The ancestors of Esaias Tegnér, both on his father's and on his
mother's side, were Swedish peasants. As in so many other instances
of the prominent talent of the north, his descent may be traced from
the peasant class through the ranks of the priesthood. This generally
comes to pass in the following way: the grandfather plows his fields
with his own hand, the son displays a thirst for knowledge, and through
many sacrifices on the part of his parents, and the support of kindly
disposed people, progresses far enough in his studies to enter on
a theological course; for during many centuries the priest was the
absolute representative among the peasants of the learned class. In
this son, the vigorous, untutored peasant-nature becomes subjected to
its first rude polish; the preacher no longer plows his own fields,
although he may supervise their cultivation; the preacher begins to
think, although the final result of his studies is not the consequence
of his thought. In the grandson, or great grandson, the original
fundamental nature finally becomes so refined, that it produces
scientific, technical, or poetic talent. Thus it was in the case before
us. The father of Tegnér was a priest, the mother a priest's daughter,
and these clerical progenitors were the children of peasants. The
aristocratic sounding name was formed when the father, Esaias Lucasson,
from the little village Tegna (Tegnaby), was entered in the Latin
register of the gymnasium as Esaias Tegnerus.
The parsonage was early blessed with sons and daughters, and at
Kyrkerud, on the 13th of November, 1782, was born the fifth son of the
house, the eventually so celebrated Esaias. He was only nine years old
when the home was broken up by the death of his father. The latter
left his family without means of support, and his widow, whose heart
was filled with anxiety for the future of her six fatherless children,
joyfully seized the opportunity offered her to place her youngest son
as clerk with a highly esteemed state official living in the vicinity.
In the office of Assessor Bran ting, through tasks in penmanship and
keeping accounts, the boy acquired habits of industry which lasted
through life; and of even greater value to the little clerk was the
opportunity afforded him, at the early age when all impressions are
the most profound, of making the acquaintance, from the travelling
carriage, of the picturesque, natural beauties of the home region,
during the extensive trips he was permitted to share with his worthy
chief, whose duties as assessor compelled him to traverse every portion
of Wermland. Although active and industrious when at work, young Esaias
was inclined to be forgetful and absent-minded at times, to become
wholly absorbed in his book, or waking dreams, and he would often be
found wandering along some solitary road soliloquizing in a low tone.
He read poetry, works of history, above all else northern sagas; and in
a collection of the latter, Björner's "Kämpadater," he discovered "The
Saga of Fridthjof the Bold," which lingered twenty-five years in his
fancy before it began to germinate.
These two impressions, that of Sweden's nature and of the old Norse
myths and sagas, were inseparable; they mingled together, gliding
softly one into the other in the young soul. Often, when perched on the
back seat of Branting's carriage, the future poet was driven between
forest-decked mountains, through deep ravines, along the banks of those
mighty waters that stream through the land, it seemed to him as though
Nature were vieing with him in freaks of fancy. Romantic indeed were
the landscapes presented to his view in the long summer days, when
twilight and dawn flowed gently together, and the roseate glow never
vanished from the horizon, while an old northern landscape charmed
him in winter, when the snow was piled in high banks, when the brooks
hung in long icicles from the rocks, and the youth felt as though he
actually saw, in the moonlight playing on the snow, winter personified,
in the colossal form of a god, with a snow-storm in his beard, and a
wreath of fir upon his head.
"Swedish poetry;" says Tegnér somewhere, "is, and ever will be, a
poetry of nature in the strictest sense of the word; for it centres in
our glorious natural scenery, in our lakes, rocks, and waterfalls;"
and when, shortly after the completion of "Fridthjof," he wishes to
explain the origin of the poem, he himself mentions, in addition to
his early, familiar acquaintance with the old Norse sagas, the fact
that he was born and brought up in a remote mountain parish, "where
Nature herself makes poetry in weird and gigantic forms, and where the
ancient gods still wander about in the flesh, of winter nights." "In
such surroundings," he continues, "left wholly to myself, it was not
singular that I acquired a certain predilection for the untamed and the
colossal that has never left me."
And not only the contents, but also the fundamental form of his own
as well as of all other Swedish poetry, Tegnér, in his riper years,
strove to trace to impressions of the peculiar nature of Sweden. He is
astonished at the exclusive preference of his people for the lyric, at
the tendency of this people to crowd the entire world of poetry into a
few strophes, and he inquires into the reason of this characteristic.
"Does it not lie for the most part in the nature itself which surrounds
us? Are not the mountains, with their valleys and torrents, the lyric
of Nature, while the gentler plains, with their calm rivers, are
Nature's epos? Many of our mountain regions are true dithyrambs of
nature, and man delights in making poetry in the same key as that
of the nature about him." And then boldly endeavoring to draw the
utmost inference of his thought, he bursts into the query, "Does not
a lyric vein permeate all Swedish poetry? Are not the most prominent
representatives of our national traits in ancient as well as in modern
times, rather lyric than epic characters?" He was evidently thinking
of such minds as Sweden's greatest kings and greatest generals, and
perhaps not least of all of himself.
It is an undoubted fact that the nature about him attracted him, as
a poet, far more through its phantastic than through its utilitarian
element. I say designedly "as a poet," for as a man he cherished a
healthy, practical interest in the means of subsistence and sources of
industry of his people. He has, however, never depicted this people in
its struggles with material nature. There cannot be found in his works
a single scene representing the great mining operations through which
Swedish iron is brought to the light of day; he has never presented a
picture of the hardy miner or the sturdy smith; never vouchsafed a view
of the blazing, steaming, glowing furnace in the midst of the snow.
These realistic impressions rebounded from his romantic fancy, inclined
as it was to view everything in the abstract, to symbolize. Sweden did
not present herself to his mind's eye as the workshop of the nation;
his Svea was a shield-bearing maiden, and her dower of iron was in his
eyes less the source of the natural wealth of the land than the broad
girdle about her waist and the once so mighty sword within her hand.