Ludvig Holberg, The Founder of Norwegian Literature and an Oxford Student

by S. C. Hammer

Ludvig Holberg—Ludovicus Holbergius, Norvegus, as he signed his name in the Admission Index of the Bodleian Library—was born at Bergen, the present capital of Western Norway, on December 3rd, 1684. His father, who was a well-known officer in the Norwegian army, died when Lewis was an infant; his mother, when he was 10 years old. Lewis who was the youngest of twelve brothers and sisters, six of whom attained their majority, therefore very early became acquainted with the sterner aspects of life and grew up a lonely boy, deprived of the tender care of a parental home. It was at that time the custom in Norway to give pay to sons of officers and to initiate them at an early age in military tactics, the salaries they got being used to defray the expenses of their education. These petty officers were called corporals, and Lewis was now promptly appointed corporal in the "Upland Regiment," far away from his native town, in one of the midland districts.

This was a rather curious beginning for a man so decidedly anti-militarist as Holberg was throughout his life. In his autobiography, published in Latin in 1727,[1] he makes fun of the episode, describing his transformation from a petty officer into a professor of philosophy as "a sort of Ovidian metamorphosis which might expose me to the risk of being sent back from my professorial chair to the camp, if the authorities were disposed to question my qualifications."

Notwithstanding this, his appointment as petty officer was to become of importance to him. As soon as he got his commission he left Bergen for the midland counties—a remarkable journey at that time, by sea and land, through a great part of West and Mid Norway—until he finally arrived at the Fron Vicarage, one of the finest places in the valley of Gudbrandsdalen and at present one of our most popular tourist districts. The vicar of Fron, who was his relation on his mother's side, soon discovered his remarkable abilities, his passion for literature, in which he had already made some trifling attempts, and last but not least, his gift for languages.

The two years which Holberg subsequently spent at Fron have, until a quite recent date, been practically unnoticed by Holberg students, but it is easy to see that they form an interesting link in the chain of events connected with his life. His schooldays at Fron were not pleasant to him, for the assistant master, who had to take care of the boys, was rather inferior as a teacher. His Latin was bad, his views narrow and pedantic, his chief instrument of instruction the birch, of which he made assiduous application. Holberg, who rather early reacted instinctively and strongly to all strokes of spontaneousness, very soon conceived a deep dislike and contempt for these pedagogic methods, and his power of reflection made its combinations and conclusions. Latin and pedantry became to a certain extent synonymous notions to him, and it was to be one of his pleasures as a writer to record and hand over to derision the whole system of travestied learning which was one of the characteristic features of his age.

This was the negative aspect of his sojourn at the Fron Vicarage. Its positive aspect was the time he spent in the library of the vicarage, where, among a number of Greek and Latin classics, he also found several modern foreign books, including some Bibles in English and French, an English and a French dictionary, a French grammar, and an English reader, with colloquial sentences—rather a curious collection of books for a Norwegian inland county towards the end of the seventeenth century. These books, as far as we know, were the first specimens of English and French literature which he ever saw, but he was fascinated by them. They were to him messages from the great marvellous world hundreds of miles beyond the mountains by which he was surrounded. Do you wonder that he was longing and dreaming, silent and solitary as he was by disposition?

But he was not dreaming only. Being a quick observer of things surrounding him, we may infer that he was deeply impressed by the customs and manners of the peasants among whom he lived, their cool, unobtrusive way of behaving themselves, their sound judgment, their manual cleverness, their traditions, songs and fairy tales, and last but not least, their dialect, with its peculiar words and phrases, so decidedly different from his own Bergen tongue and way of speaking. Indeed, numerous passages in his works are stamped by obvious reminiscences from his Fron sojourn.

After an absence which, in more respects than one, ripened him above his age, Holberg, in 1698, returned to Bergen, where he resumed his studies under conditions which did not please him at all. During his absence the grammar school of the city had been subjected to a thorough reform by an able manager, who was himself an ardent admirer of the classics. Accordingly, Latin more than ever became the chief subject of instruction, the command of the language being laboriously aimed at by means of disputations which were at once linguistic exercises and a medium of theological and metaphysical fencing.

Holberg, who always felt himself alien to subtleties of this kind, was therefore quite agreeable when very soon after the heavy fire at Bergen in 1702, which stands out as one of the most remarkable events in the annals of the city, he was sent to the University of Copenhagen, where he passed his B.A. examination. He does not seem to have been favourably impressed in any particular degree either by the capital itself or by the conditions ruling at the University. Otherwise, in his reminiscences he would hardly have passed by his life as a student in absolute silence; on the other hand, Bergen, as she presented herself to him towards the end of 1702 after he had been away for some seven or eight months, was certainly no cheery place, being still under the gloom of the devastations of the fire. He therefore quite naturally availed himself of the earliest opportunity of getting away.

The two following years of his life, but for a short stay at Copenhagen, where he completed his theological studies and attained a high degree, he spent chiefly "in flogging his pupils and converting Norwegian boors." This is a humorous expression of his for the way in which he performed his duties as a tutor to the children of the vicar at Voss—now one of the best-known districts on the Bergen-Christiania Railway—and occasionally replaced him in the pulpit. By his own saying he succeeded decidedly better as a preacher than as a tutor which, by the way, does not say very much, as he never excelled in either of these functions. The chief interest connected with his stay at Voss is the fact that it strengthened his early Fron recollections of the peasants.

We are entitled to infer from his famous Description of Bergen, which appeared thirty-five years later, that he has taken a special interest in Voss, and that he has studied the history and the topography of the district, and we hardly jump at conclusions in assuming that his popularity with the peasants was due, not to his sermons, but to the straightforward, unpretending way in which he approached them. He carried with him from Voss, as he had carried with him from Fron, favourable impressions of the Norwegian peasantry to the manly qualities of whom he often returns in his writings.