(1782-1848)
Among the men nearest to the heart of the Danish people is Steen
Steensen Blicher, who was born in 1782 on the border of the Jutland
heath with which his name is so inseparably linked. The descendant of a
line of country parsons, he was destined like them to the ministry, and
while awaiting his appointment he supported his family by teaching and
by farming.
When after years of hardship he finally obtained a parish on the Jutland
heath, the salary was too small to support his large family. It was only
during the very last years of his life that he was freed from harassing
cares by the generosity of three friends, who, grateful for his literary
work, paid off his debts.
While he was in college at Copenhagen he heard the lectures of the
Norwegian Henrik Steffens, an interpreter of the German philosophic and
romantic school. Steffens aroused a reaction against the formalism of
the eighteenth century, and introduced romanticism into the North by his
powerful influence over men like Oehlenschläger, Grundtvig, and Mynster
in Denmark, and Ling and the "Phosphorists" in Sweden. Through these
lectures Blicher became much interested in the Ossianic poems, of which
he made an. Excellent Danish translation.
The poems and dramas with which he followed this work were of no great
importance. It was not until he began to look into the old Danish
traditions that he found his true sphere. The study of these quaint and
simple legends led him to write those national peasant stories which he
began to publish in 1826. They are not only the best of their kind in
Danish, but they bear favorable comparison with the same kind of work in
other literatures. They are not written as a study of social problems,
or of any philosophy of life or moods of nature as they are reflected in
human existence; they are merely a reproduction of what the country
parson's own eyes beheld--the comedy and tragedy of the commonplace.
What a less sensitive observer might have passed in silence--the brown
heath, the breakers of the North Sea, the simple heart and life of the
peasant--revealed to him the poesy, now merry, now sad, which he renders
with so much art and so delicate a sympathy. Behind the believer in
romanticism stands the lover of nature and of humanity.
Among his works the best known are 'E Bindstouw' (The Knitting-room), a
collection of stories and poems, full of humor, simple and naive, told
by the peasants themselves in their own homely Jutland dialect. These,
as well as some of his later poems, especially 'Sneklokken' (The
Snowbell), and 'Trækfuglene' (Birds of Passage), possess a clear, true,
and national lyric quality.
Dying in 1848, Blicher was buried in Jutland, near the heath on which he
spent whole days and nights of happy solitude. On one side of the stone
above his grave is engraved a golden plover, on the other a pair of
heath-larks, and around the foot a garland of heather, in memory of that
intimate life with nature which, through his own great love for it, he
endeared to all his readers.
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