Esaias Tegnér
Esaias Tegnér was a Swedish writer, professor of Greek, and bishop. During the 19th century, he was regarded as the father of modern poetry in Sweden, mainly through the national romantic epic Frithjof's Saga. He has been called Sweden's first modern man. Much is known about him, and he also wrote openly about himself.
Early life
His father was a pastor, and his grandparents on both sides were peasants. His father, whose name had been Esaias Lucasson, took the surname of Tegnérus—altered by his fifth son, the poet, to Tegnér—from the village of Tegnaby in the province of Småland, where he was born. In 1792 Tegnérus died.In 1799 Esaias Tegnér, hitherto educated in the country, entered Lund University, where he graduated in philosophy in 1802, and continued as tutor until 1810, when he was elected Greek lecturer. In 1806 he married Anna Maria Gustava Myhrman, to whom he had been attached since his earliest youth. In 1812 he was named professor, and continued to work as a lecturer in Lund until 1824, when he was made Bishop of Växjö. He remained in Växjö until his death, twenty-two years later.
He was comparatively slow in development. His first great success was a dithyrambic war-song for the army of 1808. In 1811 his patriotic poem Svea won the great prize of the Swedish Academy, and made him famous. In the same year was founded in Stockholm the Gothic League, a sort of club of young and patriotic men of letters, of whom Tegnér quickly became the chief. The club published a magazine, entitled Iduna, in which it printed a great deal of excellent poetry, and ventilated its views, particularly as regards the study of Icelandic literature and old Norse history. Tegnér, Geijer, Afzelius, and Nicander became the most famous members of the Gothic League.
Nationalism at the time went hand in hand with liberalism, and Tegnér during his most productive period also expressed his opinions on politics, which were evident as early as 1808 in poems such as Fördragsamhet, which was later rewritten and published as Fridsröster. In Hjelten, he announces in the context of the French Revolution: "What is decayed shall be toppled / and the healthy new shall grow / out of destruction." In Den vaknade Örnen he celebrates the return of Napoleon from Elba. In Nyåret 1816 he pours scorn on the reactionary politics of Metternich and the Holy Alliance. In a famous address given by Tegnér in 1817, he celebrates the Protestant Reformation as a breakthrough for human liberty and progress and praises the national liberation movements of his day. In Epilog vid magister-promotionen, Tegnér also attacks reactionaries in the realm of literature. And in 1824 Tegnér writes: "We should not forget that the have a couple of million bayonets at their disposal in Europe and thus, for the moment at least, are the strongest. It is not too much if each one who can wield a pen undertakes the cause of the liberals, which is nevertheless, above all, that of light and humanity."
Lund poems
The majority of the many poems from Tegnér in Lund are short, but some are in lyrics. They are still shown to visitors as the Tegnér museum. His celebrated Song to the Sun dates from 1817. He completed three poems of a more ambitious character, on which his fame chiefly rests. Of these, the romance of Axel and the delicately chiselled idyl of Nattvardsbarnen, translated by Longfellow, take a secondary place in comparison with Tegnér's masterpiece of worldwide fame. In 1819 he also became a member of the distinguished Swedish Academy, on seat 8.Claim to recognition
In 1820 he published in Iduna fragments of an epic on which he was working: Frithjof's saga. In 1822 he published five more cantos, and in 1825 the entire poem. Already before its last canto it was famous throughout Europe; the aged Goethe took up his pen to commend to his countrymen this alte, kräftige, gigantischbarbarische Dichtart and desired Amalie von Imhoff to translate it into German. This romantic paraphrase of an ancient saga was composed in twenty-four cantos, all differing in verse form, modeled somewhat, on an earlier Danish masterpiece, Helge of Oehlenschläger.Frithjof's saga was during the 19th century the best known of all Swedish productions. It is said to have been translated twenty-two times into English, twenty times into German, and once at least into every European language. It is far from satisfying the demands of more recent antiquarian research, but it still is allowed to give the freshest existing impression, in imaginative form, of life in early Scandinavia. A section of the work was later used by Max Bruch as the basis for his 1864 cantata Frithjof.