National Renaissance and Nordic Resonance: Language History and Poetic Diction in Nineteenth-Century Sweden

In nineteenth-century Sweden, the concept of the “voice of the past” was both literal and figurative. As in most other European countries, the turn of the century brought a national reawakening, as the cosmopolitan Enlightenment culture of the preceding Gustavian Age was devalued and the true roots of the national culture were sought, primarily in its Old Norse and medieval heritage. In the journal of the Gothic Union, a community of artists and intellectuals promoting interest in the Nordic past, the poet and historian Erik Gustaf Geijer wrote: “De lefvande minnena fästas i skrift, och Nationen beskådar tydligare sig sjelf i häfdernas spegel. […] Den ser sin dunkla början där Sagan står och väfver dess ätteledning från Guda-slägter; den hör från vidt aflägsen forntid ett språk talas, hvars ljud den ännu igenkänner” (5; emphasis mine).¹ The auditory metaphor seems to work on two levels: Old Norse was, literally, a familiar sound for the Swedes; at the same time, however, it means something less trivial, the “voice” in question being the testimony to a way of life and a mentality that supposedly unites the speakers of the original language with their modern-day descendants. Pronouncements such as these point to a particular idea of cultural resonance, according to which the sounds of the national language are connected to the essence of the national culture, and the memory of its past can be made to resound in modern creations. I will trace this idea in nineteenth-century Sweden, from its beginnings as a general trope in romanticism, through the effects of new scholarship on language history, to a philologically informed poetic style.

“The Language of Glory and Heroes”

This idea of cultural resonance is connected to “nationalism,” “romanticism,” and “historicism.” These aspects, simultaneously vague and particular, can be integrated and given a more functional description if we turn to Alexander Beecroft’s idea of the national literary ecology (195–241). What Beecroft terms ecologies are systems that allow literature to be produced and consumed, although they are different from systems modeled on economics in their more plural morphologies. The national literary ecology is not just a market in which literature can circulate, but also a particular way of structuring literary space and time. As a system, the national literary ecology treats the nation-state and its language as the primary unit of literature, in opposition to the premodern situation in which vernacular expression coexisted with cosmopolitan languages and literatures. In the case of Sweden, this means a clear difference from the preceding phase in which Latin and French were viable media of literary production. The national ecology not only redraws the map of literature along the borders of nations, but also reframes their past by the writing of literary history. As Beecroft points out, this device, “that at once legitimates a literature and the nation it embodies” (198), is an invention that is unique to the national ecology. One can thus speak of a synchronic and a diachronic aspect to this new literary system. It produces a particular feeling for linguistic and cultural difference in the present, while charging this difference with the knowledge of the past.

The best guide to the synchronic aspect of the Swedish national literary ecology is the poem “Språken” (“The Languages,” 1817) by Esaias Tegnér, one of the leaders of the Gothicist movement and a dominant figure in Swedish poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This seemingly playful poem consists of an inventory of the main literary languages of Europe, which are characterized and evaluated by the poet. What is interesting about the poem is how it conflates linguistic properties and national traits in a form of synesthesia, a technique demonstrated in how he characterizes Latin:

Ren är din stämma och skarp som rasslet af härdade klingor,hårdt, som eröfraren höfs, ljuder ditt herrskareord.Stolt, oböjlig och arm; men ur grafven behärskar du ännuhalfva Europa...