Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground by Ludvig Holberg

18th-century sci-fi from a Danish Voltaire

Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground or Niels Klim’s Underground Travels is a science fiction novel published way back in 1741. It was penned by Danish author Ludvig Holberg. The edition I read included a brief biography of Holberg, which makes him out to sound like Denmark’s version of Voltaire. He was that Scandinavian nation’s pre-eminent man of letters in the 18th century, an Enlightenment freethinker who, besides this one novel, also wrote books on philosophy, history, and law, as well as plays and poetry. Niels Klim’s Journey, Holberg’s only novel, is very much in the same vein of satirical sci-fi and fantasy literature as Voltaire’s Micromegas (1752) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

The story takes place in 1664. Niels Klim, a recent graduate of a Copenhagen university, returns to his hometown of Bergen in Norway. Near that city is a mountain with a mysterious hole in it, from which warm air emanates. Someone should really investigate that hole, so Niels volunteers to lead an expedition. He enters the cave with a small team of men. While rappelling into a chasm, Niels’s rope breaks, and he falls for a very long time.

It turns out that the Earth is a hollow shell. Inside is an inner space complete with a small sun and a planet about 600 miles in circumference, named Nazar. Niels lands on this planet and finds himself in the kingdom of Potu. The citizens of Potu are intelligent, speaking trees. Unlike trees we know, they are not stationary, and can walk using their roots, but not quickly. They welcome Niels into their society and, due to his long legs, they give him the job of courier-general. The Potuans include many races, essentially different species of tree, each with its own peculiar characteristics and personality traits. In addition to Nazar, Niels also explores what Nazarians call “the firmament,” actually the interior surface of the Earth’s sphere, which also bears nations and their inhabitants. There he encounters civilizations of beings resembling animals of the surface world, but possessing language, the ability to walk upright, and human-like hands.

In total, Niels spends twelve years in this underground universe. Unlike Gulliver, who visited about a half dozen different lands in his travels, Niels seems to encounter a new race of beings every few pages, each with their own strange quirks. I’m sure many of these fictional peoples are meant to satirize different nations and polities of Holberg’s day. Not being an 18th-century Dane myself, I’m sure much of that satire was lost on me. For today’s reader, however, Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground does make for more accessible and humourous reading than Voltaire’s satires, such as Candide or Zadig. Even if you don’t know the politics of the time, you can enjoy Holberg making fun of various types of people and systems of government. There is a land where gender roles are reversed, for example. The women are sexual predators, and the men are expected to be chaste virgins and slut-shamed if they aren’t. Thus, Holberg points out some of the ridiculous double standards placed on women of his time. Another land is inhabited by philosophers and academics who are so focused on their search for knowledge that they have abandoned all personal hygiene and social graces. Each little country Niels visits has its share of comedic surprises.

With this novel, Holberg inaugurated the hollow-Earth subgenre of science fiction, from which would arise Symzonia (1820), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1867), Mizora (1881), A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), The Smoky God (1908), and At the Earth’s Core (1914), among others. Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground deserves respect as a pioneering work in science fiction, but it’s not just some stodgy old vintage antique that belongs in a museum display case. After all these years, it’s still fun to read.   

The Nordic Translation Series

Modern lit from Northern Europe
From 1965 to 1970, the University of Wisconsin Press published its Nordic Translation Series. This collection of books presented works of literature from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden in English translation, thereby introducing English-language readers to the modern authors of those nations. The books in this series include novels, short stories, drama, and memoir. Each book typically has an introduction by a university professor that provides a brief biography of the author and some explanation of the historical context behind the work. 

I believe 16 books were published in the series. Eleven of those books are now available for free download. The University of Wisconsin Press has released these translations as open access books. They can be found at the UW Libraries website. Old Books by Dead Guys has previously reviewed all eleven of those books, and presents an overview of the series below. Though not every book in the series is a masterpiece, each volume presents a welcome glimpse into a corner of the world often neglected by English-language readers. Scandinavian literature (a subset of Nordic) has enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent years, mostly due to mystery novels and thrillers. The books listed below, however, represent some of the highbrow literary luminaries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who are revered in their native lands. Click on the titles below to read the full reviews.

Denmark 🇩🇰

We Murderers: A Play in Three Acts (1920) by Guðmundur Kamban (1.5 stars)
Kamban was born in Iceland. He moved to Denmark for college and remained in Copenhagen for most of his life, although he lived briefly in New York, London, and Berlin. His play We Murderers is set in New York. As a result, it doesn’t in any way come across as particularly Nordic or Scandinavian, which begs the question, why would anyone translate it for this series? Isn’t the purpose of this series to educate Americans about Nordic culture? Instead, this is a pedestrian marital melodrama involving a jealous husband and a wife with a straying eye. There is a touch of Eugene O’Neill in this, but it would be early-career O’Neill, as seen in such forgettable plays as Welded, Diff’rent, and The First Man. A century after it was first staged, this drama reads as rather pretentious and overly melodramatic.

Finland 🇫🇮

People in the Summer Night (1934) by Frans Eemil Sillanpää (4 stars)
Sillanpää won the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature, the only Finnish author so far to have done so. This novel paints a vivid portrait of a rural community in Finland. Comprised of 48 short chapters, the structure of the novel is more of a montage than a linear narrative. The story takes place almost entirely over the course of one summer night, when Finland is lit by the strange midnight twilight of Northern latitudes. A large ensemble cast of characters act out the intimate dramas that contribute to the collective history of this fictional rural community. Sillanpää’s style strikes a delicate and satisfying balance between pastoral romanticism and naturalist realism.

The Woodcarver and Death (1940) by Hagar Olsson (2.5 stars)
Olsson was a member of a minority Swedish population in Finland that produced its own body of literature in the Swedish language, of which this novel is an example. A quiet young woodcarver decides to leave his widowed mother’s home and make a pilgrimage to his birthplace. Obsessed with thoughts of death, the pointlessness of life, and the futility of religion, he hopes the journey might help him to discover some meaning to life. This book calls to mind some of the soul-searching wanderer novels of German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse, such as Siddhartha or Narcissus and Goldmund, but drearier and less interesting. This novel is a bit too contemplative and navel-gazing for my taste.

My Childhood by Toivo Pekkanen (4.5 stars)
Unlike most of the works in this series, which have a decidedly modernist style, this partial autobiography by Pekkanen is a straight-up work of old-school naturalism. For most of this narrative, Finland was under the rule of the Russian Empire, and Pekkanen was born in a coastal town near the Russian border. After his father dies of a stroke, Pekkanen and his mother struggle with poverty and hunger that only worsen with the coming of World War I and the Russian Revolution. This powerful and poignant memoir explores timeless and universal themes of coming-of-age through a story that is specific to its time an place. One learns quite a bit about Finnish history and Finnish life in the process. While there are harsh and brutal aspects to this story, it is also suffused with familial love and a resilient hope for the future.

Iceland 🇮🇸

Fire and Ice: Three Icelandic Plays (1915–1955) by Jóhann Sigurjónsson, Davið Stefánsson, and Agnar Þórðarson (3.5 stars)
This trio of Icelandic dramas highlights three important figures in the history of Icelandic theatre, and their works included here depict three distinct periods in Iceland’s history and literature. Sigurjónsson’s The Wish is a Faustian tale of a driven young man who dabbles in black magic. Stefánsson’s Golden Gate is a humorous Christian folktale about an old woman striving to get her recently deceased husband’s soul through the pearly gates of Heaven. Þórðarson’s Atoms and Madams is a modern political satire involving imperialism and resource extraction. Because of its tripartite structure and the editor’s informative introductions, Fire and Ice is one of the more successful books in the Nordic Translation Series at educating the reader about the history and literature of the nation in question.

Norway 🇳🇴

The Fourth Night Watch (1923) by Johan Falkberget (4 stars)
Falkberget, a very prolific author of historical novels, is highly respected in his home country. As a representative of the regionalist movement in Norwegian literature, his writing exhibits similar characteristics to authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope or Emile Zola. This novel is set in the mining region where Falkberget was born, and the story takes place around 1807, about the time Norway won its independence from Denmark and entered a war against Sweden. The plot involves a realistic depiction of forbidden love, as well as contrasting characters of different social classes. Although this is not a religious novel, it portrays the significant role that Christianity played in Norwegian society during this time period. The reader learns much about Norwegian history from reading this book.

The Great Cycle (1934) by Tarjei Vesaas (5 stars)
While literary critics often classify Vesaas as one of Norway’s groundbreaking modernists, The Great Cycle is pretty traditional stylistically and reads like a naturalistic depiction of Norwegian rural life in a bygone era. This is a coming-of-age story about a boy born and raised on an isolated farm in the rural countryside. As he grows into adolescence, he chafes at the idea of being forced to take over the family farm. While the Norwegian setting is made intimately real for the reader, the life events and the feelings they engender are universally human. Though understated and modest on the surface, this excellent novel delivers a deep and powerful reading experience. It reads like a kinder, gentler variation on Knut Hamsun’s masterpiece Growth of the Soil. I consider this the best book in the Nordic Translation Series.

Werewolf (1958) by Aksel Sandemose (3 stars)
Sandemose was born in Denmark and moved to Norway as an adult. The “werewolf” of the title is only a metaphor, similar to the wolf of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. The story involves a successful but alcoholic writer who periodically comes into contact with a love from his younger days, whom he seduced when she was half his age. There are also some references to the Nazi occupation during World War II, but most of the novel is really about the characters’ love lives and sex lives. This is a work of modernist literature that goes overboard with its modernism, obscuring the narrative with self-indulgent and ostentatious artiness. Sandemose doesn’t present the story in chronological order, and the lives of these characters are a puzzle that the reader has to piece together. This might have been a more compelling story if it weren’t so deliberately difficult and pretentious.

Sweden 🇸🇪

Kallocain (1940) by Karin Boye (4.5 stars)
Though best known as a poet, Boye also wrote five novels, including this science fiction story set in a dystopian future. The narrator, a scientist, describes a highly militaristic society subject to a draconian bureaucracy called the Worldstate. The citizens of this land live underground under heavy surveillance. Written during the rise of the Nazis and Stalin’s reign over the Soviet Union, this novel is a warning cry against totalitarian dictatorships and the military-industrial complex. Boye, however, emphasizes the personal over the political by investigating issues of human nature: the need for love, the fear of intimacy, the allure of conformity, the poison of jealousy, the paranoia of betrayal, and the reluctance to acknowledge or reveal one’s true self.

Bread of Love (1945) by Peder Sjögren (3 stars)
This novel takes place during the Finnish Continuation War of 1941 to 1944, a conflict that formed part of the Eastern Front of World War II. It is based on some of Sjögren’s own wartime experiences. The narrator is one of a troop of 20 soldiers holed up in underground burrows beneath the ice and snow, surrounded by mine fields. This novel would have been better had it been a relentlessly realistic novel of war, but instead Sjögren softens the blow with overly poetical prose, a fairy-tale romance, and suggestions of supernatural forces toying with the destinies of man, all of which diverts the narrative from reality into the realm of fable.

Rose of Jericho and Other Stories (1946–1949) by Tage Aurell (2.5 stars)
Aurell grew up in Värmland, a rather rustic area of Sweden. Much like America’s William Faulkner, however, he writes about rural and small-town life in an experimental, modernist style that would appeal more to
big-city and university intellectuals than to the simple country folk he depicts in his stories. In general, Aurell’s writing is too abstract for my taste. These stories are often frustrating in their deliberate obscurity, but about a third of the nine stories assembled here deliver a moving story with characters that the reader really grows to care about. Overall, however, the book didn’t teach me much about Swedish country life.

Additional Books in the Series
The following books were also published in the Nordic Translation Series, but they are not currently available in open access editions (probably due to copyright and permissions issues). Old Books by Dead Guys has not reviewed them.

Two Minutes of Silence by H. C. Branner (Denmark)
This collection of short stories appears to be out of print. Only used copies available.

World Light by Halldór Laxness (Iceland)
An English translation of this novel is currently available from the publisher Vintage.

The Black Cliffs by Gunnar Gunnarsson (Iceland)
Out of print (in English, at least). Look for used copies.

Havoc by Tom Kristensen (Denmark)
An English translation of this novel is currently available from New York Review of Books Classics.

Jørgen Stein by Jacob Paludan (Denmark)
Out of print (in English, at least). Look for used copies.

We Murderers: A Play in Three Acts by Guðmundur Kamban

Scandinavian drama of an American marriage

Playwright Guðmundur Kamban was born in Iceland. He moved to Denmark for college and remained in Copenhagen for most of his life, although he lived briefly in New York, London, and Berlin. His play We Murderers was first staged in Denmark in 1920. The play is set in New York, where Kamban and his wife had recently lived for a year or two. In 1970, We Murderers was published in English as one of about a dozen books in the Nordic Translation Series from the University of Wisconsin Press. One notable thing about this series is that the University of Wisconsin has made these translations freely available to the public. The books can be downloaded from the UW Libraries website, allowing curious readers to sample the works of 20th-century Scandinavian writers, many of whom are revered in their home countries but little known in America.

We Murderers presents the tumultuous marriage of Ernest and Norma Macintyre. They had previously enjoyed a happy and stable marriage, but since Norma took a solo vacation to Florida, their relationship has not been the same. Norma has recently taken up flying lessons with an instructor named Mr. Rattigan, whom she met in Florida. She swears that there is nothing romantic happening between them, but Ernest is a very jealous husband who resents the amount of time his wife is spending with another man. Norma thus feels she has to lie to Ernest when she spends time with Rattigan, and her mother and sister aid her in her deceptions. Ernest has had enough and demands a divorce. Norma refuses to agree to a divorce, and swears that she will change her behavior to please her husband. For Ernest, however, their love has been tainted by dishonesty, and he will not settle for anything less than true love and complete devotion.

There is a touch of Eugene O’Neill in this, but it would be early-career O’Neill, as seen in such forgettable plays as Welded, Diff’rent, and The First Man. This ain’t no Long Days Journey Into Night. Kamban clearly sympathizes with Ernest in this conflict, but to readers a century later the husband’s stance seems like unreasonable overreacting. Kamban’s views of love, as voiced by Ernest, seem pretty high-falutin a century later. Even the title, We Murderers, is rather pretentious for what today feels like a rather pedestrian marital drama.

Why would a Scandinavian playwright set his play in New York? Perhaps the Danish audience would have liked that. The bigger question is, why would anyone translate it for this series? If you’re doing a series on Nordic literature, why not translate books that give some insight into Scandinavian life? For the American reader, this little play about a New York marriage is not very special. The introduction by D. E. Askey informs us that Kamban was satirizing American society but if so, this isn’t a very biting satire.

The story of Kamban’s death is one of the saddest that I’ve ever heard. On the day that World War II ended in Denmark, Kamban was wrongly suspected of being a Nazi collaborator and was shot in the head in front of his family. During his life, Kamban was also reputed to have psychic abilities. He sounds like an interesting man, but this play unfortunately is not very interesting. Of the several volumes I’ve read in the Nordic Translations Series, this is the weakest entry. Thankfully, it might also be the shortest book in the series, so it doesn’t require a major investment in reading time.
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Mogens and Other Stories by Jens Peter Jacobsen

Danish modernist pioneer

Jens Peter Jacobsen

Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-1885) was an important writer in Scandinavian literature’s transition from romanticism to modernism. Jacobsen was a scientist by trade, and he died at a rather young age, so his career in literature was brief. His entire literary output consists of two novels—Marie Grubbe (1876) and Niels Lyhne (1880)—one volume of poetry, and a handful of short stories. Four of these stories are collected in the English-language volume Mogens and Other Stories, translated by Anna Grabow and published in 1921.

Jacobsen’s scientific and atheistic mindset is evident in his literary works, which tend toward naturalism, a school of early modern realism influenced by recent developments in science, particularly Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Jacobsen’s specific discipline was botany, and plant imagery is often prominent in his writings, particularly in the story “Mogens,” in which the blooming and withering of vegetation charts the change of seasons and the passage of time in human relationships. In this story, a councillor and his daughter Camilla venture into the country on a leisure trip. There they meet a young local named Mogens, with whom Camilla eventually falls in love. References to Cape Trafalgar would seem to situate the story in Spain, though Mogens is clearly a Danish name. What starts out as an idyllic romance turns into a more profound meditation on love, loss, and redemption. Mogens, like Jacobsen, is also an atheist whose faith lies in nature rather than in deity. “Mogens” is the longest selection in this volume, taking up half the book’s length, and it is also the collection’s best story.

On to something completely different, “The Plague in Bergamo” seems to be set in medieval times or perhaps some unspecified dystopian future. When a plague strikes an isolated town, the inhabitants go into a rapid moral decline, making their city the new Sodom or Gomorrah. A procession of devout religious penitents marches in to hold a service begging God for mercy. The message preached, however, does not follow the typical church doctrine. Instead, it reflects Jacobsen’s antithetical views on religion. This makes for an odd story, powerful yet confusing. Another unusual entry is “There Should Have Been Roses.” Stylistically this is a very modern piece, with a feel reminiscent of Katherine Anne Porter. The story has no real plot. It is more like a description of a stage set—an old manor house, a decaying wall covered in foliage (again with the plant motif)—where a scene might take place. The imagery is rather romantic, but expressed in avant-garde prose.

The final selection, “Mrs. Fonss,” returns to the more realistic style of “Mogens.” A Danish widow is traveling with her two children in Avignon, France. There she meets an old boyfriend from her youth, and they decide to get married. The drama springs from the teenaged children’s reaction to this decision. Jacobsen’s take on the situation is by no means sappy or clichéd. This is a fine work of naturalist writing, but the behavior of some of the characters seems too extreme to be realistic.

Overall, this is an impressive offering by Jacobsen, though not quite as good as his novel Niels Lyhne. One wishes he would have lived longer to produce more fine literature. The English translation is a bit clunky at times, making for uncomfortable reading. In the hands of a better English-language prose stylist, this book would likely merit a higher rating.

Stories in this collection

Mogens

The Plague in Bergamo 

There Should Have Been Roses 

Mrs. Fonss

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Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen

Atheist coming-of-age story
Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen is one of a group of writers associated with what’s known as the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavian literature, in which several writers in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden broke away from the prevailing romanticism in European literature and forged a movement towards naturalism. French author Emile Zola is generally considered the founder of naturalism, but while he was formulating his naturalist school in Paris, Danish literary critic Georg Brandes was simultaneously spearheading a similar movement in Scandinavia. One of Brandes’s recruits was Jacobsen, whose novel Niels Lyhne was published in 1880.

While romantic literature emphasizes individualism and spirituality, naturalist literature emphasizes a more scientific view of the world in which human beings are inescapably formed, governed, and directed by natural forces. One such natural force is heredity, as Jacobsen illustrates in Niels Lyhne. The novel begins with the courtship and marriage of Niels’s parents. His mother lives a sheltered, insular, small-town life. Through a love for poetry, she finds some escape from her mundane existence and develops into an inveterate dreamer. She is attracted to Niels’s father, who comes from a wealthier and more cosmopolitan family, because he has traveled to foreign lands and gained an appreciation for arts and culture. After their marriage, however, the romance of Mr. Lyhne wears off as he becomes just another practical business man. Mrs. Lyhne than shifts her lofty dreams to her son and instills in Niels the romantic visions she can no longer share with her husband. Under her influence, Niels decides to become a poet. As he grows older, however, he finds his life drifting further and further from the idealistic dreams of his youth as his manhood is shaped by a series of events that transform those dreams into lost illusions.

Naturalism often goes hand in hand with atheism, and Jacobsen was a confirmed atheist. One of the reasons I chose to read this book is because Niels Lyhne has a reputation as a pioneering work of freethought literature. Even the introduction to the English edition of 1921, by translator Hanna Astrup Larsen, calls attention to this particular aspect of the book. While there is an atheist message to this novel, however, Jacobsen sure does make you wait for it. Other than one brief conversation about midway through the text, only the final 10 percent of the novel deals explicitly with atheism and religion. It is worth waiting for, however, as this is one of the most frank and forthright depictions of nonbelief in the literature of its time. Even so, the bulk of the novel primarily concerns itself with the various love affairs one usually finds in a coming-of-age novel. Even though Jacobsen was a professional scientist—a botanist influenced by Darwin—Niels’s adherence to atheism is based more on an emotional rejection of God over the loss of loved ones rather than on any rational philosophical basis. The book’s final chapters evoke the brutally frank detachment and deterministic fatalism one finds in the writings of Zola and his disciples. The rest of the novel, however, feels more tied to the emotionalism of the Romantic era, though in a protomodern style evocative of the early novels of Hermann Hesse or Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

Given Jacobsen’s strong Darwinian inclinations, Niels Lyhne was not quite the freethought manifesto I was hoping for. It is still advanced for its time, however, and a worthwhile read for those who enjoy Scandinavian literature.
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Christopher Columbus (The Long Journey, Volume 3) by Johannes V. Jensen

The climactic conclusion of an epic saga
From 1908 to 1922, Danish author Johannes V. Jensen wrote a series of six novels collectively entitled The Long Journey. When these books were translated into English, they were published in three volumes. Christopher Columbus is the third and final volume in this epic work by Jensen, who would later go on to win the 1944 Nobel Prize in Literature. Through a Scandinavian-centric narrative that is part science, part mythology, and much poetic license, The Long Journey chronicles the evolution of man from prehistoric Europe to modern civilization. The first volume of The Long Journey, entitled Fire and Ice, and the second, The Cimbrians, were both excellent reads. This third volume, not surprisingly, devotes a fair amount of its length to Columbus’s voyage of discovery to the New World, but the novel also ventures farther afield, covering centuries of history in its sweeping scope.

Though The Cimbrians ended in ancient Rome, this novel briefly flashes back to the Iron Age, when a mythical hunter gives up his nomadic ways to settle down and build himself a home, one that doubles as a pagan temple. From there, Jensen relates the story of St. Christopher and depicts the building of a Gothic cathedral before diving into the narrative of Columbus and his journey to the Americas. Though Columbus was an Italian who sailed for Spain, Jensen sees him as embodying a union between Northern and Southern European peoples and their natures. (Given the amount of genetic mixing in prehistoric Europe, to claim that Columbus had some Scandinavian DNA would not be a stretch). Columbus is also depicted as the representative of two opposing faiths, a philosophical admixture of his Christian religion and the pagan tradition of empirical scientific exploration passed from Aristotle on down. Jensen presents Columbus as a mythic hero of great size and strength, but also a tragic hero with the flaws of a real mortal man.

Though The Long Journey is essentially an extended saga of white European migration, Jensen displays a surprising sensitivity toward Native Americans. When the whites reach the New World, Jensen makes it clear that the European voyagers are meeting their long-lost cousins who migrated through Asia to the Americas during the Ice Age. Jensen also devotes a few chapters to the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés. In contrasting the Aztecs with the Spanish conquistadors, he asserts that the latter triumphed because the Europeans were technologically superior to the Americans in the realm of warfare, but by no means were they intellectually, morally, or culturally superior. For a Dane, Jensen is surprisingly well-read in the history of the Americas and has done his research well. He even comes up with a novel interpretation of the Aztec myth of the god Quetzalcoatl, one that cleverly harkens back to events in previous volumes of The Long Journey. Readers looking for a historical novel about the expeditions of Columbus and Cortés will find this a satisfying read, but it does allude to some of the characters and events from the prior volumes, so The Long Journey is best appreciated as a three-volume whole. Jensen doesn’t stop with the 16th century either, but continues his exploration of humanity’s cultural evolution right up to modern times, with even Charles Darwin making an appearance along the way.

The Long Journey is really an impressive masterpiece of world literature that powerfully and imaginatively combines the mystical romanticism of a mythic saga with the brutally rational realism of natural science. Jensen’s fascinating work really deserves to be better known by English-language readers, for whom there is fortunately an excellent translation by A. G. Chater.
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The Cimbrians (The Long Journey, Volume 2) by Johannes V. Jensen

From Stone Age Denmark to ancient Rome
The Long Journey is a cycle of six novels by Danish author Johannes V. Jensen, winner of the 1944 Nobel Prize in Literature. Originally published in Danish from 1908 to 1922, these six books were published in a 1923 English translation as three volumes. Thus the second of these English volumes, The Cimbrians, is comprised of Jensen’s third Long Journey book, Norna Gest, and his fourth book, The Cimbrians. In The Long Journey series, Jensen creates an alternative creation myth with Scandinavia as the cradle of civilization, and he presents a modern secular mythology that charts the Darwinian development of European peoples.

The first volume, Fire and Ice, begins with prehistoric apeman’s early existence in a tropical jungle in southern Sweden and goes on to cover mankind’s survival of the Ice Age. The second volume, The Cimbrians, begins in the Stone Age. As he did with the previous protagonists of Fire and Ice, Jensen singles out a lone genius hero who leaves his homeland and strikes out on his own to accomplish advances in technology and culture. Here the hero is Gest, a Dane of the seafaring peoples of Zealand, the largest island of Denmark. In the first volume, Jensen allowed one of his heroes a brief mystical view into the future. Here he goes further down the science fiction road by introducing the unexpected element of immortality. Gest morphs into Norna Gest, the hero of a popular Danish folk legend, and becomes a sort of wandering troubadour/fisherman who travels the world, mingling incognito among the people he meets and observing humanity in all its varied forms. Through the eyes of this ageless character, Jensen shows us European man’s progress from the Stone Age through the Iron Age to the Bronze Age.

The second half of the book shifts to Jutland, the mainland peninsula of Denmark, where Norna Gest encounters the tribe known as the Cimbrians (a.k.a. the Cimbri). For a time he settles in the Cimbrian village and observes their customs, including an elaborate pagan festival to celebrate the coming of Spring and their agricultural practices through the four seasons of the year. A catastrophic rise in sea level forces the Cimbrians to flee their homeland. Migrating southwards, they clash with the Roman Republic. Here Jensen’s narrative passes from the realm of archaeology and legend to the domain of recorded history, beginning with the Battle of Noreia in 112 BC. In doing so, he chronicles a Danish diaspora that expands the narrative from a Scandinavian-centric focus to a wider European scope, which will presumably set things up for the third volume, entitled Christopher Columbus.

Because of Norna Gest’s immortal presence throughout the volume, constantly observing mankind’s progress, The Cimbrians is more descriptive in nature and less character-driven than Fire and Ice. While that first volume had a style that could be described as almost Biblical, this second volume is more firmly grounded in history, even so far as to include quotes from Plutarch and other Roman historians. Even so, the story of The Cimbrians is no less epic than the awesome events of Fire and Ice. The literary style with which Jensen crafts The Long Journey is a unique and remarkable blend of grandiloquent romanticism, scientific naturalism, and poetic prose. The translator, A. G. Chater, deserves some credit for the fact that each sentence is eminently quotable and a joy to read. So far the first two volumes of The Long Journey have proved to be a stunning literary achievement, leaving the reader to wonder why Jensen has undeservedly faded into relative obscurity compared to other Nobel laureates. Although Jensen certainly aimed The Long Journey at a Scandinavian audience, this is one saga that truly deserves a worldwide readership.
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Fire and Ice (The Long Journey, Volume 1) by Johannes V. Jensen

Darwinian epic of Scandinavian genesis
Danish author Johannes V. Jensen (1873-1950) won the 1944 Nobel Prize in Literature. His magnum opus was a series of six novels, completed from 1908 to 1922, collectively titled The Long Journey. In 1923 this work was published in English translation as a three-volume set. The first of these three volumes, Fire and Ice, is comprised, appropriately enough, of Jensen’s Book One: Fire and Book Two: Ice. As a whole, The Long Journey is a historical epic chronicling the development of European man from prehistoric times to the voyages of Christopher Columbus. Jensen creates an alternative to the biblical account of mankind’s creation and early history, one based on rationalistic scientific concepts like Darwinian evolution. His intention is not to create a narrative that is rigorously accurate either scientifically or historically, but rather to craft a sort of secular mythology stylistically akin to the Judeo-Christian Old Testament.

The narrative begins prior to the dawn of Homo Sapiens, when furry, tree-dwelling primates first opted for life on the ground. These proto-humans dwell in a European jungle where their lives center around a volcano called Gunung Api that they both fear and worship as a god. One precocious member of the herd, however, learns to tame the dreaded fire by bringing it down from the mountain and putting it to the service of man. This early hominid Prometheus, named Fyr, is rewarded for his achievement by assuming godlike status within his tribe.

Book Two: Ice jumps ahead an unspecified number of generations and focuses on one of Fyr’s descendants named Carl. The volcano has gone dormant, and the climate is becoming colder. Glaciers descend on Europe as an ice age sets in. While most of the humans migrate to the South, Carl, who has been outcast from his people for having committed a transgression, sets off to the North to live amid the ice. Like their ancestor Fyr, Carl and his descendants use their ingenuity to produce technological advancements that help mankind adapt and evolve. To tell his story, Jensen attributes millennia worth of human progress to a handful of fictional geniuses. Over the course of the story, the mythos of The Long Journey encompasses not only the taming of fire, but also the development of religion and social inequality, the origins of hunting and agriculture, the building of ships and the invention of the wheel, and the spawning of the various races of man.

In this specifically Scandinavian Genesis, the birthplace of humanity is in southern Sweden, just a short boat ride from Jensen’s native Denmark. The underlying thesis to The Long Journey is that those who fled from the ice age to tropical climes became indolent and weak while those who stayed in the North to contend with the cold became heartier, stronger, and smarter. There is some potential for racism here, obviously, but Fire and Ice comes across as more of an expression of intense nationalistic pride. Jensen’s Nordic bias is not any more offensive than the many religions in the world that consider their followers to be “the chosen people.” The difference, of course, is that this is a secular creation story, and what makes it great literature is how Jensen expertly mixes naturalistic scientific theory with romantic grandeur of mythic proportions.

Given the subject matter, it is not surprising that The Long Journey is little known outside of Scandinavia, but Jensen’s writing is powerful, and this fascinating book merits a wider audience. Jensen won his Nobel for a reason, and judging from this excellent novel, he deserved it. I am very much looking forward to the next two volumes of The Long Journey.

Poland: A Study of the Land, People, and Literature by Georg Brandes

Life and art under foreign occupation

Georg Brandes

Georg Brandes was a Danish literary critic who influenced European literature’s transition from romanticism to realism. He was a big deal in the world of letters a century ago, when a literary critic could still be a big deal. His writings demonstrate his encyclopedic knowledge of literature from throughout Europe, and he had a particular interest in Polish literature when everyone else was paying attention to Germany, France, and England. Brandes’s 1903 book Poland: A Study of the Land, People, and Literature is part travelogue, part investigative journalism, part political commentary, and part literary critique.

In the first two-thirds of the book, Brandes writes the impressions he formed of Poland from four journeys he made to the country from 1885 to 1894. At this time Poland as a nation did not exist, for it had been conquered and divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Brandes’s first two visits were to Warsaw, in Russian-occupied Poland, and his third to a country manor house nearby. In these travel narratives Brandes vividly describes the lives of Poles under the rule of the Russians, who made every attempt to obliterate Polish culture, including prosecuting anyone who spoke the Polish language and exiling thousands to Siberia. As a literary man and journalist, Brandes pays special attention to censorship and the absurd lengths to which the Russian bureaucrats would go to stifle any inkling of nationalistic expression on the part of the Poles. Clearly sympathetic to the cause of Polish independence, Brandes praises the indomitable spirit of the Poles but frankly and insightfully points out how this systematic oppression has nevertheless affected the mindset of the Polish people and their national literature. More than just a geographical treatise, the book is an in-depth character study of the spirit of a nationless people. In the fourth and briefest trip described in the book, Brandes travels through Austrian Poland (a.k.a. Galicia), stopping briefly in Krakow before spending some time in Lemberg (today Lviv, in the Ukraine), where he is hailed as a visiting dignitary. By including this contrasting vignette, Brandes makes it clear that Austrian rule was far less oppressive than that of the Russians.

After 200 pages on Poland’s political climate, Brandes devotes the final third of the book to a study of Polish literature. This section was somewhat disappointing because Brandes only covers a handful of authors in detail. Mostly he discusses romantic poets of the early 19th century, with an intense focus on Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Slowacki, and Zygmunt Krasiński. Today’s readers tend to view novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz as a paragon of romanticism, but Brandes only mentions him briefly as an overrated upstart and an author of “light literature.” Though I have read Mickiewicz’s epic poem Pan Tadeusz, I was unfamiliar with the other works referenced, and I suspect most English-language readers are in the same boat as me. Still, some of the biographical information on these writers is very interesting, and Brandes provides a great deal of insight into how Poland’s history of foreign occupation has influenced its literature. Frankly, at times the literature section gets rather boring, but I won’t fault Brandes for providing a thorough examination of romantic poetry simply because the subject doesn’t particularly interest me.

Brandes’s book is a valuable document of Polish life at the dawn of the 20th century. Anyone interested in Polish history and culture—even if you’re not keen on romantic poetry—will find much to discover and appreciate in this frank and thoughtful work of literary travel journalism.
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The Golden Horn by Poul Anderson

Byzantine “Immigrant Song”
Poul Anderson is best known as an author of science fiction and fantasy novels. In 1998 he was named a Grand Master of Science Fiction by the Science Fiction Writers of America, probably the most prestigious lifetime achievement award in that field. He also, however, wrote historical novels, and if his 1980 book The Golden Horn is any indication, darn good ones. (Wikipedia says he cowrote this novel with his wife Karen Anderson, but the recently published ebook edition from Open Road Media does not bear her name anywhere.) The Golden Horn is the first book in Anderson’s The Last Viking trilogy, a three-part fictionalized biography of Norwegian King Harald Sigurdharsson, also known as Harald Hadrada, who lived from around 1015 to 1066.

Harald is the nephew of King Olaf the Stout, who reigns over Norway during the novel’s opening scenes. When Olaf dies in battle, Harald is not first in the line of succession (Olaf had a son), but he nevertheless sees himself as a contender for the throne. Before he can make a play for the crown, however, he must first acquire wealth, soldiers, and military acumen. To accomplish this, he spends several years fighting as a mercenary, first for a Russian prince and then for the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium. The title of the book refers to the body of water in Constantinople known as the Golden Horn, which feeds into the Bosphorus. Harald fights nobly for the Empire, crushing infidels in the name of Christianity, and rises in rank until he reluctantly attains a place in the emperor and empress’s inner circle. While his military success brings him great wealth, it also proves to be a trap, as Byzantine court intrigue threatens to derail his plans to return to Norway and reclaim what he feels is his rightful place as king.

Though there’s a lot of Game of Thrones-style political maneuvering in this novel, despite Anderson’s fantasy background you won’t find any supernatural occurrences here, which is as it should be. Anderson sticks very close to the historical script and displays a hardcore devotion to the facts, perhaps too hardcore for some readers. While I admire the relentless authenticity with which Anderson tells this tale, at times it feels like a full-immersion session in Viking language day camp. The text is so loaded with Norse words and 11th-century proper nouns it is often more difficult to get through than science fiction and fantasy books that invent their own languages. Dune at least has a glossary; The Golden Horn could use one. Instead, the reader is expected to be familiar with words like jarl, carle, byrnie, wadmal, liefer, rede, or thing (in this case, an assembly or meeting). The genealogy of the royal Yngling family is confusing (though Anderson thankfully provides a chart), as is the revolving-door cast of Byzantine emperors. Anderson really makes the reader feel present in that time and place, but the disorienting level of detail does at times hinder one’s appreciation of the narrative. On the plus side, the battle scenes are exquisitely rendered, the characters are well-drawn, and Harald’s mission is compelling. On the other hand, the book does have its slow periods, and Harald’s impatience to return to Norway is contagious.

Sometimes a trilogy means three separate connected novels, and sometimes a trilogy means one epic work split into three sections. Given the biographical nature of this series, The Last Viking is obviously the latter. The Golden Horn reaches an adequate stopping point but doesn’t really feel like a complete novel in itself. Anyone with an avid interest in Viking lore will be happy to tackle all three books, but the casual history buff might find that too daunting a task.
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Emanuel, or Children of the Soil by Henrik Pontoppidan

Danish social realism
Danish author Henrik Pontoppidan won the 1917 Nobel Prize in Literature. English-language readers are unlikely to have heard of him, however, because very few of his works have been published in English translation. Emanuel, or Children of the Soil, was originally published in 1891 under the Danish title of Muld (Soil), and it is the first book in a trilogy known as Det Forjaettede Land (The Promised Land). The English edition was published in London in 1896. Perhaps this first volume didn’t sell well enough to justify publishing the remaining two volumes of the trilogy, or maybe this book was deliberately singled out for translation because, from what I can tell from a little research, it is the happiest portion of the trilogy and therefore most likely to appeal to a broad audience.

Emanuel, or Children of the Soil, is a naturalistic novel that depicts a period of class conflict in Danish history. In the late 19th century, the proliferation of liberal and democratic ideals among the peasantry began to undermine the authority of the conservative aristocracy and the Church. This story takes place in two adjacent villages of a seaside parish in rural Denmark. The town of Veilby is where the wealthier landowners reside, while Skibberup, a fishing village along the fjord, is populated by a lower class of peasants. Governing over the religious interests of this domain is Provst Tönnesen, a conservative clergyman of the old school who believes the rabble out to know their place. His condescending attitude incites dissent among the Skibberup masses.

Into this insular conflict comes Emanuel Hansted, a newly ordained priest assuming his first clerical appointment as the Provst’s subordinate. He lives under the Provst’s roof and assists him in the spiritual duties of the parish. Unlike the Provst, Emanuel is sympathetic to the peasantry and bears a romantic conception of the farming life as a truer, more honest way of living in communion with nature. At first Emanuel is reviled by the residents of Skibberup for his association with the Provst. Over time, however, he begins to win them over with his sincerity and good intentions. This only draws the ire of his superior, however, and Emanuel soon finds that contradicting the Provst may prove threatening to his clerical career.

Pontoppidan’s novel provides a vivid slice of Danish rural life. The villages and their inhabitants are rendered lucidly real by his descriptive prose. Like any story in a pastoral setting, it can get picturesque at times, but there are glimpses of a darker, grittier side to country life that grounds the narrative in a sense of authenticity. Likewise, the accompanying love story gets a bit too cute from time to time, but Emanuel’s social awkwardness and the rituals of 19th-century courtship bear a ring of truth. The class struggle and conflicting ideologies, as played out in this Scandinavian microcosm, are really quite interesting, and take the story to a higher philosophical level than a typical peasant romance. The story not only engages the reader but also provides an introductory education in the social history of Denmark.

It’s a shame that so few of Pontoppidan’s writings have been translated into English, because if this book is an accurate indication of his body of work, he appears to be a writer of rare quality and a deserving recipient of his Nobel laurels. Emanuel is an admirable work of early 20th-century world literature worth seeking out.
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Stories by Foreign Authors

A series overview

In 1898, the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons put out a ten-volume series entitled Stories by Foreign Authors. Each book in the series is a collection of four to six works of European short fiction in English translation, focusing on a different country or region. The breakdown of the ten volumes is as follows. All ten books have been reviewed individually at Old Books by Dead Guys. Click on the links below to read the full reviews.

1. Stories by Foreign Authors: French I
2. Stories by Foreign Authors: French II
3. Stories by Foreign Authors: French III
4. Stories by Foreign Authors: German I
5. Stories by Foreign Authors: German II
6. Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish
7. Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian
8. Stories by Foreign Authors: Scandinavian
9. Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian
10. Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish, Greek, Belgian, Hungarian

Altogether the ten volumes contain 51 stories by 48 authors, providing a broad and varied overview of European literature in the 19th century. The selections are a pleasant mix of household names (e.g. Zola, Balzac, Tolstoy), Nobel laureates (Bjørnson, France, Heyse, Maeterlinck, Sienkiewicz), lesser-known luminaries, and a few writers who have since faded into obscurity. The best books in the series are the French and Scandinavian volumes. The worst volume, by far, is the Russian volume. Though it features four literary superstars, the editors may well have chosen the most boring stories from each. Despite this one disappointment, the other nine volumes each have their own hidden treasures. If you are interested in classic literature—Romanticism, Naturalism, early Realism—this series is a great way to sample and discover new authors you may not have encountered before.

These books are in the public domain and can be read online and downloaded for free at various sources. For some unexplained reason, Project Gutenberg and Amazon do not have the three French volumes, though they do have the other seven. Wikisource has several volumes, including the French:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Stories_by_Foreign_Authors

If you’re intimidated by the thought of reading ten volumes, you don’t have to, because Old Books by Dead Guys has already done it for you! Below is a list of the ten best stories in the series. These are the ones you just can’t miss.

“Christian Gellert’s Last Christmas” by Berthold Auerbach
from Stories by Foreign Authors: German II
When a peasant is touched by a passage of verse, he makes a pilgrimage to a local university to thank the author in person.

“The Massacre of the Innocents” by Maurice Maeterlinck (Belgian)
from Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish, Greek, Belgian, Hungarian
After a farmer is robbed and his wife and daughters killed, the enraged inhabitants of a Belgian village attack the Spanish soldiers responsible for the act.

“San Pantaleone” by Gabriele D’Annunzio
from Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian
When the sky inexplicably turns blood red, a mob of fanatically religious folk seek solace in their priest, their relics, and their superstitions.

“The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant
from Stories by Foreign Authors: French I
A poor woman longs for the luxury and status of a high-class life. When her husband is invited to a ball by his employers, she sees the chance to live her dream, if but for one night.

“Laurette or the Red Seal” by Alfred de Vigny
from Stories by Foreign Authors: French III
An old soldier recalls a story from his naval days when he captained a ship transporting prisoners to the penal colony of Cayenne, Guiana.

“When Father Brought Home the Lamp” by Juhani Aho (Finnish)
from Stories by Foreign Authors: Scandinavian
When a poor family becomes the first in their town to purchase an oil lamp, it becomes an immediate status symbol, elevating them in the eyes of their neighbors.

“The Philosopher’s Pendulum” by Rudolph Lindau
from Stories by Foreign Authors: German I
After having lived a life of disappointment and heartbreak, a man adopts a personal philosophy by which he expects nothing and therefore feels nothing.

“The Substitute” by François Coppée

from Stories by Foreign Authors: French II

A petty criminal, raised in reform schools and prisons, decides to turn his life around, gets a real job, and forms a close bond with a new friend.

“Moors and Christians” by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
from Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish
The owner of a historic estate finds an old parchment on his property. He suspects it to be a treasure map, but, unable to read Arabic, he must first have it translated.

“The Railroad and the Churchyard” by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (Norwegian)
from Stories by Foreign Authors: Scandinavian
Two close friends suddenly find themselves at odds in a power struggle over local politics. Matters reach a boiling point with the proposal of a new railroad through town.

I have recently learned that this series was a follow up to two previous series published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, Stories by American Authors and Stories by English Authors. Together they add up to twenty more volumes of 19th-century literature, all available for free download from Amazon or Project Gutenberg. Look for them in upcoming posts at Old Books by Dead Guys.