - only in Sweden - had established a political structure, the district league, which rejected interference from the higher classes - should he, as in Denmark and Norway, unite with radical forces and take part in the storming of Bjørnson’s "establishment"?

Obviously, nothing came of this. Since nobody in Sweden took up the idea of shouting that "the sun rises with the farmer, not at all with the scholars" [One of the most famous of Grundtvig’s quotations, and the title of this book]- in other words that therefore no "culture-war" existed - I believe it has always been difficult in Sweden, yes practically impossible, to understand the cultural and political dimen-sions of those struggles with which the folkhighschool in the other countries came to be involved.

Contacts with Grundtvigian ideas and with the battle for independence in Norway became distorted and led to misunderstanding, something which was caused partly by ignorance and partly by an inability to understand because of a quite different spiritual climate.

Of course, the political pressure affecting Sweden at the beginning of the century contributed to this difference in climate. Sweden lost Finland, Åland and part of Västerbotten to Russia in 1809. Bernadotte, the French marshal imported to be Sweden’s crown prince, gave up all ideas of revenge and instead forced a Swedish union with Norway, which for centuries had had a common king with Denmark. This political reversal was the basis in Sweden for the so-called Gothic Union (1811), with the idea of reviving "the old Goths’ devotion to freedom, manly courage, and honest mind." In that spirit, for example, E. G. Geijer wrote his poem about the hereditary peasant. Professor Anton Blanck points out the dilemma in his work about Geijer’s Gothic poetry (1918): "The first conscious national movement in the 1800’s was born in those months when a new and untraditional foreign policy placed Sweden definitely outside participation in the century’s great idea of nationality."

Sweden and Grundtvig
"Something in his mental structure is foreign to the Swedish temperament."
August Sohlman in Aftonbladet [The Evening News] October 11, 1872.

We should always hold in mind that contacts between the Nordic countries were still sporadic at the beginning of the 1800’s, especially across the Öresund [with Denmark] . It is , to be sure, worthy of note that certain works by Grundtvig were read in literary circles in Sweden, especially his Mythology (1808) and World History (1812). The literary historian Lorenzo Hammarsköld discovered "craziness combined with brilliance" in the writer, while the poet Esaias Tegnér confided in Jacob Adlerbeth, the founder of the Gothic Union, that "the man is a genius who has abandoned good sense."

The epoch of the Scandinavian students

After the famous Caledonia, the first steamship, crossed Öresund in 1828, the contacts between Denmark and Sweden had become closer, even though at first this affected [only] the academic world. Certainly, it was through the first Scandinavian magazine that "the Gothenburg project" became known in Sweden.

Grundtvig formulated his ideas "About the Scientific Union of the North" in an article in the first issue of Brage and Idun, 1839. When Frederik Barfod founded this journal, he first thought of calling it The Ancient and the New North. Grundtvig opposed this title for reasons which are not always fully apparent, but which clearly show, that his "nationalism" is unimaginable in other than a universal perspective. Thus he writes to Barfod: "I believe and prophesy that the planned journal will have both a longer and finer life, if it doesn’t limit itself exclusively to the North.... On the contrary, foreign journeys, from the time of Arild, have been partof Nordic life and its special character, where there is no barrier, but [rather] a tendency to travel.... So I feel a great desire and need to make Nordic readers better acquainted with human life and its fruits under other skies... [and] to give the journal the whole world as its playing field."

Unfortunately, Grundtvig’s language was difficult to understand. (It always is!) Professor Chr. Flor confided in Barfod: "Meanwhile, Grundtvig, as is well-known, has the misfortune that nobody, not even his best friends, knows what he means."

How right Flor was, we sense when we read the reviews of "About the Scientific Union of the North", whether they appear in Barfod’s journal or in the Swedish Aftonbladet.

In 1840, an article by Pete Wieselgren called "About the Scientific Union of the North; reply to N.F.S. Grundtvig by a Swede" was published in Barfod’s journal. Wieselgren was originally from Småland, which had faithfully preserved the Rud-beckian traditions. He had become a valued member of the Gothic Union. Wiesel-gren was best known for his temperance work, but he was also a religious reformer. In this capacity it had to be expected that he would criticize certain Grundtvigian thoughts severely. In his article, we read: "We thus do not approve that opinion that strives to preserve Nordishness - Brage and Idun and all of Valhalla’s divinities included - a continuing cultural separateness." Wieselgren the reformer must naturally have been shocked by the manner in which Grundtvig’s thoughts were originally presented - as a relationship between "Odin and the White Christ."

On the other hand, he was intrigued by the idea of a Nordic university. "It is undeniable that there may be something valuable in the very possibility that such an idea could be born and so boldly developed by a Northerner among this race of siblings, divided throughout some centuries [as they have been].." Here we note an echo of the Scandinavian ideas that Grundtvig set himself against so strongly! Wieselgren declares that "the idea (of a scientific union alone) is proposed by a genius in Denmark." But how should one bring this idea into fruition? "About the realization, a humble Swedish interpreter must offer his thoughts....Everything that Herr Grundtvig offers in his recommendation of a common university seems to us can be acquired in the following way: During summer vacations, when the four Latin Universities are not holding preparations for examinations, they could at little cost come together in a particular place, whether that be a fixed or a changing one, and there hold the lively discussion and whatever else could be part of the common University."

Here we see for the first time a decisive difference between Sweden at one side and Denmark and Norway on the other. There was no comprehension - there couldn’t be comprehension in Sweden - of the basic enmity in Denmark and Norway toward the university, the seat of that kind of culture that they were opposing with all their might. We shall find several examples that show how in Sweden there was no understanding that it really ["the common University"] had to do with a counter-culture, a counter-university.

J. L. Almquist’s article, which was also printed in Barfod’s journal, lacks interest. Otherwise, it is related to the one that Lars John Hierta published in Aftonbladet, June 13, 1839. Hierta had started this newspaper in 1830, and it became called "The Peasant Class’s Bible." Further, it is interesting to notice that Hierta was not, like most people of the time, smitten by the Scandinavian fever. In his article one reads: "The brilliant interpreter of Nordic myths has turned himself into a ‘Goth’ and represents more than all others the modern Gothicism that attempts to introduce Gothic elements into modern life." Here is an interesting example of the survival of the Gothic myth even in the case of a leader of the liberal wing in Sweden.

Aside from the Gothic leadership he imputes to Grundtvig, Hierta’s criticism is poisonous. First and foremost, Grundtvig’s language wearies him. According to Hierta, the author’s style is "worthless" and shows "an affected simplicity." Not to mention the content: "Grundtvig lives in a constant exaltation, in a delirium tremens, in which he has visions which are sometimes brilliant, but which often seize upon what is the [proper] subject of prose and earnest reasonableness, leaving the reader in total uncertainty about the true intention... Asa gods and Iceland and Cambridge ‘colleges’ and ancient times and ancient poets and saga writers and the Gjallarhorn and the sword of Heimdall and all sorts of glories are strewn around in this treatise, so that it swings around before the reader’seyes, and both the soundly serious and the fantastic poetic are stirred into an ‘apple-pudding’."

The news that came over the Öresund and certainly reached a few people, didn’t mention Denmark’s first folkhighschool, Rødding. This oversight is all the more surprising, since a personality who in the future would play an important role in the creation of folkhighschools in Sweden, namely August Sohlman (1824-74), participated in the Scandinavian meeting of 1845 in Copenhagen. Through Danish friends, he learned to know the problems of Southern Jutland, but clearly nobody bothered to mention the folkhighschool in Rødding, which was precisely in the center of these problems and which indeed had been founded with the active help of the Scandinavianists.

As mentioned earlier, Grundtvig in 1843 had turned to the king with a proposal to turn "the Academy at Sorø" into a "people’s university". We recall the unfortunate failure of this project. [The plan was favored by the then-ruling king Christian VII, but this monarch’s death left the Sorø idea undefended and at the mercy of bitter opponents in the Danish Folketing [[parliament[]. It was summarily dismissed.]

A Swedish discussion about "the Sorø project" is to be found in a book published by the educator J. H. Ekendal. In 1848 he undertook a journey for educational purposes, which among other things led him to Denmark. (Travels through Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, 1852).

In Copenhagen, he met Ingemann. This close friend of Grundtvig gave him information about "the prophet of the North", which was so unfavorable that one must ask whether Ekendal had really understood him, or whether he had unconsciously falsified what he had learned about Grundtvig under the influence of the prejudices that were flourishing in Sweden. In his book, one reads: "In Copenhagen lives a unique and remarkable man, Dean Grundtvig. He has two universal remedies for all possible social ills. One is Christianity, the other nationality. Wherever Christianity isn’t appropriate, he turns to the emotion of nationality."

When he speaks of "the Sorø Academy", Ekendal states that it previously was nothing other than "a Latin school". But it is to be "raised to higher-education status", that is, a Danish college, for all kinds of youth of confirmation age. But the plans for creating this "peasants’ academy" have come to nothing.

To close with a more positive picture, I cite the letter which Frederika Bremer* wrote on March 30, 1849, to her friend, the schoolman and rector Per Bøklin, after a visit to Grundtvig: "Grundtvig - possibly the most original and powerful nature among Denmark’s great men. Lately, I have come in contact with him, but this contact was of a magnetic nature, at least from me to him, and the words he uttered about the Scandinavian North’s special task, the consciousness of life, just as much as the historical development, as that appears in his Mythology, the significance of these myths in connection with the interpretation of Christianity and its historical development - this and more, which Grundtvig said during a conver- sation of about two hours, in a spiriit and manner which could well have been that of the old prophets, now with flaming intimacy and again in polemical wrath, pleased me very much, and I long to hear him further on these subjects. G. is a handsome old man with a tall, strong figure, noble proportions, a pale, thoughtful face, snow-white hair; his head is as though carved in marble, and the flaming glance of his eye, full of dark passion, in that pale face, makes an impression which would not be easy to forget. G. is the first magnetic nature I have met in Denmark."

Scandinavianism after the war of 1864
"One hears only what one understands."
- Goethe

The 1864 war, the Danish defeat, put a period to the Scandinavian dreams. But new initiatives were undertaken, especially in Sweden. There, on March 2, 1865, the "Nordic National Union" was formed, which also published a journal, called The Nordic Journal for Politics, Economy and Literature. The editor was Professor G. K. Hamilton in Lund. Its intention was to make the Scandinavian struggles concrete, especially to inform [its readers] about the necessity for a political union among the three Nordic kingdoms, at the same time that their special characteristics should be respected. It should also be held in mind, that union between Sweden and Norway perpetually invited conflicting interpretations.

Two personalities, August Sohlman and S.A. Hedin, both at times editors of Aftonbladet - Hedin also being anticlerical - took the initiative to make contact with the Danes who belonged to the folkhighschool milieu. They wanted information about a school that might be able to influence the Swedes to be hospitable to the idea of the political unity of the North.

This pan-Scandinavian credo, as we know, stood in opposition to Grundtvigian ideas. But as Chr. Flor emphasized, even in Denmark it was difficult to comprehend Grundtvig’s thinking. One of the Grundtvigians was guilty of a Scandinavian devi-ation. This was Frede Bojsen, who belonged to "the dynasty of the nobility", that is, the clan of Grundtvigian families immediately close to the master. (Bojsen was married to Herman Anker’s sister Mix - so we’ve really landed in the Grundtvigian "special alley"!) Frede Bojsen wrote an article which was published in the June/July issue of the Nordic Journal: "The folkhighschool must in its essence be neither Swedish, Nor-wegian, nor Danish, but in common Nordic."

In the same year, the magazine turned to Frederik Bajer, a Dane who was [a partisan of] Scandinavianism, but was primarily famous as a pacifist. In 1908, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He called his article in the March/April 1867 issue "Recommendation for the Founding of a Nordic Folkhighschool". Thus, yet another digression from Grundtvigian ideas. But in contrast to P. Wieselgren, who as pre-viously mentioned would have placed Grundtvig’s Nordic university in existing universities during their summer vacations, Frederik Bajer thought this was not feasible. Although he certainly wasn’t Grundtvigian, he declared, "It would perhaps be a labor harder than Hercules’ to sweep out the non-folkly [aspects] which, in the course of many centuries have collected within the framework of the universities. No, let us raise a new People’s High School by the side of the old." First and foremost, he concluded, one must "clear out the very unfolkly leaven", and as a result, the university "would fall like other old trees."

This attack upon the university was not to the magazine’s taste. Professor Hamilton protested vigorously and made it clear that the journal was in no way in agreement with Frederik Bajer. Once more we can declare that Sweden had no "culture-war". The popular culture was not seen as opposed to the academic.

The new Riksdag assembled for the first time on January 15, 1867. The [separate] peasant party had ceased to exist; peasant representatives constituted the majority in the new parliament and the Nordic National Union - apparently both editors of Aftonblad, Sohlman and Hedin - were certain that one of the most important tasks for the Scandinavian movement was to take the initiative to help the peasants.

These "hereditary peasants," who later more prosaically called themselves "home-activists". should be full citizens, as involved as others in the welfare of the state.

By chance, Sohlman had encountered Chr. Flor on the train, on the way to the World Fair in Paris. This Danish professor at the University of Kiel was a convinced Grundtvigian and earlier the rector of Rødding High School. Chr. Flor had traveled in Sweden, and remarked with surprise on the lack of interest in universal questions, a total indifference toward everything that went on outside of everyday life’s narrow circle. And Flor enlightened Sohlman about the role of the Grundtvigian folkhighschools in Denmark. Sohlman himself tells that he spent sleepless nightes until he finally decided to undertake to recommend to the Nordic National Union that it engage itself actively to create similar institutions in Sweden.

On the 5th and 11th of November, 1867, the Nordic National Union arranged discussions about "peasant highschools". Sohlman opened the debate and gave information about the Danish folkhighschools "which amount to a new cultural-historical phenomenon, as peculiar as splendid. It is especially in the very most recent time that these institutions for learning have arisen, brought about by the awakening desire of the people themselves to strengthen nationality."

Sohlman had written to the best known members of "the Little Theological Group", the principals of Askov, Vallekilde and Testrup: Schrøder, Trier and Nørre-gaard. He had received long letters in reply, which presented the folkhighschool as it then was. "Awakening" and "enlightening" were mentioned, but it was emphasized that the awakening must be a national awakening. They reported that instruction occurred only through oral lectures. No textbooks were used. But singing - at least an hour a day - for song was the best instrument to help "the spiritual" to affect the whole of human life. The subjects of instruction were "the history of humanity" - mythology, Saxo, Snorre, the Bible, Herodotus, Homer... - along with practical subjects, if the need for such things came to be considered, but as little as possible of that kind. It was necessary to begin very simply, in the country, using a farm locality.

We don’t know how the members of the Nordic National Union reacted to this quite specific presentation of the folkhighschool’s spiritual world. But as Goethe has said: "Everybody hears only what he understands". Certainly the members of the Union remembered what they could understand of this Grundtvigian message, or better, what they believed was part of the message. Some observed with satisfaction that the Danish folkhighschool came about without the interference of state and church. Carl von Bergen, the editor of the journal Framtiden [The Future], emphasized the following, in his contribution: "In this circle, I don’t need to point out extensively the enormous difference between Grundtvigianism, with its "happy Christianity", its liberal-mindedness and its warm inter- est in the national, and on the other side the avoidance of light, the hangdog and imprac- tical pietism, which is most general in our land." Education and school suffer under "the official guardianship of religiosity, whose authoritarian dominion these new folk-education institutions are intended to oppose by indirect methods."

Olof Eneroth, in Framtiden, called Sweden "the Protestant Spain" [referring to this anticlericalism].

S.A. Hedin, the most liberal of all the liberals in Sweden, spoke against all involvement from the side of the State: "We must carefully protect ourselves against an almost instantaneous result, what [might] appear to be an advantage, the so-called enlightened despotism’s motto in the last century: ‘Everything for the people, nothing through the people...’ It is of great importance that the folkhighschool is not, and doesn’t appear to be, something arranged by the favor of the so-called higher classes, established by the calculation of others. Interest for this affair must be sought and awakened among the peasants themselves - which will give life to the undertaking."

Sohlman doesn’t share this optimism: "Were the country people so warmly interested for a national education, so willing to make personal sacrifices for the sake of folk-enlightenment, that they could be expected entirely by themselves to construct a whole system of peasant highschools, then they would already be at a point which we should have reason to congratulate ourselves about. That spirit would already be in place, which should constitute one of the peasant highschool’s most noble results."

Carl von Bergen had recommended that "the press should open a full and instructive discussion about the subject." Finally, it was decided to print the discussions from the 5th and 11th of November. Seven thousand copies should be distributed gratis to the subscribers to Aftonbladet. This publicity was not without result: "Friends of Popular Education", who had a meeting in Örebro in July and August of 1868, included a discussion about the folk-highschool in their program.

Once more it was Frede Bojsen who presented the Danish "college". Accord-ing to the report in the local newspaper Nerike’s Miscellany, the whole Grundtvigian world was discussed at the meeting - awakening, mythology, "the living Word" - everything that was emotional and irritating for the Swedish public. Reaction was not slow. In the July/August, 1868, number of The Newsletter for the Public School, its editor Chr. L. Anjou condemned unmercifully this institution whose importation into Sweden was being attempted. "Concerning the currently much discussed question about folkhighschool, or peasant colleges" Anjou thinks "that we couldn’t imagine, here in this country under present conditions, that the establishment of any such permanent poetical-political circles would succeed for our peasantry." The author hopes "that our people never should be in such circumstances that extraordinary revival establishments of similarly peculiar kind would be needed or could even come into question."

The Nordic Magazine naturally replied to Chr. L. Anjou’s article. In the August/September, 1868 issue, one reads: "We couldn’t avoid finding in this statement a sad proof of how hard it is, for even keen and enlightened promoters of state-supported educational extension to free themselves from onesidedness in their judgment of occurrences which don’t carry the once-for-all-time accepted hallmark of officialdom." The article is signed by the magazine’s editor. S. A. Hedin likewise showed his disapproval and wrote on September 12 in The New Illustrated Times: "In recent times, a quite marked enmity toward that promising institution has certainly come into the open, but let us hope that this unfriendly voice - although it is raised by the editor of a semi-official newspaper for the public schools - is and continues to be a voice crying in the wilderness."

There was still another source of irritation for Chr. L. Anjou. He had read in Aftonbladet on the 12th of September, 1867, a report by O.S. Ålund, Ph.D. This member of the Nordic National Union had been sent to Denmark by Sohlman, to make personal contact with these schools, which were to be proposed in Sweden. Anjou doesn’t hesitate, he answers on November, 1868 in the Nordic magazine, that he has heard the folkhighschool represented "as a kind of poetical-political club" , which is distinguished by "a superficial mixture of poetry and Christianity." This was no doubt an answer both to Ålund’s report and to his recommendation of a folk-highschool, which had been published in February, 1868.

As a conclusion to this account of the many initiatives which were taken by the Nordic National Union, I will just mention that Sohlman, in order to secure support for the initiation of folkhighschools, arranged for gratis speeches to be given in Stockholm by the cream of Sweden’s intelligentsia, each week in November and December, 1868.

One is surprised to observe that, at the same time the National Union in many ways strained energetically to make the Danish "highschool" known, and its intro-duction eagerly desired, the peasants themselves were taking [a separate] initiative to improve education in the country towns. And it was a consequence of their initiative, that the first folkhighschools were founded in Sweden. So they were indeed created "up from the bottom", as a Swedish participant declared at the last Scan-dinavian Student meeting in Uppsala in 1875.

The Nordic National Union had, in spite of itself, played the same role in Sweden which the Grundtvigian movement had played in Denmark. This, in Norway, according to an international pattern, was called "the [battle] camp of the folk." But the order of events was different, and I believe that if the folkhighschools were the work of the peasants in Sweden, their active engagement in schoolwork is connected with the unique position which the peasants have had in Swedish history.

The peasant in Swedish history
"There lies within the Swedish nature a certain desire in everyone, to, as they say, ‘have their word’ in the meeting."
Matts Pehrson from Roslagen, Riksdagen 1856-58

It is well known that the Swedish peasant, during the whole course of history, has supported "town meeting", where all kinds of questions could be handled without interference from nobleman, official, or priest. Not before the 1800’s did the town meeting disappear, as a consequence of constitutional reforms, of which the most sweeping was the decree about law changes in 1827. From the time of the foundation of Riksdagen in the 1400’s, the peasants were represented there, as the fourth estate of the nation. By the time of Gustav Vasa (1523-60), they still owned 52% of the land, and Olaus Petri wrote at that time: "Sweden is a country which is so protected by moors, rocks and forest that the common people cannot long be subdued by coercion and force, for they have great opportunities to set themselves up against their masters."

During the Great-Power time in the 1600’s, the peasant class had to pay for Sweden’s political ambitions through the confiscation of crops, but officially their independent position was acknowledged. Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna declared at the Riksdag in 1642: "The peasant is a freeborn "innocent", and it is an honor in Sweden to be the son of a peasant." Two years later, the spokesman for the peasants let Riksdagen hear: "We know that in other lands, the common people are slaves; that dread we shall avoid, for we are nevertheless born free people."

But the peasant survived all threats. When a new constitution had been worked out after the coup in 1809, Hans Järta would point out that it was not "modeled after any of the modern social pacts in the rest of Europe (a clear allusion to Montesquieu) "but according to the ancient Swedish costume, with the peasant’s jersey nearest the skin."

The peasant class takes part in discussions in Riksdagen’s
moving introduction of the public school in 1842.

Only in Sweden was the peasant class represented in the country’s parliament. During the first half of the 1800’s, when discussion began to lead toward the founding of a public elementary school obligatory and free of cost, the farmer class’s members in Riksdagen participated in the debates. The argument for and against the folk-highschool was forecast by these overtones, when that came to be discussed [later] in Sweden.

During the early part of Karl XIV Johan’s reign, the two higher classes, the nobility and the clergy, were usually opposed to ideas of enlightenment and romanticism. The peasant class was awakening about 1823, when for the first time the education of all citizens was being debated among them, under the leadership of Anders Danielsson, a member of the opposition party. "The time of innocence" was past, it was explained, and the liberal opposition was strengthened. Aftonbladet was founded, as earlier mentioned, subsequent to the 1830 July revolution in France, and this newspaper became "the Peasant Class’s Bible". It had an obvious effect on the speeches of the peasant leaders. Thus, Per Sahlström commented in 1833 that only the higher classes received the advantage of the country’s [current] form of instruc-tion, while it was the peasants who paid for these privileges with their taxes. Still, there could be no question of sending farmers’ sons to school in the cities, for this would prepare them to look for "the insecure career of a servant". In 1834, Sven Heurlin declares that "if the common man is to keep his ancient independence in the future, a school must be created, [appropriate to] the peasant". But there was clearly doubt about the intentions of the government. In this matter, Sven Heurlin hopes that the government "won’t exercise that degrading policy, against which all the govern-ments in history should be warned, namely, through keeping the people ignorant, to prepare to be relieved of rule, themselves!"

A question which was vehemently argued was the financing of the proposed school. Already in 1823, a farmer from Västergötland had demonstrated "that the advantages of the respected clerical class have little relationship to the general welfare or distress of the country." Sven Heurlin sharpens the argument. He suggests that district schools be established at common expense, and that the means be found through reductions "... in the salaries of the clerical class. There is a common opinion that bishops are unnecessary."

Here, we note the tone of Aftonbladet. The bishop of Wingård in 1834 mourned the influence of "the falsest, most superficial liberalism, which threatens the founda-tions of State and Church". Finally, the Riksdag decided that the townships should pay for the common school - which called forth lively protests from many peasant members. For example, Lars Petersson from Blekinge says: "I recognize my own incapacity, and I dare say that many besides me perceive that if one is to come into possession of that kind of learning, both I and many of the actual peasants, yes and besides that, most of our worthy class here assembled, and possibly a significant part of the respected master-class within other Estates and Corporations, would need to return to school, entering as pupils... For my part, I wonder how our poor Sweden would look, if that time comes when all the sons of countrypeople turn to writing as a career. Who then would [be left] to handle the axe, the spade, the flail and the plow?"

According to the royal decree of June 18, 1842, it was decided that the town-ships should finance the common school and that the church rectors should be the chairmen of the school committees. The peasant class were long indignant over this defeat...

The folkhighschool in Sweden begins "from below"
"What happens that is great, occurs quietly.
...Powerful masters with shouting and roars
beat up around cities and the state;
The peasant and his son build quietly -
though they peer from blood-sprinkled earth.
I don’t have a lot of learning;
All I know is what is mine.
What is right, I give to God and the king
and enjoy the rest freely."
E. G. Geijer: The Hereditary Peasant, 1811

We have earlier had occasion to tell how disappointed the author of Peasant Stories [Bjørnson] was, when he abandoned the company of the literati and settled down among the peasants whom he had painted in such idyllic colors in his tales. We don’t want to make the same mistake, when we undertake to describe the attempts some Swedish peasants made to found folkhighschools!

The hereditary peasant, so revered throughout Swedish history, was to be once more praised by certain principals and teachers at the first schools. I shall speak of again, later. Here, instead, it should be pointed out that the hereditary peasant, or as we would call him today the farmer, had to be rather wealthy, in order to be elected to the Riksdag. There he undertook to represent [also] the more than 30% of the population, who lived, as it was said, "under the line" - the agricultural proletariat consisting of poor cottagers, superannuated farm workers and artisans, and the hired farm laborers paid "in kind". The term "from below" should be understood as in opposition to the higher classes - precisely those who made up the Nordic National Union. There were no peasants among its members, and perhaps that explains why the echo from the Union’s propaganda for the Danish "highschool" didn’t extend to the country town.

Interest in the folkhighschool dawned among those who belonged to what we should call a farmer-aristocracy. For that matter, that’s the way it had been also in Denmark and Norway.

Hvilan

While the liberals in the Nordic National Union attempted to convince the common people of the need to create schools in Sweden like the Danish models, it was a farmer from Scånia, Ola Andersson, who really had some effect. He was a worthy heir of the "Honest Peasant Class", actively engaged in local politics and later elected to the Riksdag. On March 28, 1867, Ola Andersson proposed the founding of a club in his township, Bara, with the purpose of gathering the peasants to discuss agricultural problems as well as other common questions. On the 16th of November, 1867, the Ola club considered the possibility of founding in the township a school on the model of "a higher common school", as recommended in the Riksdag of 1856-58 - which already existed in about a dozen places in the kingdom.

Scarcely a month later, Dr. O. W. Ålund’s articles dealing with the Danish "highschool" were published in Aftonbladet. Nobody in the club read that newspaper. But a teacher at Alnarp’s Agricultural Institute, Dr. Pehrsson-Bendz, who came from a peasant family, was a subscriber to that notoriously liberal publication. He talked to a friend, County Councillor Hans Andersson, about what he had read. Andersson was a member of Bara Township’s Agriculture Club. Bendz was immediately elected to its committee for school questions.

But at first, no special attention was given to the information in those articles. There was no mention of them when the Bara club reported on the school question, on January 29, 1868. On the contrary, the argument about the proposed school was more like what had been heard in the Riksdag, when the public school was founded. The school should be in the country, it was thought, so as not to divorce pupils from their customary station as peasants. Mostly, the discussions had to do with practical arrangements - more about the financing of the school than about the content of its instruction.

[Outside] support was not urged nor desired, either from the township, the county, or the state. Moreover, it was emphasized that the school should not be under the influence of the church. (Here, we aren’t very far from the liberalism of Aftonbladet!) The budget was set at 3,772 riksdaler, of which 3,000 was to be the salary of the principal. In my opinion, it is right to emphasize that these farmers understood very well that the success of the school depended first of all upon the principal. The remaining 772 riksdaler should be used to rent a locale, buy fuel, and provide a minimum of school supplies. Each pupil should pay 100 riksdaler. Instruction should extend from the first of November until the end of March. A guaranteeing association was formed, and the three possibilities which might happen were discussed:
1. If at least 40 pupils enrolled, their tuition charge would cover expenses.
2. But at first, there might be fewer pupils.
3. If no pupils at all enrolled, the association would be committed to cover certain expenses.

Now, how should they go about it?

To allow for these three eventualities, the guaranteeing association should send out subscription lists. Those who signed on it should undertake responsibility for all costs, in case pupil tuition payments fell short. The signers should also be respon-sible for all the expenses which already had occurred, even if the school didn’t come into being. The guaranteeing association should collect at least 36 members, who would contribute 70 rdr. for the first year and 16 rdr. for the following year. Members should sign on for a period of five years, beginning January 1, 1868. The guaranteeing association should be considered established, when 36 members had signed. The association would elect a board of six persons. This board would choose a principal, who would be an ex officio member of the board.

From this example, we certainly get a good impression of the Scånian peasants’ grasp of reality! Furthermore, here we have the model that was to be used in the future for most of the schools.

When we see the surprisingly quick result of this plan, we must wonder whether an explanation may lie - more or less consciously - in the memory of former times, when "the Honest Peasant Class" had to look everywhere, to find a secretary who could handle their petitions. In any case - from the l7th of April, 1868, 44 persons - that is, 44 peasants - had signed the contract.

Thus the main question was solved. Now, where to find a principal? Olof Persson-Bendz wrote to a friend in Stockholm, a member of the National Union, Harald Wieselgren, who sent a hand-carried letter to Peter W. Denne, about all the characteristics which a future principal would need. He should be able to sing, to arouse enthusiasm in his pupils, to use "the living word" effectively - but where to find such a rare bird? Harald Wieselgren couldn’t suggest anyone.

After this failure, Bendz turned to his academic colleagues. Professor Otto Torell, at Lund University, suggested one of his fellow-teachers, the geology lecturer Leonard Holmström (1840-1919). To convince him to accept the appointment - which one must admit was an unusual one - Professor Torell assured Holmström that he would be well paid for a job that wouldn’t take more than six months, and then the rest of the year he could give to his own research. Holmström accepted the offer.

Now it was a question of finding a locale. After a rather long search, a closed inn called "Hvilan", situated beside the country road between Lund and Malmö, near the Åkarp railroad station, was chosen.

The Aftonblad articles had been loaned to Holmström, but it is clear that such reading didn’t give him any desire for more information about the Danish "highschool". But there were more reasons not to refer to Grundtvigian ideas than Holmström’s lack of enthusiasm for them. The Swedish clergy were bitterly hostile toward Grundtvig’s religious philosophy, and even though [the school plans] had declared separation from the influence of the church, at the same time it would be wiser not to come into conflict with it. The publicity for the future school in the local press reflects this consideration. In Lund’s Weekly Paper for June 6, 1868, for example, we read that a school is to be created, inspired by "the Danish Peasant Highschools", but the fact is pointed out that the Scånian school is "significantly different, to agree with our circumstances and our people’s character."

Thirteen years later, Ola Andersson acknowledged in a letter to Holmström, that one learned from the Danes "that our schools perhaps became so practical that a good deal of spirit and life and uplift was thus lost - and perhaps the schools themselves also [lost quality]".

Önnestad

The three "historical" folkhighschools, Askov, Vallekilde and Testrup, which were to set the tone and create the form of the Danish folkhighschool during its first period, were founded in 1865 and 1866, Sagatun in Norway in 1864 and Christopher Bruun’s Vonheim (Romundgaard) in 1867. The first three Swedish folkhighschools date from the same period. They were founded in 1868, but the historical situation they were born was different. I’ll return to this.

The same year that Hvilan was started, another school was begun in the northern part of Skåne. In connection with this, it is interesting to observe that there, we are in an area affected by religious revival. It’s otherwise with "the Southern Plain", an open landscape with broad fields, relatively heavily populated. People here are strongly realistic - the creation of Hvilan is also a witness to this - but have always been indifferent to religious ecstasy. The northern part of Skåne was even then like [the later] forest-Sweden, where revival movements were widespread in the 1800’s. The area around Önnestad, where the school was founded, was one of the so-called "revival towns", where "the religious passion of the folk, never dampened, is plainly easy to bring into full blaze", as E. Newman expresses it in Swedish High Church, Low Church and Free Church, 1932.

The district was first affected by the Moravians, but during the period that inter-ests us, the new evangelism inspired by C. A. Rosenius’s movement was the one that counted. This should be emphasized, since it is noticeable that there was otherwise no connection between these movements and the schools during the Swedish folkhighschool’s first period, which was contemporary with the strongest influence of revivalism.

In Önnestad, however, action did come about thanks to Rector C. A. Bergman, who was considered to be the most liberal cleric in Sweden. Bergman took the initiative, he even went to Denmark, where he contacted Hindholm Højskole, then the least Grundtvigian folkhighschool in the country - Ålund had also visited that school. But now the same thing happened in Önnestad as in Hvilan: One farmer, Sven Nilsson in Everöd, a Riksdag member like Ola Andersson, settled matters.

It was a difficult job in this tract, which because of failed harvests was ravaged by famine. Peasants who were urged to finance the school and to be pupils in it, were reluctant. Most of them lived on small farms and without doubt would have subscribed with conviction to the opinion expressed in Riksdagen just before the end of 1840/41 - that the communes should pay for the common school. "It would be very hard," Peter Pettersson of Slätthult, Jönköping province, had declared, "if poor fellows must take the clothes from their backs, so that their children might learn the names of Swedish cities... The gentlemen on the committee little realize what the poor man would suffer, if he must sell his last sweater in order that his child, who later would be fit only to be a shepherd or a milkmaid, should learn history and geo-graphy... I believe plenty of honest folk have lived and died in Sweden... without being literate [to say nothing of ] learning history and geography."

I’m sure that the poverty-stricken small-farmers of this area, who sometimes had to eat bread made from bark, would have listened with a sensitive ear to these words, pronounced about twenty years before any discussion of folkhighschool. But could they have been influenced by the speech which Sven Nilsson of Everöd gave at the county council, September 12, 1867? He said: "A question of life-importance...is that of a more widespread general education, in the broadest sense of the word. The cultivation of knowledge more pervasive of life’s situations, and a clearer awareness, among the sons of the common people, [one] not at the cost of simplicity and purity of morals, [one] which maintains the valued strength and self-sufficiency of earlier days, must lie close to the heart of every true friend of his country."

Were such "gothic" expressions understood? In any case, one can imagine that they confused, yes, they even hindered the promoters of the Önnestad school from understanding the concept of "folklihood", a concept without which it was impossible to understand "folkhighschool". Anyway, that’s the impression one gets, when one reads what Bergman wrote after his visit to Hindholm.

Bergman, a supporter of the Scandinavian ideas, had been following the discussions in the Nordic National Union. He observed with anxiety S. A. Hedin’s and Carl von Bergen’s anticlericalism, and feared that recommendation from these Scandinavians would result in the creation of "irreligious centers". When he heard about the plans for establishing Hvilans folkhighschool, he also expressed his fear that these rested on anti-Christian ground.

During this summer (1868), while the two districts in Skåne strove to found folkhighschools, no confidence otherwise was established between the future schools. As Bergman dreaded "irreligiosity" at Hvilan, so Leonard Holmström was uneasy about the religious exaltation in the newly evangelistic milieus. Holmström had traveled to Norway to make some geological investigations there. (One may be surprised that it didn’t occur to him to contact the Norwegian folkhighschools!) He wrote to Ola Andersson, that he hoped that unctuous words wouldn’t damage "our cause" with moderate people.

In contrast to the situation in Åkarp, it was difficult to collect funds for the folk-highschool in Önnestad, for the reasons mentioned earlier. Here, as in the case of Hvilan, it was finally the wealthy, powerful, and thoughtful peasants, together with Riksdag members and county councilmen, who supplied the school with the necessary means, Bergman reports in a letter. And so it was announced in the local press, beginning with the 22nd of August, 1868, that in spite of obstructions and opposition, a folkhighschool would open on November 1 in Önnestad, thanks to indi-vidual contributions.

Olof Eneroth, who had compared Sweden with "a Protestant Spain" in its anti-clericalism, was clearly not shocked by any religious exaltation in the revival district where Önnestad’s folkhighschool was founded. Indeed, he sent an enthusiastic letter to August Sohlman, who included it in Aftonbladet on November 5. "I know that you will rejoice more than anyone... and therefore I want ... to inform you that both of the Skånian folkhighschools are now beginning their work, in Önnestad already on Sunday, in Åkarp yesterday, the 2nd of November. I was present at both occasions." Önnestad’s locale is "a Skånian peasant holding, one of those Skånian peasant houses with thatched roof, which are so well known... The whole dedication, if one may call it that, was simple and unpretentious, in the way that the whole task is undertaken." Eneroth summarizes his impressions in the following conclusion: "Regarding the coming of both these folkhighschools into existence, there is this joyful circumstance, that the common people themselves, through their contribu- tions have made it possible to realize the proposed and developed idea. Confidently looking into the future, they had, after the thorough consideration which marks [all] their undertakings, taken hold of the affair, and even now are confidently looking for both teachers and students. It was heart-encouraging to watch them. Honor and praise to the Swedish peasant in his fight to win and to spread his own folkly education."

Herrestad

In spite of all its efforts, the Nordic National Union had not managed to create folkhighschools. What should be done? It was Dr. O. W. Ålund who took the initiative. He contacted a peasant member of the Riksdag in Stockholm, and tried to interest him in his plan. It couldn’t have been better. Jonas Andersson of Häckernäs, East Göt-land, had already made himself noticed in the Riksdag of 1856/58, when he proposed the establishment of a higher public school. Obviously, this man was interested in educational questions. Moreover, one should emphasize another of his merits, which was unusual: he was a member of the National Union, where peasants were other-wise missing.

An agreement was quickly made between Jonas Andersson and Dr. Ålund. The Riksdag member undertook to find students and a locale. This was relatively easy, since East Götland was a good agricultural area and therefore had well-to-do peasants. These farmers were known for their sense of freedom and independence, and can be considered as true "hereditary farmers". Furthermore, the province had been a spiritual center during the Middle Ages. This is shown by Alvastra monastery, which had belonged to the Cistercians, and Vadstena, the mother-cloister for the whole order of Birgitta, an important cultural center during the days of the Kalmar Union. In the eyes of Scandinavians, this was a fine inheritance for a folkhighschool.

Herrestad became the only school which was founded according to the Danish model - that is, without any guaranteeing organization, and no leadership outside of the director, who carried the sole responsibility. But Dr. Ålund left the school after one year, and Herrestad became re-organized according to Hvilan’s model. The new director, P. A. Gödecke (1840-90) was one of those who attempted to give the folk-highschool a Nordic profile.

The Folkhighschool’s spiritual milieu
A school free of examinations

We have seen that the first folkhighschools in Sweden emphasized that they had nothing in common with those of Denmark. Actually, they had borrowed more from the Danish folkhighschool than they were willing to recognize.

One could enter a folkhighschool without an examination, and there was no examination when the course ended. "Education for life" in Grundtvig’s expression, couldn’t be sanctioned through an examination. Without having under-stood the real content of this "education for life" - which couldn’t be understood, either, without knowledge of the whole Grundtvigian connection - yet the Swedes were aware that the education peasants needed couldn’t be cast in the same form as the traditional schools. Thus, in Sweden as in Denmark and Norway, one entered folkhighschool without an examination and left it without certification. In this way, the folkhighschool was placed outside the traditional academic world. It is still difficult today - yes, almost impossible, for a foreigner to understand how schools without examinations and degrees can exist, they don’t serve any practical purpose, we think. So difficult it is to root out the fetish of approval by examination!

"Awakening" in a Swedish sense

We have earlier spoken of the aggressiveness which was in Sweden turned against the role that "awakening" played in the Danish folkhighschool. In Sweden, it was said, what counted was to impart knowledge, use books instead of depending on "the living word" [which might be] exercised with more or less talent. I have also cited the Danish farmer, Niels Pedersen Vittenbjerg, who sad that he had taught himself to run his farm according to "Nordic myths, as I heard them from Schrøder at Askov in my youth."

Obviously it happened also in Sweden, that folkhighschool students were awakened, and used this "awakening" to enrich their daily life. This "awakening in a Swedish sense" I have found in a letter written to L. Holmström in 1886 by a [former] pupil.

J. C. Gudmundsen first declares that he values Holmström more than any other person on earth: "Perhaps it is because I know so little about leaders in the world. I can’t imagine whatpeople know and think who come to Holmström with a better grounding and with stronger aptitude as a result of better-off parents than I have. They must leave with much greater profit [from it] . From Holmström I have discovered what is meant by a "sleeping" and an "awakened" condition. "But forgive me, I have not yet gained any good from it. Sleepiness and disability still oppress me. Well, there are quite natural reasons for that. My parents "sleep", requiring much less of life, leading a monotonous and withdrawn life, without any special faith that there is anything better than the life they have seen father and grandfather lead. But I have had my eyes opened to what is backward in their way of life, and that will spur me to greater activity. "But here at Öregården (the Scånian agriculural school) I won’t be sufficiently awakened. Here, we never hear an inspiring word from the teachers - everything is monotonous and stiff. I think that a course at Hvilan would do these teachers good. For forgive me if I say that they are asleep. What they want to see in us is slavish fear and politeness. Several times we have been promised demerits for what we learned in the fresh air of Holmström’s living room, and talked over, the five of us, in the dormitory room we share. Such [treatment] fosters hatred and depression. The happy songs that were heard in our room at first have long since been stilled. "When I consider myself in solitude, I am aware that I still have much to do, to become a useful member in the chain of active life. I feel the weight of an upbringing that was basically wrong, and to restore this to what it should be is very hard, yes, impossible. That I had a poor upbringing, Holmström knows better than I, even though Holmström has never seen my home. But my descendants, if I have any, can certainly have things better. From Holmström’s lectures I have understood the matter thus: Perseverance and industry must improve things more and more, generation after generation. and a proper religious stance results from living a just and useful life and from striving for one’s race’s development and progress. What I have once decided shall be carried out, whatever the cost. I intend, in a practical and rewarding way, to transform my father’s holding into a model farm in the district. I want to see my father walking around hisprosperous acres, enjoying his pipe. Only when I have seen that will I think about the fight I must make for my own welfare. "From where I am now, I could probably obtain fairly good employment. But my parents would benefit from that. And I myself fear that I’ll go sleeping, all my life. Besides, it wouldn’t give me any joy to be a sort of boss over poor breadwinners, unless I could lessen their misery. Under landlords, they are just like domestic animals - yes, worse. "Perhaps it sounds arrogant to say that I think I have awakened, as if out of a long dream. But what is certain is that I have found a turning-point in my life, and I can only wonder whether I will have had good fortune, the next time I stand face-to-face with Holmström. "Forgive my ignorance in spelling and sentence structure, and if I have otherwise written anything stupid and mistaken, please correct me - for in that case, I will have taken wrong conclusions from Holmström’s lectures."

The folkhighschool, a center of culture in the country district

The constitutional reform according to the law of 1827 was realized during the whole century (except in Dalarna). The peasant found himself in a social vacuum, where nothing had replaced the humane, close contacts which had existed with the district councils. The folkhighschool attempted to pull the peasants out of their isolation, by setting up public lectures, which met with good attendance almost everywhere. Take for example the public lectures at Hvilan during the winter of 1868/69:
Charles XII
The introduction of the Reformation in Sweden
About the solar system
Concerning geological formations, especially with reference to Skånia.
About royal power and the nobility, up till 1680
About the physiology of the ear and the eye
About the union of Sweden and Norway
About the qualities and manifestations of heat
About the origin and spread of Mohammedanism
About winds, weather and climate
Overview of Sweden’s history, especially with reference to the state constitution

Proximity to Lund made it possible for L. Holmström to attract good scholars to Hvilan, so that the quality of these lectures was very high.

A foreigner has to express her amazed admiration - in French country districts, it is still impossible even now to bring farmers together to listen to [lectures about] such subjects, so distant from their daily life...

The director of the folkhighschool in Fornby formulates the purpose of these public lectures, in his yearly report for 1878/79: " We have tried through them [the public lectures] to arouse the participation of the country people in the school, and even in some degree to act as an awakener upon the population and to make of the school a kind of spiritual center in the locality." According to Leonard Holmström, this task was all the more needful, because "the church no longer gives the spiritual inspiration mankind needs." In this way, the folkhighschool became, in many areas, what we today would call a cultural center for the country district.

The Sharpshooter movement
"This Sweden, almost closed off from the sea, the dark side of the North,
that turns toward the barbarians in the East."
Grundtvig: Handbook of World History III

"I planted you like an iris, among the fresh winds of the North Pole.... I placed you as a knightly outpost for light, by Europe’s eastern portal , and you gave yourself [to be] a prisoner to Asia’s idols."
Viktor Rydberg: Tomtebissen, 5/1/1857

In our times, we no longer talk about "love of fatherland" as [we did] during the previous century. Everything that in different ways is associated with that "antiquated" concept has been discarded. We cultivate "identity", the tendency that is apparent everywhere and that Alex Haley has made known as "back to the roots" - in Sweden, a "dig-where-you-are movement".

This current is defined in various ways from land to land, from region to region, yes in every milieu, no matter how small it may be. Therefore, it is at once under-standable and quite legitimate, that the search for identity has developed differently in each Nordic country. In Sweden at the middle of the 1800’s, a new patriotic mani-festation arose, which the folkhighschool was taken by, like all Swedish society. It has to do with a movement which is forgotten today and which is often denied when it touches on the national consciousness in Sweden, namely the sharpshooter movement.

Sweden’s ancient fear of its powerful neighbor in the east was painfully remem-bered, when the Crimean war broke out in December, 1853. Denmark and Sweden/Norway declared their neutrality. But in 1854, a French army-corps captured the Russian fortress Bomarsund on [nearby] Åland. In a debate at the upper house of the Riksdag on November 1, the same year, it was declared that "civilisation and freedom" must be defended against "the barbarism and despotism of the East".

The great powers had guaranteed Sweden’s boundaries, but one couldn’t feel safe. In October, 1859, the author and newspaperman Viktor Rydberg turned to the peasant class and urged its members to take a hand in the defense of the fatherland. Defense was dependent on only 3% of the population, he wrote, although there were 400,000 men in the country able to bear arms. Rydberg, a humanist, was not motiv-ated by any desire for war, but by a deep fear of the Russian danger. Therefore he recommended the creation of an army of defense like the Swiss model. In these circumstances, the sharpshooter movement arose.

We can hardly imagine today the enthusiasm that this arming of the people awakened in all of Sweden. We have pointed out the democratic character of the movement. Sweden, which was divided among four classes, was now united into one, in meetings, festivals, and target practice, as was declared at the great national celebration in Stockholm on November 14, 1863: "Masters and apprentices, lords and servants, wealthy farmers and hired men" all assembled around the same table to share meals.

Sweden of "the Great Power’s time", now reduced to a small state, proclaimed with poorly concealed pride: "Our fatherland has the honorable place among European states to be, in the far North, Europe’s outpost against the pressure of the Russian colossus upon the West."

The "old dreams" were not completely forgotten, nor was the cult of the hereditary peasant. Hadn’t Engelbrekt, in the 1400’s, freed Sweden from Danish tyranny, thanks to his peasants and miners?

The sharpshooter movement went in for an enthusiastic worship of Engelbrekt, who was compared with William Tell and with Garibaldi. At the congress in Örebro in 1868 - the congress at which Anjou opposed the Danish folkhighschool so vehemently - it was declared that education of the people and arming of the people should go hand in hand. This happened in the folkhighschools, where principals, teachers and students enrolled in the sharpshooter movement’s ranks.

Before August Sohlman placed his energy in the Scandinavian movement, he had been gripped by the wave of enthusiasm for the sharpshooter movement in the whole country - how could he have avoided it? At a festival arranged in Stockholm on November 19, 1860, he declared: "Such a meeting as this one ought to have a different purpose, namely to express an opinion about the target practice question in general and to exercise a lively influence on the great national movement which begins to be discussed in our country."

The meeting of the Scandinavian students in Kristiania

If the Sharpshooter movement is forgotten in today’s Sweden, one gets the impression that the neighboring countries have never known about it. As far as Norway is concerned, that is easy to understand. The relationship beween the two countries, always charged with conflict, became worse that same year that Viktor Rydberg recommended the arming of the people. In 1859, the Storting [theNorwegian parliament] had demanded the abolition of the office of viceroy, in order to achieve equality with Sweden. Sweden’s Riksdag refused. Bjørnson turned to Norwegian youth: "Do you hear what the Swedes are saying, young Norwegian man?"

During the 1860’s, the first folkhighschools appeared in the three countries, but under such fundamentally different political conditions, that according to my percep-tion it explains why so little interest was shown, at least in Sweden, for the establish-ment of common Nordic connections.

So neither Hvilan nor Önnestad nor Herrestad sent any delegates to the student meeting in Kristiania in 1869. And yet this congress had placed a discussion about "the high school" on its program. But the meeting was organized by academic people, and this topic was combined with discussions about political Scandin-avianism. Such a confusion couldn’t have avoided irritating those who represented the Danish and Norwegian "highschools". Their voice was raised more thunderingly by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson than by any other.

The academicians, who were represented by professors from the Nordic universities, reacted with unanimous negativity against this voice, yes, to cite M. J. Monrad from Copenhagen, their opposition was so strong that it was impossible and quite meaningless to answer the Norwegian popular leader.

The Swedish folkhighschool had left their representation up to two academic people, who had little confidence in that kind of school. They totally lacked comprehension of the conflict that arose for the first time at this congress, and which in Denmark and Norway was to set "the high school" and the university against each other in a "culture war".

It was university lecturer Esaias Tegnér, junior, and a representative of the obligatory school in Sweden, who spoke for the three folkhighschools. "The murmur of the people’s springtime" as Bjørnson had expressed it with his characteristic enthusiasm, elicited from Tegnér the following answer: "In Sweden, there has been no need for a movement for either outer or inner freedom, of the same kind as in the brother countries, and national consciousness has therefore not seemed so important in this situation."

The abyss which opened between "the high school" and the university, and which was a clear expression of the political ferment, was felt as a threat, which happily had not shown itself in Sweden: "The political aspect, which with these (the highschools in Denmark and Norway) exerted a significant influence, is lacking in Sweden". Tegnér emphasized also, that "the fatherland rapture" which in Denmark was conveyed through "the poetical and the religious" wasn’t recognized in Sweden, where the schools were "more practical". But what all these schools, in all circumstances, had in common was that they all worked in "the spirit of Scandinavianism". Once more Grundtvig’s ideas - which of course they didn’t know much about - were mixed together with the message of Scandinavianism.

The other Swedish delegate, lecturer A. Rundbäck, explained "the fatherland rapture" which had developed on the Norwegian and especially on the Danish side, by the fact that Denmark had been forced to fight against "Germanism" and this, therefore, "had strengthened the nationalistic spirit". Sweden had never needed to meet such a problem, which explains why the folkhighschool hasn’t the "same consciousness-raising character". Furthermore, "the Danish commoners ... have suddenly, twenty years late, obtained especially broad political freedom", and therefore that country’s folkhighschools have become "politically educating institutions.... In Sweden, the free peasant has from time out of mind had his word to say about decisions, both locally and nationally." Once more, the noble peasant!

It is enough to notice the Swedes’ choice of words, to understand how distant they stood from that Bjørnson’s appeal to the congress:
"First, when the sighing of the people’s springtime
Over forest and field
Awakens all the hundred thousands
Then comes the time of trouble."

Bjørnson’s crusades in Sweden, 1871 and 1873

November 1871
"Rome conquered Greece, but [then] Greece absorbed Rome. Sweden had conquered Norway, but now Norway was conquering Sweden."
August Strindberg: The Servant Woman’s Son , 1886.

There was no hope in 1860 that Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, who fought untiringly for "young ideas", would be understood in Sweden. [Knowing this] he could toss out words such as: "I have no culture in common with the Swedes, they live outside the rest of the civilized world". The events of the 1860’s, which are analysed in the Norwegian book from which this is excerpted, would certainly not have changed Bjørnson’s view. A poet’s intellectual development is anyway not to be foreseen and doesn’t follow rational logic.

Anyway, Bjørnson wrote on October 6, 1871, to his Danish friend, the author Rudolf Schmidt, that in November he intends to travel to Sweden on a lecture tour. "It is my intention to introduce myself with a neutral subject, which I can handle well; once I am known and if possible liked, I’ll continue with Grundtvig and introduce him among the Swedes. For many years, I have felt this to be a mission."

Certainly in Gothenburg, in the circle surrounding Business and Seafaring Times, he would find understanding among his friends S. A. Hedlund and Viktor Rydberg. Their magazine had published articles about the culture-war in Denmark. [S. A. Hedlund (1821-1900) - liberal journalist and politician, as chief editor of Gøteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning (Gothenburg’s Business and Maritime News) made his newspaper the leading cultural and liberal publication of his time. Viktor Rydberg (1828-1895), a populr novelist and poet, joined him as a colleague. Both of these men were influenced by Grundtvig, whose "Gothenburg thoughts" were behind Hedlund’s interest in founding the Gothenburg Univeristy in 1887, although this later developed into a traditional university.]

Bjørnson came to Sweden in 1871 and gave lectures both in Gothenburg and Stockholm. Not a single word about Grundtvig. The public, the cultural elite who were accustomed to attend lectures, were charmed by the author of the "peasant tales". "Never before or since has a lecturer inspired such enthusiasm as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson," declared the newspapers.

Bjørnson surely thought that this enthusiasm was an expression of interest in Grundtvig. He wrote to his friend, Kristofer Janson, a teacher at Vonheim: "Great memories from the Sweden trip. I shall soon go there again and talk about Grundtvig, about the awakening of church, school, and people, I have never seen a field more thirsty for him than the Swedes.... My trip became a sort of mission-journey, I did nothing but preach, the Swedes hadn’t understood that it was a whole new education we wanted."

There were so many events in Norway in 1872 that Bjørnson didn’t travel to Sweden. Above all, there was the Student Association’s meeting, which was devoted exclusively to the folkhighschool. It began in the University’s locale on Karl Johann Street, [Christiania] on April 22. Opponents and supporters of the folkhighschool confronted each other more acrimoniously than ever, nor would it ever be as violent later. One might say that it was a head-on collision between the academic culture and the "folkly". On the political level, it brought about a struggle between the defenders of "young ideas" in democratic Norway and the conservatives, who feared for their privileges.

P. A. Gödecke, who had succeeded Dr. Ålund at Herrestad, had been invited, but didn’t come. So there was no Swedish representative at this congress, which hasn’t been forgotten in the annals of the Danish and Norwegian folkhighschools. All that was inscribed in Denmark’s memory, for example,was that at this meeting, the principal of Askov, Ludvig Schrøder, spoke the famous words about folkhighschool being held "wherever students’ need and teachers’ abilities meet."

Once more we find the explanation in the historical, that is to say the political, situation. Johan Sverdrup, a member of the Radical party, was introducing parlia-mentarism in Norway, and in 1872 forced through a demand for the Cabinet to part-icipate in the meetings of the Storting . But the majority of the members [of this Norwegian parliament] were peasants, and their leader Jaabæk was dreadful to Swedish eyes. Aftonbladet had published articles about this Jaabæk, who was leading Norway back into barbarism, and it was a frightening thought that such a situation might arise in Sweden.

On exactly that political level, Bjørnson had attempted to bring the political leaders of the three countries to a "meeting for democracy in the North". He described this "Meeting of Three Emperors" in a letter to Sophus Høgsbro: "The Swedes are the ones who will learn the most at the meeting, and in all respects will be most grateful for it. They don’t share our ground of faith, the "folkly" is unclear to them, but they will get a firm perception of what Nordic freedom, not French, will mean in our society. Sweden is my special mission-field, just wait a few years and you will come to see something succeed here, which now you would suppose unbelievable. The Swedes are a Great People: truth convinces them powerfully, they meet greatness with enthusiasm...."

What a disappointment was [in store] for the ardent poet! Already in 1871, he had turned to Count Arvid Posse, who had joined the Farmers’ Party, and wrote to him that it was necessary to "liberate the spirit of the folk", something that seemed to the Swedes to mean that Norway planned on freeing itself from Sweden. Finally, a meeting did take place in Hamar on July 26, 1872, but even S. A. Hedlund and Viktor Rydberg, the only Swedes, attended only as private individuals. They explained that "the serene and promising development of Swedish politics" must not be disturbed - which in plain language meant that they were on the point of reaching a compromise solution about land taxes - which the members of the Farmers’ Party called "the century-old injustices" - [and they didn’t want the boat rocked?]

February - March 1873
"A sound like a peal of thunder went over the land,
and he felt it as if a troll had come forth with power to bewitch."
August Strindberg: The Servant Woman’s Son, 1886.

This time, Bjørnson did lecture about Grundtvig, not only in Gothenburg and Stockholm, but also in various places in the countryside. He even dared to present this "folkly" culture in Uppsala, the seat of the most venerable academic culture. But he understood how to speak very politely about "folklihood’s" part in the struggle for freedom, so that the message was well accepted in this place, where Rudbeckianism and Gothicism were not yet completely forgotten, and where Scandinavianism lived on in his auditors’ minds. At least, that is the impression one gets from the newspaper reports.

After Bjørnson’s lecture in Norrköping, he was consulted by a young Swede, who wanted to find a suitable Danish folkhighschool to visit. Bjørnson recommended Askov. The young man spent three months there, listening to the famous mythological lectures by Ludvig Schrøder. He mentions them in his letters home to his father. He explains that it was like peeling an onion - one layer after another was taken away to find the kernel, but none was to be found. This young man, Fridtjuv Berg, eventually served twice as Minister of Church Affairs in Sweden. [Fridtjov Berg (1851-1916), as a member of the government in 1912, was influential in obtaining state support for students and increased teacher pay. At the same time, the requirement of state inspection of the folkhighschools was more dubious from the liberal point of view.] Without doubt, he could have subscribed to the judgment that Sohlman expressed in his obituary of Grundtvig: "that gloomy, mysterious, disorderly man, incapable of order, who through his dark imagin-ation has no attraction for the Swedish people". (Aftonbladet, October 11, 1872)

But even Sohlman, in his Aftonbladet report of Bjørnson’s lectures, couldn’t avoid falling for the speaker’s charisma, like everyone else, and didn’t dare attack the ideas presented.

It was the same everywhere that Bjørnson lectured about Grundtvig. Only one exception is worth noticing, that is in Örebro. There, a statue of Engelbrek had been mounted in 1865, there it was that he had declared that the arming and education of the people should go hand in hand, indeed it was also there that Anjou had expressed his sharp criticism of Grundtvig’s ideas. It was only in that city that the local newspaper published an exhaustive criticism of all that Bjørnson had presented and emphasized the "socialistic and political" character of Grundtvigian followers.

In spite of Anjou’s complete lack of understanding of Grundtvig’s thought, as shown by the article, he appears to have published daily notices in the same newspaper, announcing the folkhighschool which was about to be founded in Närke. There was no connection indicated between Bjørnson’s lectures and the efforts being made to interest the common people in that future institution.

One must be surprised that none of the five folkhighschools existing at this time were "taken" by the Norwegian poet’s message.

Bjørnson’s "crusade" to Sweden, his "mission-field", became an episode with no result. An article in The Magazine for Politics, Economy and Literature, written by the historian Hans Forssell, sheds light on this in his ironic comment: "Poetry presented without the support and approval of the Swedish Academy, and religion with growing success by the Evangelistic Patriotic Diocese.... This Grundtvigianism, experimentally imported and offered in the lecture hall, has been able to flourish only as an orange grove might in a drawing room."

The Nordic renaissance in Sweden
"That small patriotism which we can still find among our Swedish folk, has been of the old kind, [stemming] from the national pride of the 1600’s. The instinctive popular struggle to express one’s innermost character in every circumstance of life has been something unknown to us."
Gustav Sundbärg - The Swedish Folk Temperament, 1911.

Carl van Bergen, the promoter of Scandinavianism, went to Copenhagen to take part in a "Friends Meeting"* planned for the 8th of September. However, Grundtvig died on the 2nd and was buried on the 10th. Naturally, the "Friends Meeting" which was then held on the 11th and 12th of September became a memorial celebration for the departed leader. [The term "Friends" in this case refers to "Friends of Grundtvig" - a group composed mostly of liberal theologians and other educated men, who supported Grundtvig’s ideas and the development of folkhighschools in the latter half of the 19th century in Denmark.] Van Bergen’s speech was placed between Bjørnson’s, as the best known representative for the popular movement, and the one given by the Danish peasant and Folketing (parliament) member N. J. Thermansen, who had so brilliantly defended "folk-education" in the Folketing. The placing of the Swedish statement seems like a deliberate irony, as Carl van Bergen’s talk shows clearly that the violent fight going on in the neighboring countries, between a culture sprung from ancient depths, and the higher class’s education fed from foreign springs, was incomprehensible to a Swede. "Culture war" just didn’t match Sweden’s histor-ical traditions. Carl van Bergen spoke about the Nordic renaissance in Sweden: "The defenders of higher education walk in front, and the people follow them eagerly."

The articles about Jaabæk in Aftonbladet, mentioned earlier, had pointed to this Norwegian peasant leader as the chosen tool to lead poor Norway back to ignorance. In the same Aftonbladet, Carl van Bergen published an article after Grundtvig’s death, headed "Denmark in our days". It reads: "Like the laborer in foreign countries, so here in the North the peasant turns up with pretensions of unrestricted political power." One cannot better illustrate the differing development of the three Nordic countries during the 1800’s. Carl van Bergen continues faithful to the Gothic accent which was applied during the whole century: "These new demands (are) only a challenge for a return to the old primitive Nordic- ness ... the free hereditary peasants."

The "noble" peasant had indeed been sung about with enthusiasm, during the time of freedom and the Gustavian period in Sweden (1719-1809). In this way, he had become a literary artifact. From that position, to give him a cultural mission was a long step and obviously difficult for the Swedes to take. Carl van Bergen’s article continues to speak in this vein: "Their (the peasants’) political battle is then a cultural battle, an attack upon cultural life. The original Nordic culture - that is, barbarism - is to replace ‘the higher culture’, all of whose institutions should be abolished."

The folkhighschool and the Nordic renaissance

There were no "poet-politicians" in Sweden, such as existed in Norway - men who sometimes played a more important role in politics than in literature. At least, they placed their literary work in the service of their political ideas.

"The return to oneself" - to use once more Geijer’s famous expression - did not in Sweden result in a break between what Bjørnson had called "the camp of the people" and "the intelligentsia". Thus, the folkhighschool in Sweden never came to oppose the university, it never became engaged in a cultural struggle, as I have earlier maintained. "The return to oneself" in the folkhighschool and elsewhere in Sweden was fed from the traditional springs of national feeling.

The return to the hereditary peasant

The Swedish folkhighschools were created by peasants and for peasants. It is therefore not surprising that sometimes these schools were seized by enthusiasm for ˆthe peasant¨and his unique role in his country’s history. In Norrländska Korrespondenten for April 5, 1873, a folkhighschool teacher writes that it was when he studied Swedish history and statesmanship that he began to understand the significance that the peasant class had had for the country. He also thought about how most of these cultivators of the earth had been excluded from all spiritual cultivation, and he heard within himself a serious voice, which said to him: "Is it serving one’s country well, to spend all one’s life teaching grammar and logic to the children of [wealthy] city men? Go out into the country! Contribute to the education and enlightenment of our country people."

This enthusiasm for the noble peasant is again exemplified by P. A. Gödecke, who succeeded Dr. Ålund at Herrestad in 1869, and who in the same year had accepted his "call" to attend the Scandinavian student meeting in Kristiania -where he had been a passive participant. Gödecke later became the principal of the new-built school in Närke, in 1873. There he discovered a milieu that agreed with his ideas. In a letter to Leonard Holmström he writes: "I have got a student-body which it wouldn’t be easy to match . From Engelbrekt’s and Sturarnes’ and Gustaf Vasa’s days, there shines a kind of people - miners and peasant forest- workers, whose roots are of iron. I didn’t know that kind of people before I came up here.... There lives and grows true Nordic manhood in a miner. Come up here and you’ll see how Swedes, the original Swedes, look!"

We don’t know the answer to this letter - if there was one. Holmström, who mis-trusted the exaltation in the revival district where the Önnestad school had arisen, probably distanced himself from this interest for the "noble" peasant - and to boot, the Rousseau perspective and according to Gothic tradition - which Gödecke tried to transfer to him. Certainly one couldn’t bring such ideas into the Southern Plains.

"The Baltic had no Iceland"

Meanwhile, Hvilans folkhighschool did not remain outside of the influence of the Nordic Renaissance.

A. U. Bååth (1853-1912), a minister’s son grown up in the Southern Plains, was studying classical culture at Lund University when he first came to Hvilan. Contact with the peasants there made him change his studies: he exchanged Homer for the Edda and Tacitus for Heimskringla. From 1875 onward, he became a teacher at Hvilan and tried to educate his students in the Nordic spirit. He visited in Copen-hagen in 1877-78, to deepen his Icelandic studies and there translated Njalssaga. As he progressed in this work, he sent drafts to Hvilan, where they were read aloud to the students. The school’s reports note with satisfaction that the Nordic spirit inspires the folkhighschools.

But on the other hand, Hvilans’ principals seem to have been inimical to this enthusiasm for mythology, as some Swedish visitors such as Teodor Holmberg, bore witness to from Denmark. Rector Holmström had detailed his points of view in an article series "About the Nordic folkhighschool, its origin, ideas and activity" in Nordisk Tidskrift for 1886. In the essay about the Swedish folkhighschool, he writes: "Mythological/historical instruction has never had the same significance here as in Denmark. Many conditions for it are lacking here. Grundtvig’s enormous work in that area is still largely foreign to us, it carries (if I may say so) an altogether too great aspect of Danishness to arouse an echo among the common man here. And although the Old Nordic sagas are of great interest and value for us Swedes, yet they cannot carry the same weight as for Norwegians. Our oldest history points eastward, although unfortunately we know so little about our forefathers’ dealings and behavior in the East. The Baltic had no Iceland."

Here we have the explanation why, for Grundtvig, Sweden represented "the dark side of the North"!

A Norwegian, Lorentz Dietrichson, who had been an academic teacher in Sweden during the 1860’s and ‘70’s, and had been in close contact with the country’s cultural life, describes the origin of the Swedish folkhighschool in his memoirs, A Norwegian’s Memory of Sweden, 1902. He tries to explain why the Danish example couldn’t tempt the Swedes. "High school" made "a somewhat mixed impression....In part, the theological element in the [Danish] national character, in part the predominance which the lyrical element with folk-dance, national songs, and poetic dilettantism had, in comparison with the acquisition of solid knowledge, made the Danish form of the folkhighschool... distasteful to the Swedes.... The folkhighschool awakened suspicion because of the previous conviction that Grundtvigianism was indissolubly linked to dilettantism.... The movement took a real spurt, and from that point of view, these successful schools deserve all praise for the completely independent position they have taken, as opposed to Grundtvigian [ideas] ".

 

EPILOGUE

Rasmus Nielsen, a Danish philosopher well-known in his time, said at the meeting of Friends of Grundtvig in 1871: "Grundtvig understood that it was necessary to lift the masses by folkly education, and he himself showed the way. So one can see that the history of the world, sometime 100 years from now, will show that after many attempts, the right school for the folk was begun by him, first in Denmark and the North, then in the rest of the world."

More than a century has passed since this prophecy, and there are folkhighschools in all of the North, even on the Færøy Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and Åland. Outside of the North, everywhere one finds institutions which have borrowed their name from the Nordic folkhighschools - even if they haven’t always adopted their spirit. They are called "Folk High School" in Great Britain, "Heimvolkhochschule" in West Germany, "Volk Hoge School" in the Netherlands, to mention only the most generally known in Western Europe.

It isn’t possible to review all these institutions. To follow the principal theme in this essay, I should like to attempt to analyze to what degree the folkhighschools have continued to be true to what I have presented as their principal task: "revolt [uproar]", protest, and national identity. Even if I limit the overview of these institutions to these ideas, I must be satisfied with a choice, which I admit is not the same as a worldwide judgment.

As I now begin with Sweden, it is because, as I emphasized earlier, at the time when the folkhighschool movement began, Sweden was outside of what was happen-ing in Denmark and Norway - what I have called "the culture war", using a Danish expression. There was opposition between an elite culture unavailable to the folk and the culture which the folkhighschool offered, a culture which came from the folk and which should rise from the folk to the elite, in order eventually to embrace the whole nation. This reversal of the cultural currents was really revolutionary. It has not become reality, but as a consequence of the cultural struggle, we have come to the political point of view which we today call "the left", or the left-directed. In Sweden, other roads reached what in my opinion was essential for the Nordic folkhighschool, namely "uproar" or "revolt". Therefore I will now add some reflections about the Swedish folkhighschool’s development.

"Revolt" in the Swedish folkhighschool

What went on in Denmark and Norway in the time before "the culture war" happened in Sweden at the time when the folkhighschool was adopted by the folk movements, especially the workers’ movement. This movement has continued to declare that the folkhighschool should work toward "changing society". In Olof Palme’s words: the folkhighschool should be an element of restlessness in society.

We come still nearer to the Danish and Norwegian culture-war view, when we read what the author and folkhighschoolman Bengt Skördeman (1936-87) wrote in 1976: "As long as anyone has to pay the price for the culture of others, without sharing in it himself, so long we have no culture worth mentioning"

Another side of the Swedish folkhighschool is its pluralism. This also includes a protest, and attracts a French observer above everything else. In France, we talk about pluralism, we try to create such a thing, but it doesn’t exist. In Sweden, all the folk movements, for example the temperance movement, the free-church movements, the cooperative movement, the trade-union movement, the worker’s movement, have their folkhighschools, and each school cultivates its special direction.

At the time when the Swedish folkhighschool celebrated its centennial, four ministers then in the government had been pupils at a folkhighschool. In the 1960’s it was reckoned that between 75 and 85 [members] of the Riksdag were former folkhighschool pupils (about a fifth). To this we can add the many who were active within local government, country courts, administration and cultural life. This is unimaginable in France. One of my University colleagues remarked to me that in France, even the Communist party’s politicians were academically educated!

The writer Ivar Lo-Johansson (born in 1901) declares that, after having been a pupil at a folkhighschool, one must "with improved knowledge turn to improve his class", adding that the folkhighschool is not to be considered as a springboard, [to move one] out of his class, out of his milieu, but rather as a means for enriching class and milieu". Here again we recognize what we in France call "social promotion". Perhaps we can use the Swedish expression "social adjustment", if by that one means that an individual person should not seek education only for his own advantage. The knowledge gained by an individual should serve the group that the individual belongs to. In France, this development has not led to social criticism.

If the folkhighschool is able to protest against "the establishment" in this way, as Bjørnson said, it is because it possesses a freedom which the foreigner may envy. The state may exercise a certain amount of control, because it subsidizes the schools to a great extent, yet in spite of the fact that in Sweden the schools appear to be integrated into the general school system, yet folkhighschools are not affected by the bureaucratic pattern which hinders the importation of new ideas in traditional schools. The folkhighschools can indeed, as mentioned above, choose their own profiles.

On the whole, one can say that this protest affects not only Swedish society; it is more generally global in influence. All the schools are involved in the Third World’s problems; for example, they accept political refugess, and arrange courses for immigrants, to integrate them into Swedish society.

The peasant milieu in which the folkhighschool was born during the 1860’s and 1870’s, was certainly very conservative. But to assume, as is sometimes done, that folkhighschools from the beginning constituted "a school for the oppressed, on the conditions of the oppressed" is to view this institution from an anachronistic, backward-viewing perspective. The peasants of that time, whom we see today as "conservative", were about to enter into political life under the same conditions as other social classes. The folkhighschool was to help them to fill this role competently; The principals of these first schools did not line up on the side of "the oppressed".

It is in our own time that Paulo Freire and his "pedagogy of the oppressed" prompts the folkhighschool to act as the school "for the oppressed, on the conditions of the oppressed". The oppressed, even in welfare-state Sweden, are legion : "the millions of poorly educated, the economically and culturally oppressed" (Greger Morin in Up to Battle for the Folkhighschool, 1976). The folkhighschool protests just as much against the abandonment of all adult education to the communal adult education institution KOMVUX, as to the labor market’s education, AMS. For neither model opens the way for an education which studies society critically.

Grundtvigian "folkliness" in an international perspective.

From the chapter about Denmark in this little essay, it appears that Grundtvig was completely aware that his thoughts about "folkliness", even if they had a markedly local character, were a link in the general movement for the awakening of national consciousness, which became apparent in Europe in the 1800’s.

In our days, to promote anything which on short or long view approaches a nationalistic philosophy seems to ask for rejection. One is no longer "purely Danish" or "originally Swedish"; one wants to be open to a global philosophy, turned toward the whole world. It is not by happenstance that I have cited a Grundtvig text which emphasizes how he foresaw this opening toward the great world. The "folkly" strain in Grundtvig’s thinking can only be understood in its connection with the "scientific" - in a twinned relationship. "Scientific" in Grundtvig’s speech means universal. But one cannot suppose that Grundtvig gives the idea "universal" the same global meaning that it has for us. The world to which we have become accustomed was unknown in his time. It is more appropriate to note that his sense of the multiplicity of cultures - the Nordic cultures he calls "the Folk-Hearts" - agrees completely with what Senegal’s President L. S. Senghor calls "the humanism of the universal", where this little, untranslatable "de" means, that it is a humanism that embraces all the cultures of our time. It is then the opposite of that "universal humanism", which is a Western ethno-centric phenomenon, not considering other cultures than the European.

This distinction between the national and the universal - made concrete by Grundtvig in the Sorø and Gothenburg projects - one can find later in the anthro-pologist Claude Lévi Strauss, who wrote in 1953: "Following the aristocratic humanism of the Renaissance and the middle-class humanism of the 1800’s... a democratic humanism is needful for the closed world which our planet has become - which also may be the last one. All societies are entitled to a place there, not just some few... For no part of humankind may live foreign to a true humanism."

One of the most outstanding French historians, Le Roy Ladurie, maintains as earlier mentioned, that the purpose "of writing previous history is to learn to understand today’s". One clearly becomes more and more aware of this. One of the fundamentals of the folkhighschool, "folkliness", in modern language the same as national identity, seeking after "one’s roots", has become a common phenomenon. In this connection, I cite an article from Unesco Courier, January 1983, written by Amadou M’Bow. It has a very telling title: "At the Source of the Future": "Within the growing globalization of fundamental social processes and within the pressure toward homogeneity, which weighs upon the mentality of individuals and groups, (one must record) an awakening of the special, a demand that has obtained first priority: the demand for cultural identity, noticeable since the 1800’s, visible in certain parts of Europe, crystallized in the longings of young nations which were earlier colonies... This demand rises now in the heart of the industrial societies, where the need to preserve and revive regional or ethnical identity becomes strong."

In those milieus where one engages in the fight for the culture of minorities, one notes carefully how Jacobinish France is, whether one stands on the right- or left-side. The most active of our six minorities, the Breton, is very open for the message of the folkhighschool. I have been shown a translation to Breton of texts from the Danish folkhighschool men Holger Begtrup, Hans Lund and Peter Manniche, written in 1926 and printed in a Breton newspaper Gwalarn in 1928. For that matter, we have arranged for a Grundtvig seminar in Brittany in 1984.

As always in France, ideas flower but reality doesn’t. The need for folkhigh-schools in order to promote the cultures of minorities is obvious, but there are none. Instead, the problem is clearly analysed with thoroughness - but only theoretically!

I refer now to one of our ethnologists, who died too young a few years ago, Robert Jaulin. The article I am quoting has the title: "Folk Murder, Milieu Murder, Self-Murder". Mankind, he says, is always "manifold". But it’s difficult to acknowledge this. Even socialism, at least in its common Marxist form, has not recognized the inescap-able differences among human civilizations. The eternal concern of the Marxists has not been the manifold forms of civilization, but rather to find a final Messianic model, to apply to all of mankind. That is what they have fought for.

Marx dealt with the labor problem in relation to a new humanity... (here, there is a change from the times of the 1800’s). Twenty years ago, no revolutionist could have considered fighting for a multiplicity of civilizations. One should fight for a world of equality, based on a universal catechism, and one should hold to that.

There is a war which must be led on behalf of all the minorities, or rather on behalf of all civilizations. A civilization is not the same as a "traditional minority". All civilizations... must now join together to fight "de-civilization", that is, negative univer-salism. No longer can the battle cry be: "Proletarians of all countries, unite", if that is understood to mean "to become all the same". Now, it must be: "Civilizations in all places, unite in order to be different"... There is something global in the present day version, declares the author.

Robert Jaulin insists further, that one is tempted to see in the most obscure civilizations models for a possible future realization of that end, which is truly revolutionary.

"Another America"

I discovered these tendencies in America - to my great encouragement. To be sure, they are found only sporadically, but such attempts should not be despised, for the very reason that they are noticeable in milieus connected with the American folkhighschool movement. An American with a Danish family background on one side, who was aware of the Danish folkhighschool, Mildred Jensen Loomis (died in 1986) entitled one of her books, provocatively: Alternative Americas (notice the plural); An informal history by the grandmother of the counter-culture. Here one reads: The America of the Indians was free. The invading Europeans repeated here the same kind of exploitation that they fled from in Europe. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that just about every great problem that one meets in North America today, every form of unethical behavior and every offense against personal dignity, freedom and self-government has European roots.

"Cooperation, democracy, ‘bottom-line’ technology, natural birth, holistic medicine, opposition to the state, all of this existed in the native communities of America from north to south, from east to west... They are not products of some ‘New Age’, new times. These ideas grew strong and developed throughout the millennium. It is among the native folk that we shall find the best examples of how we should live in the 21st century."

The so-called "Folk Schools" in America, find great difficulty in defining "folk-liness" in a land, a part of the world, where immigrants from the whole world meet the culture of the original population. A Canadian of Czech origin, whose wife is Danish [Jindra Kulich], * speaking at the international Grundtvig bicentennial celebration in Copenhagen, declared that interest in the mythology of the Indians and Inuits is steadily growing. Many people who have become rootless are seeking desperately for their origins. This search may be expressed in various ways, may be more open to find what is common for everyone, in the many-sided mosaic that is America,. That is why, as one writer emphasizes, a folk-school is a place where one can look for the common sources and the home connections that unite us and make us whole, where we discover that we are inseparably bound to the earth and to each other.

The first "Folk-schools" (in America) were founded by immigrant Danes, and were directed toward the Danish population in USA. But as Enok Mortensen in his book Schools for Life points out, it has long been clear that such a school can only succeed if it grows out of a common ground and is relative to our par- ticular situation. It must find its own voice, speak its own ‘living word’ and sing its own songs. We must go beyond Grundtvig and the Danish-American school and take into account how we live in America in the ‘80’s, at the same time that we keep in mind the strength of the folkhighschool experience and the wisdom in the Grundtvigian vision.

"Revolt" in the American Folk-school movement
" To be content with circumstances as they are, to be ‘neutral’, is to stand on the side of the oppressors, who also want to maintain the status quo."
OPTION, Winter 1984

As great as this search after an identity is, even in the USA it is united with a protest, a "revolt" against the established society, much like the unrest which disturbs folkhighschools based in Denmark and Norway.

This protest, it seems to me, is especially interesting in the American context. The Danish parliamentarian Harald Holm wrote in 1871, explaining the Danish situation in Norway, that protest affects only "a small flock". But this little group were bearers of a different future. The similar "small flock" in the USA declares that society needs Folk Schools, as we move toward a sustainable society, based on renewable resources, hopefully with liberty, justice and peace for all....If the natural environment is to be preserved and rural life revitalized and rural communities rebuilt as places where life is worth living - then the ideals and methods of the folk schools may well be seen as a model, or concept of, our commitment, how best to go about the task of meeting the world crisis of our time, how best to expend our money, time and energy to that end. [Harley J. Gibson]

This demanding account of the role that Folk Schools should be responsible for playing in society closes with a warning: Every community needs at its heart something in the nature of a folk school as a leaven and catalyst. For society changes, but established institutions do not change. A Folk School must by its very nature preserve those challenges which life sets before us.

True, the general situation (in America) has not been favorable for Folk Schools. But nowadays, everything is changing. In a time of ecological disturbance, social division and spiritual decline, we need Folk Schools. Perhaps the Folk-school movement can gain new life through schools that take root in all parts of the country and bring people together to study these situations.

Indeed, the situation has not been good for Folk Schools. But as conditions change - as big nation-states and urban empires show signs of crumbling - as international communities and communes continue their groping experiments - as economic pressures and new technologies point more and more toward decentralist tendencies and what is called neighborhood power and community self-reliance - the folk school philosophy may yet come into its own, even in ways we do not now anticipate."

Myles Horton and Highlander Research and Education Center, Tennessee
"To serve the disadvantaged "

There is no better example than Myles Horton, to illustrate how one, through a concrete experience of the Danish folkhighschool, may come to see that the model cannot be transplanted in the USA.

The historian Howard Zinn, who gave his book the title A People’s History of the United States, acknowledges that much of ‘the people’s history’ has never been reported. In reality, "one hardly notices the modest voices that fight to make life better." History is "the history of the establishment, which is always most attentive to state and statesman - the guardians of the existing system - but which fails to respect a rebellion against the culture of the majority."

This explains why [American] history doesn’t mention Folk Schools, which all the country’s leadership seems to be unaware of - as the magazine OPTION. Journal of the Folk School Movement of America regretfully declares.

Meanwhile, there is an exception, and that is Highlander Folk School [now Highlander Research and Education Center]. In a celebration of its 50 years of existence and work, Andrew Young, an earlier ambas-sador of the USA to the United Nations, declared: "For fifty years, the Highlander Center has promoted ideas about leadership and a spirit of independance, which changed the direction of history."

Highlander, which calls itself "the school for problems" and whose aim has always been "to serve the disadvantaged" has recently joined The Folk School Association of America. This has increased the view of political choices on the Left flank.

When in 1983 "the Danish Society" arranged a seminar about "Grundtvig’s thoughts in North America", Myles Horton, Highlander’s founder and leader, described the school’s activity and tried to explain what he had reason to be grateful for in Grundtvig’s ideas, and what he had learned from the folkhighschools which he had visited.

It was in 1931 that Myles Horton decided to travel to Denmark, on the advice of Aage Møller, at that time the minister [of the Danish congregation] in Chicago. After reading everything he could find about Denmark, Horton set out. He learned Danish at Borup’s College in Copenhagen. He visited several folkhighschools and studied the labor and cooperative movements. He viewed Grundtvig as "a revolutionary with prophetic insight" and his "philosophy", he said, reminded one of the Hopi Indians’ holistic philosophy in America. - yet another reference to "America before the whites".

But the impressions which Myles Horton took back from his visit in Denmark were not all positive: He had got the impression that Grundtvig’s thinking had been bypassed; he would prefer to deepen his contacts with the labor movement and its folkhighschool in Esbjerg.

Naturally, Myles Horton knew of the Folk Schools that had been founded by and for Danes in the USA. He had early understood that there could be no question of copying the Danish model, but that it was necessary to create something appropriate to the American situation.

Highlander, from the beginning and during various periods of its existence, had never lost its chief task from view: "to serve the disadvantaged". Highlander has to a high degree worked to strengthen the labor movement. Highlander illegally brought together blacks and whites during the time of racial segregation, and this activity - with the consequent arrests, imprisonment and confiscation - made the school known throughout America. Today, Highlander tries to oppose "internal colonization" by bringing together Mexicans, Puerto-Ricans, Black and White poor people, especially from the Appalachian area, one of the most neglected regions in the USA.

Highlander’s teachers, who as a rule are University educated, all must learn that "instruction alone is not able to serve the people, without - and this is the important thing - also becoming oneself a part of the people."

One generally connects the famous song "We Shall Overcome" with High-lander. Actually, this song originated during the tobacco workers’ strike in the 1940’s, and Highlander learned the song from them. But it is insisted that the song is not Highlander’s most important trademark. Rather, it is the fact that today in all the Southern states, one finds people who declare that a weekend course at this school changed their lives and made it possible for them to work more effectively to change the world.

Myles Horton has retired as leader of Highlander, but the center continues in the same spirit as in his time.

This Folk School seems to be primarily characterized by its protest against an oppressive society. It has broadened its protest to include the cultural aspect. In the fight against "the American way of life" and the mass-culture promoted by massmedia, Highlander tries to promote the local cultures. In this way, the Center organized in April 1986 a weekend meeting about "our cultural multiplicity". The workshop brought together people from the whole South, one met cultural ideas and traditions from different backgrounds, inherited by widely separated groups of society. The purpose of this weekend is and was comprised within the frame of the Grundt-vigian dialectic between the national and the universal. In Highlander Report, the center’s publication, we read: "We widen our horizons and our view of the world through accepting and participating in a different perspective."

Israel. Ulpanim, Tehila Center and folkliness
The problems of national identity in Israel

Since one of Grundtvig’s chief ideas, "folkliness", is an original variation of the national awakening during the 1800’s, I should like to examine Zionism from his per-spective. It may be viewed as the last national movement of this century. We shall come to see how two institutions in separate surroundings attempt to achieve a national consciousness in Israel. They were not unaware of the Nordic folkhigh-school; on the contrary, they were inspired by it, though without copying it.

One cannot strive for national identity in Israel without coming upon a very special problem: How can a Judaic national feeling be created in a state where 112 different nationalities live side by side, and how can the 1.2 million from the diaspora, which includes 80% of the Jews, be integrated there?

First of all, Zionism’s chief purpose was to obtain a fosterland for a people who had lived in separate places all over the earth for nearly 2000 years. It was an emancipated Jew who created the movement in cosmopolitan Vienna, influenced by the 1800’s’ concern for nationality. To understand the proposition of the founder Theodor Herzl, we must for a moment return to the French Revolution. In a famous speech in the National Assembly in December 1780, the speaker proclaimed: "It is necessary to forget the Jews as a nation and to consider all the Jews as individuals. They must comprise neither a political corporation nor an organ- isation in the state, they must individually become fellow citizens."

Right in line with the political and cultural Jacobinism in France, and in line with the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Jews were thus deprived of the right to their own culture. Thus began the process of secularizing the Jews, and their assimilation into Western Europe.

After a century, during which the Jews were integrated into the culture of those countries where they lived, the Dreyfus affair (1894-1906) created violent anti-Semitism. Theodor Herzl, who was present as an Austrian journalist during the trial in Paris, saw that it was necessary to deal [with the situation] and if possible to take the Jews out of Europe.

What did he recommend in his little book, The Jewish State, which was pub-lished in 1896? Herzl wasn’t thinking of Palestine as "the Jewish people’s historical fatherland". He had no plans at all to import the national mother-tongue, Hebrew, into the Jewish homeland that he was campaigning for. Quite simply, he recommended his own mother-tongue, German. As a young man, he had dreamed of solving the Jewish problem by having the Jews convert to Catholicism. To obtain the necessary support of the great powers for his suggestion, he emphasized finally, that a Jewish national homeland would create "a defense for Europe against Asia", and he added: "We shall serve as an outpost of culture against barbarism." In response to the demand of Jews at risk, he localized the country finally to Palestine. But it should be noted that Herzl was unaware that this country was already inhabited by Arabs.

To set this primitive, and for us almost unimaginable, suggestion into the context of its times, it is appropriate to remind you of the humanist Viktor Rydberg’s defence of the West in opposition to the barbarism of the East - in the expresion about "the sword-lily" set "as a knightly outpost of the light at the gate to Europe" etc., which I have used as a motto in the chapter about the Swedish sharp-shooter movement.

I hope that this little resumé of history makes it easier to understand why the founder of the state of Israel wanted to create a little enclave of European culture beside the Mediterranean’s eastern shore, never mind the Arabian world, which was unknown and despised.

But when the state of Israel was founded in 1948, it naturally became clear that it was necessary to give Jews who came from such different countries a national con-sciousness which would bring them to be a Folk.

The main thing must be language. And Israel succeeded in the effort to make that language, which for 2000 years had been used only in the service of religion, into a national speech. Hebrew became the cement of the Jewish Folk in Israel.

But how should they manage the problem of aliens, immigrants? How could those Jews who came from so many separated countries and didn’t know Hebrew be integrated into a national fellowship?

It was to solve this problem that the inspiration of the Nordic folkhighschool was used. During the 1950’s, a connection was made between the Ulpanim and the North. Ulpan means the Hebrew study place, the school. It is a kind of boarding school, where Jewish immigrants stay for six months, to undergo integration into the Jewish society. Ulpanim’s chief task is to "bridge the gulf between Israel and world-Jewry", that is, to integrate all Jews into an actual Jewishness. Does this mean a Jewish "folkli-hood"? Ulpanim answers: "A viable stability, growing out of a deep root in the Jewishness of Israel, and the culture of the country." This means not just to immerse oneself in earlier times. Ulpan Akiva, near Netanya, is certainly the most open and liberal-minded of these schools. Primarily, it offers a complete openness toward new ideas, new connections and new cultural influences. Ulpan Akiva aims to be "a dynamic fellowship".

In Ulpan Akiva, people from the whole world meet, including European non-Jews and Arabs, so that "the steady change in this Ulpan’s social structure, which is characterized by different languages, religions and concepts of faith, offers a miniature portrait of the problem in Israel and in world-Jewry." The leader of Ulpan Akiva, Sulamith Katznelson, whose father was the first president of the state of Israel, visited the Nordic countries several times during the ‘50’s. I have been quite moved to find in her accounts of her journeys the names of several of my good friends: Sture Altvall (Nordic Folkhighschool in Kungälv, Sweden), Allan Degerman (Åsa Folkhighschool in Sweden), Johannes Novrup (Magleås High School in Denmark). There has been no question of the Ulpanim schools transferring a Nordic model, but there has been a living inspiration. And I dare to affirm that the atmosphere that rules at Ulpan Akiva - which is the one I know best - really makes one think of a Nordic folkhighschool: song, human warmth streaming from fellowship, the teaching methods free of all school-like pressures, yes, one feels oneself at home in this atmosphere.

Tehila’s work to manage the growing population

"The power" in Israel has always lain with the Askenazi, the European Jews, including not only Russians but even American Jews. They have "Hebraised" the country, but one may ask what culture the official Hebrew language carries. An elite-culture, undoubtedly a Jewish culture, but interpreted through institutions to which the great majority of the people have had no access. This common problem is com-plicated in Israel by the fact that the Sephards are now more numerous than the Askenazi. Although "Sephard" means Spanish in Hebrew, one can better charac-terize the Sephards as "Jews from the East". Actually, it means those Jews that come from Arabian countries, where they had lived peacefully for a thousand years. But they became persecuted in their countries and immigrated to Israel during the 1950’s.

To integrate these 700.000 eastern Jews put the young state up against an unheard-of problem, and the problem has not found any satisfactory solution, either politically, socially, economically, or culturally. The established Askenazi society has not ceased to flaunt its superiority and its contempt for these proletarians, who were often illiterate, at least partially, and who in general lacked the ability to adjust to "civilized" society, which Israel had shaped according to the Western model.

But where does one find the true Jewish culture? Voices were raised in acknowledgement that the eastern Jews really stood much closer to the original Jewish culture than the Europeanized and secularized Askenazi.

So this was a situation which could have resulted in a "culture war" somewhat like the Nordic model. But the gulf between the privileged, that is the Askenazi, and the eastern Jews was without doubt too deep for the initiative to come "from below" as it has done in the North. Therefore, it came "from above". The Education Ministry undertook actions which led to the setting up of Tehila centers.

Among the eastern Jews, women were the most handicapped group. It was to help them that a very interesting educational work was begun.

The first Tehila center was set up in 1975 in Beersheba, the "capital" of the Negev, where a large number of eastern Jews lived. Women come to the center one day a week, and their instruction continues for seven years. It is formed similarly to the traditional school system, but with the definite purpose of convincing these women, despised by all who have education, that they too have the right "to go to school".

Within the traditional frame, a pedagogy is exercised which has the basic aim of fellowship. The teachers are always together with the pupils, and in addition to normal daily contact, they use what in the North is called "searching-out activity". Women instruct women. Teachers regularly attend local, regional and national meet-ings, so as to keep abreast of developments. Beyond the regular school subjects, much time is devoted to the women’s original cultures. Furthermore, something even more important happens in these centers: those women who come from Arabic countries are accustomed to a type of community life which has disappeared in modern society.

The Tehila center creates a new form of fellowship, which draws the women out of their isolation and loneliness. The Tehila centers, as I have said, are set up by the authorities and have not grown spontaneously from below. It was plain that these oppressed people, shut out of society, could not be expected to take the initiative. But it is remarkable to see how these individuals change. I have attended festivals with such women, who have been traditionally doomed to silence since time out of mind, and have seen how they develop in a milieu where one reckons with both their handicap and their special ability. During a festival, they could accurately and enthusiastically present those cultures which they had brought with them to Israel from their original countries.

It has been said of the folkhighshool, that it has always been "a prompter of revolution everywhere in the North" and - more precisely - attempted to encourage rebellion against the culturally elite, who often are also the politically, socially, and economically ruling elite. (Poul Engberg, Højskolebladet 7/11 81). Isn’t that exactly what the Tehila centers are trying to do?

The two latest branches of the Grundtvigian tradition:
The Grundtvig Institute in Nigeria and the Australian Folk High School Movement

To celebrate the bicentennial of N.F.S. Grundtvig’s birth, representatives from 35 countries assembled in Copenhagen in September, 1983 - an impressive manifestation of that interest which Grundtvig’s thoughts, as exemplifed in the Nordic folk-highschool, still awaken in our days in many lands.

To what extent are the institutions that claim relationship to this model faithful to what separates such schools from the traditional educational system. And - what to my mind is even more important - to what extent have they managed to hold fast to what separates them from the steadily growing sector - adult education? Do they understand the value of what is characteristic of the Nordic folkhigh-schools: the concept that these schools are free, that for that reason there are no entrance exams or graduation diplomas, that attending these schools doesn’t lead to any pre-determined result?

I think that these are the basic aspects which are understood as essential throughout the world. In Grundtvigian terminology, one speaks of "life-enlightenment". This "school for life" is adapted to each country’s special conditions, and can thus take on quite different expressions. I will limit myself to a discussion of the latest branches of Grundtvigian thinking: the Grundtvigian Institute which has recently been set up in Nigeria, and "The Australian folkhighschool-movement".

The Danish Højskolebladet [Folkhighschool Journal] told its readers in May, 1986, about an experiment in "life-enlightenment", which was quite fascinating.

A course was held at Askov in 1982 as a follow-up of a meeting in 1980 about "The possible use of Nordic folkhighschool ideas in developing lands". A participant in the Askov course was a Nigerian with a doctoral degree from the University in Ibadan. It seemed clear to him, that this "life-enlightenment" was exactly what was needed in a country where the educational system quite slavishly followed the British model. He therefore resigned from his official position with all its advantages and returned to the little town that he had come from. With the help of the whole local population, he set up a Grundtvig Institute, which began its work in 1984 with 7 pupils - compare Christopher Bruun! - and in 1986, had 70.

Apparently the people understood that they must change their situation and that this must come from a popular movement, if they would free the land from corruption and the steady power of the state and lead it along a democratic road. The Danish cooperators, to whom I refer here, were pleased to find "a local society, which to a broad degree builds on the same democratic ideals of agreement and coming-together as we know in Denmark" (at least, this was true until the communal reform in 1970).

Later contacts (February 1987) with this Grundtvig Institute result in more reserved impressions. The institute departs from fundamental Grundtvigian ideas and is more like a higher vocational school than a folkhighschool. This is certainly ines-capable; it was explained to the Norwegian visitor (Kåre Grytli), that the authorities on whom financing depended were not yet prepared to approve a really Grundt-vigian project.

One can perhaps sum up the situation thus: the project is remarkable in its original form. There is talk about "life-enlightenment", about the struggle to advance cultural identity and meaningful technological development. The reality appears to be quite different, but this is certainly not the first time that a gulf has opened between dream and reality. In any case, Danish organizations are ready to help the Nigerian "Grundtvig", Kashi Ozumba.

The founding of the Grundtvig Institute in Nigeria started from below and was supported by "the base". It is quite different in Australia.

"The Australian Folk High School Association, Ltd." was founded at the same time, 1984, with close connections to the Ministry of Education. The Danish "highschool union" has followed the develop-ment of this association closely from the beginning.

Why was it necessary to create an institution which, according to what we are told, follows the Nordic folkhighschool model? Without doubt, it is first and foremost because "the [official] educational system is coupled to conditions which no longer exist". It is therefore necessary to shape something decidedly new. The institution to come should be planned to enhance rural life, in a city or near it. It should be "a boarding school without examination rights and without a vocational curriculum." The number of pupils should be limited to 50, and "the teachers should be expected to live at the school and to supervise the students to a reasonable degree."

It is correctly announced that this will really be "a new institution with a new style", and that it will have to do with "life". But will the attempt to adapt "Grundtvigian fostering principles" to Australian social and economic conditions "agree with the best in the modern Danish folkhighschools"?

Australian society obviously has some special cultural problems. What does it mean "to be Australian in the 20th and 21st century"? To know the answer, one must try to "investigate the Australian character". One must not forget "aboriginal studies", that is, studies of the original population. One must take into account an important Australian problem: "cultural multiplicity". Finally, one asks the question: "Is there an Australian identity?"

The institution will temporarily be installed in The Bandon Grove School. It had been intended to call it a Folk High School, but this unfamiliar expression worried people so much that it was decided to call it "Bandon Grove Live and Learn".

Will these two branches of Grundtvigian thought come to live and grow?

The folkhighschool and postindustrial society

We have seen that the little world that circles around the American "Folk Schools" is very conscious of the deep-going and accelerating changes that affect our planet, shaken by a world crisis.

One of my Danish friends asks whether this is a crisis within the industrial soci-ety or a crisis of the industrial society. But it is much more, according to the definition of a "crisis" as something overpowering. We are now living through a fundamental change, which will definitely transform our society, as the change is irreversible.

Some Americans seem to feel that this change favors the founding of folk-highschools. In Australia, it has been declared that the educational system was planned for a situation that no longer exists. Therefore, new institutions must be created to meet new ideas and fill new needs. And so one turns to the Nordic folk-highschool.

In this "new society", currently called "the postindustrial society", wage-labor will be reduced to a minimum. Man must change his attitude toward work, and is no longer to be identified with his job. As is well known, in the old peasant society, one asked a person: "Where do you come from?" In the industrial society, the question is: "What is your work?" And if one no longer has a salaried employment, he is set aside, reckoned as displaced, one who no longer has a place in society.

This development leads to a dualistic, "double" society" one for those who are integrated in the production process, and another for those who are outside. And the last-named category is the one that is growing.

This development must be faced. We know, and it is often said, that "the folkhighschool originally was to be a counter-culture." (Helge Severinsen in Nordic Newspaper for Adult Education, 1980, no. 5). More than ever before, we need a "counter-culture", a massive and effective reaction, to escape the dehumanizing of our life and our culture. In this situation, the folkhigh-school can occupy a central place.

People must learn that loss of a salaried job doesn’t mean loss of human worth. It is also necessary to teach them that there are other places, other ways to work, than those the industrial society forces upon us. And aren’t there many such engaging attempts precisely within the folkhighschools?

Nobody can eliminate the modern technologies that invade our lives in giant steps. If technology is controlled by others than technocrats, the changes can occur that we desire. But we must never forget that technology is never neutral. One of our well-known philosophers, Professor Jaques Ellul, held a colloquium in Bordeaux in 1985, with the theme: "What Does Technology Transfer?" He affirmed: One never transfers a single piece of knowledge, but rather a whole set of these conditions: our habits, our culture, our social life, a special way of experiencing the relationship between the individual and society, something which for example eliminates that mystical and symbolic way of thinking that is the wealth of many developing countries". (Article in Le Monde, 20/3 1985).

"Mystical and symbolic way of thinking" can of course not be programmed into a computer.

One can declare, as I have done several times in this writing, that the interest in mystical ways of thinking has awakened anew. It is an instinctive reaction for people who dare to save themselves from conquest by a society where science - as another French thinker says - has homogenized culture. For instead of taking its place among all the other aspects of culture, science dominates all of human life with its rationality, allowing no space for feelings, transcendance. "The scientific explosion" threatens "the destruction of mankind", as Michel Henri says. The book that he published in 1987, is frankly called Barbarism.

Erich Fromm wrote: "We are living through a time when the promise of unlimited progress has turned toward defeat."

Let us explore new paths and encourage confidence in the Nordic folkhighschool to plow new fields.

 

SOURCES

The historical part of this paper - unless otherwise stated - is built on sources from the doctoral dissertation by Erica Simon, Reveil national et culture populaire en scandinavie. La genése de la højskole nordique 1844-1874. Uppsala 1960. There is a complete bibliography in the dissertation.

As to the Epilogue, the following may be mentioned:
The bit about the Swedish folkhighschool: Up to Battle for the Folkhigh-school. A debate about the Swedish folkhighschool put together by Jan Peterson, Plebs publishers 1976.

And Ingemar Sallnäs: "The Folkhighschool in Sweden, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow."
Article in the magazine Nordic Contact, October 1984.

For the citations concerning "Folk Schools" in America:

OPTION: Journal of the Folk School Association of America, 1984, 1985, 1986.

Myles Horton: "Influences on Highlander Research and Education Center, New Market, Tennessee" in Grundtvig’s Ideas in North America. Published by The Danish Society, 1983.

Frank Adams: "Highlander Folk School: Social Movements and Social Change in the American South" in Other Dreams, Other Schools by Rolland G. Paulston, 1980.

Articles about the folkhighschool in Nigeria:
Erik Høgsbro Holm: "Grundtvig is still living in Ubu" Høgskolebladet, May 5, 1986.

Kåre Grytli: "Nordfolk - a folkhighschool in Nigeria in appearance" Folkehøg-skolen, March 1987.

Among other French authors, the following are cited:
Claude Lévi Strauss: "Panorama de l’ethnologie", Diogene¨1953.

Robert Jaulin: "Ethnocide, Ecocide, Suicide", article in Roland de Miller’s "Les noces avec la terre", Editions Scriba 1982.

 

 

 

 

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