We heard little of Scandinavian literature until the translations of Tegner, Frederica Bremer, Oelenschlager, and Hans Christian Andersen, called our attention to the rich treasures of intellectual activity produced under that cold northern sky. Of course constant additions are being made to this literature. Among its recent productions is a comedy by Andersen, based on a fairy story, called Hyldemöer, which has lately been performed upon the Danish stage with not very brilliant success. It is admitted to be inferior to his stories, as have been his former attempts at dramatic composition. C. Molbach announces, at Copenhagen, a Danish translation of Dante's Divina Commedia; the same author has just published a volume of original poems under the title of Twilight. A very industriously-prepared and useful work is J. H. Eoslen's General Literary Dictionary, from the year 1814 to 1840, of which the thirteenth part has just appeared. In Norway, F. M. Bugge announces a translation of the Iliad into Norwegian hexameters, to be published by subscription. A Norwegian dictionary, by Iwar Aasen is highly commended.
A very sharp controversy is now being waged by the scholars of Denmark and Schleswig. The Danes resort to philology in order to prove the right of their country to extend its government over the Germans of that Duchy, and the other party meet their onslaught with weapons equally keen, drawn also from the arsenals of dictionaries and grammars. The best of the quarrel hitherto seems to be on the side of the Schleswigers, whose great champion is one Herr Clement, a man of as much learning as talent. In a recent essay, he establishes that the original inhabitants of Schleswig were not Danes but Angles, or Frieslanders, essentially the same race as the original Saxon stock of England. In illustration of this doctrine he adduces an immense list of names of places which are the same in Schleswig and England—as, for instance, Ripen and Ripon, Ellum and Elham, Rödding and Reading, Meldorp and Milthorp, Wilstrup and Wilthorpe, &c., &c. This essay will probably be expanded into a book.
The German critics are discussing with high encomiums a volume of poems by Annette von Droste, a deceased poetess of Westphalia. It is entitled Das Religiöse Jahr (The Religious Year), and is inspired with that absolute devotion which lends so great a charm to the poems of Montgomery, the Moravians, and the mystical writers generally.
Byron's Manfred, with musical accompaniments, by R. Schumann, is about to be produced at the Weimar theatre.
Jahn, the well-known Leipsic professor, is engaged in writing a life of Beethoven.