Esaias Tegnér

• 1. Introduction

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  Esaias Tegnér spent his final twenty-two years as Bishop of Växjö, a position he accepted not from faith but from financial necessity and a desperate wish to leave Lund. That tension between the man he was and the role he was made to play runs through almost everything worth knowing about him. Here was a writer who was called Sweden's first modern man, who celebrated Napoleon's return from Elba in verse, who attacked the Holy Alliance by name, and who privately described the reactionaries of Europe as having a couple of million bayonets at their disposal. He was also a man who fell passionately in love with someone he could not have, and who in his final years lost his mind entirely. How does a peasant's grandson become the father of modern poetry in Sweden? What made a single epic poem famous throughout Europe before it was even finished? And what does it mean that the man Sweden held up as a national poet had, by his own account, little interest in formal religious matters?

• 2. From Tegnaby to Lund

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  Tegnér's father was born Esaias Lucasson but took the surname Tegnérus from Tegnaby, a village in the province of Småland where he had been born. The poet, his fifth son, later shortened the name to Tegnér. Both sides of the family were peasants. His father was a pastor, and when he died in 1792, the boy who would become Sweden's most celebrated poet was left to continue his education in the country.

  In 1799 Tegnér arrived at Lund University, the institution that would define the first half of his adult life. He graduated in philosophy in 1802 and remained as a tutor for nearly a decade. In 1806 he married Anna Maria Gustava Myhrman, a woman to whom he had been attached since his earliest youth. By 1810 he had been elected Greek lecturer, and in 1812 he was named professor. The timeline is one of steady, unhurried advancement. Tegnér himself acknowledged that he was comparatively slow in development, and the record bears him out. His first great success came not from scholarship but from a dithyrambic war-song written for the army of 1808.

• 3. The Gothic League and Political Fire

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  In 1811, Tegnér's patriotic poem Svea won the great prize of the Swedish Academy and made him famous across Sweden. That same year, a club called the Gothic League, or Götiska förbundet, was founded in Stockholm. Its membership was young, patriotic, and literary; Tegnér quickly became its chief figure. The league published a magazine called Iduna, which printed poetry and argued for the serious study of Icelandic literature and old Norse history. Tegnér, alongside Geijer, Afzelius, and Nicander, became one of its most celebrated names.

  Nationalism and liberalism ran together in this period, and Tegnér's politics were unmistakable. As early as 1808 he had written Fördragsamhet, later rewritten as Fridsröster. In Hjelten, published in 1813 in the context of the French Revolution, he announced that what is decayed shall be toppled, and the healthy new shall grow out of destruction. In Den vaknade Örnen from 1815, he celebrated Napoleon's return from Elba. A year later, in Nyåret 1816, he poured scorn on Metternich and the Holy Alliance.

  In a celebrated address from 1817, Tegnér praised the Protestant Reformation as a breakthrough for human liberty. In Epilog vid magister-promotionen from 1820, he attacked literary reactionaries directly. By 1824 his position was unambiguous. He wrote that reactionaries held a couple of million bayonets at their disposal in Europe, and that anyone who could wield a pen ought to take up the cause of the liberals, which was, above all, the cause of light and humanity. In 1819 he had also taken seat 8 at the distinguished Swedish Academy.

• 4. Frithjof's Saga and European Fame

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  In 1820 Tegnér published the first fragments of an epic he was building in the pages of Iduna. He published five more cantos in 1822. The complete poem appeared in 1825. Before its final canto even arrived, Frithjof's saga was already famous throughout Europe.

  The aged Goethe took up his pen to commend the work to his countrymen, calling it an alte, kräftige, gigantischbarbarische Dichtart, meaning something like an ancient, vigorous, barbarically gigantic form of poetry. He wished Amalie von Imhoff to translate it into German. The poem was a romantic paraphrase of an ancient Norse saga, composed in twenty-four cantos, each one different in its verse form. Tegnér modeled it partly on Helge, an earlier Danish epic by Oehlenschläger.

  The reach of the work was extraordinary. It is said to have been translated twenty-two times into English and twenty times into German, and at least once into every European language. Tegnér's treatment was not strictly faithful to the antiquarian record of Norse life, but critics allowed that it gave the freshest imaginative impression of early Scandinavian existence then available. A section of the poem later supplied the basis for Max Bruch's 1864 cantata Frithjof. The romance of Axel from 1822 and the idyll Nattvardsbarnen from 1820, which was translated by the American poet Longfellow, both belong to the same productive Lund years, though they stand in the shadow of the saga.

• 5. Euphrosyne and the Turn Inward

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  The year 1825 was the pivot of Tegnér's life. The publication of Frithjof's saga made him one of the most celebrated poets in Europe and drove him from his study in Lund to the bishop's palace in Växjö. His health, which had been excellent, broke down for the first time. Something else happened too: a moral crisis whose full dimensions, despite much writing on the subject, remain only partially known.

  At the time, Tegnér was passionately in love with Euphrosyne Palm, the wife of a town councillor in Lund. The relationship was impossible, and the passion, though it inspired some of his finest poetry, corroded him. From this point forward, his writing returned again and again to the heartlessness of women as one of its central themes. The private man and the public triumph were moving in opposite directions at the same moment.

• 6. The Bishop and the Breakdown

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  Tegnér accepted the bishop's crosier for reasons he was candid about. It was a great honour; he was poor; and he wanted to leave Lund. A remarkable sign of the condition of Sweden at the time, as those around him observed, was that a man without a Christian heritage and with little interest in formal religious matters could be offered and accept such a position. No sooner had he begun to study for his new duties than he regretted the step. It was too late to reverse. He served as a respectable bishop for as long as his health permitted.

  In 1835 he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. But he was growing moody and melancholy. As early as 1833 he was describing fiery heats in his brain. In 1840, during a visit to Stockholm, he suddenly became insane. He was sent to an asylum in Schleswig. Early in 1841 he was cured and returned to Växjö. During his convalescence in Schleswig he composed Kronbruden, one of two major epic poems he began in his later years but left unfinished; the other was Gerda. In 1843 he suffered a stroke of apoplexy, and on the 2nd of November 1846 he died in Växjö.

• 7. The Tegnér Museum

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  The house where Tegnér lived with his family from 1813 to 1826 stands in the center of Lund. It is now Tegnérmuseet, a museum devoted entirely to his life and work. Visitors are still shown it as the Tegnér museum. Since 1997 it has operated as part of the foundation Kulturen, which also runs Lund's open-air museum. The building holds the years of Frithjof's saga's composition, the Gothic League, the political poems, and the private heartbreak; the Song to the Sun, which Tegnér completed in 1817, was written in the same rooms.