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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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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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.
