Short answers, pulled from the story.
Viktor Rydberg (1828-1895) was a Swedish novelist, poet, religious critic, and mythology scholar who was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1877. He has been described as "Sweden's last Romantic" and was "generally regarded in the first rank of Swedish novelists" by 1859. Today his grave is a national monument, and a group of charter high schools in Stockholm bears his name.
Singoalla (1858) is a story set in the Middle Ages about the tragic love between a knight named Erland and a gypsy girl, permeated with what contemporaries called a poetic nature-mysticism. Rydberg revised it throughout his life; the fourth and final edition, published in 1894, ends with Erland dying as a hermit monk. The story has been adapted into a film twice, and a popular Swedish cookie brand takes its name from the book's main character.
Bibelns lära om Kristus (The Bible's Doctrine concerning Christ, 1862) denied the divinity of Christ using the New Testament itself as evidence, and introduced modern Biblical criticism to Scandinavia. August Strindberg later acknowledged its "liberating influence" on his generation, placing it alongside the works of David Friedrich Strauss and Ernst Renan. The book is generally credited with keeping Rydberg excluded from the Swedish Academy until 1877.
Between 1886 and 1889, Rydberg published two volumes of Undersökningar i germanisk mythologi (Investigations into Germanic Mythology), arguing that Germanic myths formed a chronological epic rooted in Proto-Indo-European tradition. He had earlier won a scholarly debate against Norwegian scholar Sophus Bugge over the origins of the Poetic Edda poem Völuspá, publishing his response in Nordisk Tidskrift in 1881. Henrik Schück called him the "last, and poetically most gifted, of the mythological school founded by Jacob Grimm."
Rydberg served in the Swedish Parliament from 1870 to 1872 as a supporter of the Lantmanna Party. He gave the keynote speech in the debate to enact a law granting all non-Lutherans full civil rights, and his writings on the labor question were later described as part of the "treasury of this class." He also campaigned for Swedish language reform, coining words such as gudasaga to replace foreign borrowings.
Rydberg never spoke openly about his private life. Scholars have debated the question since the late 1920s: Svanberg (1928) and Stolpe (1978) argued he was homosexual, Judith Moffett (2001) concluded he was homosexual but celibate, and Bäckmann (2004) disputed all such readings, finding "no textual evidence" to support them. As Moffett wrote, "our best guess would still be guesswork."