Viktor Rydberg

• 1. Sweden's Last Romantic

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  Viktor Rydberg died at sixty-six on the 21st of September 1895, and Sweden declared a national day of mourning. The New York Times published his obituary. Its title read: "Death of Prof. A.V. Rydberg, Career and Remarkable works of one of Sweden's Leading Men." His grave is now a national monument, and three charter high schools and one middle school in Stockholm carry his name.

  He began life as the son of a soldier-turned-prison-guard, shuffled between foster homes after his mother died in a cholera epidemic of 1834. A single book he published in 1862 kept him barred from Sweden's highest literary institution for fifteen years. His novel Singoalla gave its name to a cookie brand still sold today. His poem "Tomten" is a Swedish Christmas tradition.

  Who was this man, and why did Sweden grieve as if it had lost something irreplaceable?

• 2. Humble Beginnings

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  Viktor Rydberg was born on the 18th of December 1828. His father, Johan Rydberg, had served as a soldier before taking up work as a prison guard; his mother, Hedvig Düker, was a midwife. They had two other sons and three daughters.

  Johan surrendered first to hypochondria and then to alcoholism. He lost his employment and then the family's apartment. Authorities boarded Viktor out to a series of foster homes. One of those homes caught fire, adding another layer of shock to a childhood already stripped of stability.

  From 1838 to 1847, Rydberg attended grammar school. In 1851, he enrolled at the University of Lund to study law. Financial pressure forced him to leave after one year, without a degree, and he supported himself by working as a private tutor.

  In 1855, the Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, a Gothenburg newspaper, offered him a position. One biographer put it plainly: "He had a hard struggle to satisfy the thirst for learning which was a leading passion of his life." That same writer noted that Rydberg "finally attained distinction in several fields of scholarship." He stayed at the paper for more than twenty years, and it was during those years that his first novels took shape.

• 3. Novels and Verse

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  Rydberg's first novel, Fribytaren på Östersjön (The Freebooter of the Baltic), appeared in 1857. It was a historical romance of piracy, witchcraft, and nautical adventure set in the seventeenth century. The following year brought Singoalla, the book that would define his early reputation.

  Set in the Middle Ages, Singoalla tells of a tragic love between a knight named Erland and a gypsy girl. 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. The Saga-Book of the Viking Club, Vol. 4, Part 1 (1904-5), called it "a novel occupying a pre-eminent place among Rydberg's prose writings."

  Den siste Atenaren, The Last Athenian (1859), was Rydberg's most ambitious novel and his last for thirty years. Set in Athens during the reign of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor, it explores the clash between classical antiquity and dogmatic Christianity. William Widgery Thomas Jr. observed that Rydberg, "at scarcely thirty years of age," was "already acknowledged to be the foremost living prose writer of Scandinavia."

  In 1871, he published "Lille Viggs äventyr på julafton" ("Little Vigg's Adventures on Christmas Eve"), first written for a newspaper. The tale has since become a holiday classic in Sweden. His 1876 translation of Goethe's Faust brought that German classic to Swedish readers. A journey to Italy in 1874 produced Romerska sägner om apostlarna Petrus och Paulus that same year. Romerska Dagar followed in 1877, collecting his essays on Italian culture, history, and archaeology. Charles Wharton Stork later described Rydberg's poetry as showing "the originality and forcefulness of his imagery," marking "an important advance in Swedish poetry."

  When Rydberg returned to the novel form in 1891 with Vapensmeden (The Armorer), thirty-two years had passed since Den siste Atenaren. Set during the Reformation, it depicts the conflict between Lutheran Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Rydberg "still fought fanaticism and dogmatism," the novel made plain, "and his ideal was still humanity and liberty." The next time Rydberg took on organized religion directly, he aimed not at a historical novelist's recreation of ancient Athens but at the Swedish church itself.

• 4. The Bible Controversy

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  Bibelns lära om Kristus (The Bible's Doctrine concerning Christ), published in 1862, used the New Testament itself as evidence to deny the divinity of Christ. The book was hugely successful and introduced modern Biblical criticism to Scandinavia. At a conference of the Swedish church in 1865, Rydberg defended his argument with enough persuasive force to impress even his most eminent official opponents.

  August Strindberg later acknowledged "the liberating influence of Rydberg's Bibelns lära om Kristus on his generation." Strindberg placed it alongside the work of David Friedrich Strauss and Ernst Renan. The book's longer-term consequence was a weakening of the church's hold over Sweden's educated classes. Rydberg's own account of his purpose was direct: freedom of individual conscience, which he described as the foundation of his fight against the state church.

  In 1865, he published Medeltidens Magi (The Magic of the Middle Ages). It argued that the contemporary church still operated under the dualistic ideology of the Dark Ages. He traced the framework of God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell, as contributors to the European and American witch-hunts. The theological battle took a personal toll. From 1865 to 1868, Rydberg suffered a severe depression, driven by the fight over his writings and by a broken engagement in 1865.

  By 1870, the agitation his Biblical criticism had set off made his name prominent enough to carry him to Parliament.

• 5. Citizen and Reformer

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  In 1859, Rydberg wrote a pamphlet on national defense. It helped inspire what became known as the Sharpshooter's movement, a voluntary militia of political importance during the 1860s. In 1870, he took a controversial pro-German stance during the Franco-Prussian War. That same year, he was elected to the Swedish Parliament as a supporter of the Lantmanna Party, representing the country's traditional economic interests. He served until 1872.

  On the floor of Parliament, Rydberg gave the keynote speech in the debate to enact a law granting all non-Lutherans full civil rights. He had supported the Jewish cause since his youth. He worked diligently for the interests of working-class Swedes. In 1906, a collection of his writings on the labor question was described as part of the "treasury of this class." His poem Den nya Grottesången (The New Grotti Song) mounted a fierce attack on factory conditions, using the ancient mill of Grottasöngr as its backdrop.

  Gudasaga, Rydberg's Swedish coinage for the borrowed word mythologi, remains in common use today. He campaigned to purge foreign words from Swedish, especially those of German origin. Around this time, he also adopted a more Germanic spelling of his own first name: Viktor, in place of the earlier Victor.

  In 1884, Rydberg refused to support August Strindberg during Strindberg's blasphemy trial. Four years later, in 1888, Rydberg sat as a juror in the trial of socialist leader Hjalmar Branting and voted to jail him for blasphemy. Rydberg and Branting never spoke to one another again.

  In 1877, Rydberg received an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala and was elected to the Swedish Academy. His acceptance speech, on the heroic saga of the Rök runestone, pointed toward the mythological research that would occupy the following decade.

• 6. Into Norse Mythology

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  The Norwegian scholar Sophus Bugge had argued that the Poetic Edda poem Völuspá drew on Classical and Biblical sources. Rydberg challenged this view in two articles published in Nordisk Tidskrift in 1881. George Stephens, writing in The Antiquary in August 1881, called it "a more crushing and masterly reply" than had ever been penned. Even Bugge acknowledged that Rydberg had won the argument. The Old Norse scholar Ursula Dronke later described the work as "marvellously intelligent, masterly criticism."

  In 1882, Rydberg published Segerssvärdet (The Sword of Victory), the first book-length product of this inquiry. Between 1886 and 1889, he completed two volumes of Undersökningar i germanisk mythologi (Investigations into Germanic Mythology). In 1887, he produced a children's version of Norse mythology, Fädernas gudasaga (Our Fathers' Godsaga). "As I have read my heart has warmed more and more," Bugge wrote to Rydberg on receiving the first volume. He added that before such a magnificent work he was "well aware that he is nothing but a philologist."

  Rydberg's central argument was that most Germanic myths formed part of a chronological epic rooted in the undivided Proto-Indo-European tradition. Henrik Schück called Rydberg the "last, and poetically most gifted, of the mythological school founded by Jacob Grimm." Jan de Vries wrote that Rydberg "swam against the stream" but "clearly expressed that which has become an ever stronger certainty today."

  Stopford A. Brooke wrote in 1892 that "this book is a real contribution to Northern mythology," even allowing for "a certain fancifulness." German scholars praised Rydberg's learning while criticizing his etymologies and his tendency to remodel myths to fit a system they considered artificial. Anna Lindén, in a 2004 doctoral review, cited the work's unavailability in English, German, or French as the reason for its limited reach. Some of his specific theories have continued to be cited in later scholarship. These include his identification of Harbard with Loki in the Poetic Edda poem Hárbarðsljóð and his ideas about a World Mill.

  His Swedish Academy acceptance speech, "Om Hjeltesagan å Rökstenen," was not published in English until 2007. It appeared that year in The Runestone Journal, a publication of the Asatru Folk Assembly.

• 7. A Legacy Contested

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  Gläns över sjö och strand, a song still sung in Sweden, carries lyrics Rydberg wrote. His works remain in print and are widely read in Swedish schools. A street in Göteborg bears his name, and a student dormitory and other buildings carry it as well. The immediate cause of his death was complications from diabetes and arteriosclerosis. He continues to appear as an individual entry in many English-language reference works.

  From 1883, Rydberg taught the History of Culture at Stockholms högskola, the institution now called Stockholm University. From 1884, he held the position as professor. In 1889, he became the first holder of the J. A. Berg Chair of the History and Theory of Art there. That same year, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences elected him a member.

  Rydberg's final publication appeared after his death, as an introduction to the Swedish edition of Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution. Titled Den hvita rasens framtid (The Future of the White Race), it expressed his anxiety about European decline. Swedish scholar Anna Lindén notes that Rydberg's use of the word "race" carried a cultural meaning rather than a biological one. What he criticized, she argues, was a phenomenon within Europe, not on other continents. He foresaw European culture being overtaken by the Chinese nation, driven by moral degeneration and demographic weakness on the continent. His vision was far more pessimistic than Kidd's own optimistic Darwinism.

  Since the late 1920s, scholars have speculated about Rydberg's private life and sexual orientation. Svanberg (1928) and Stolpe (1978) argued, from readings of his published work, that Rydberg was homosexual. Sven Delblanc, writing in 1983, contended that the novel Singoalla "reflected homosexual desires and impulses in Rydberg himself." Judith Moffett (2001) concluded that Rydberg found all sexual expression "despicable, impossible, or, at best, delicious but lethal." Bäckmann (2004) disputed all these readings, finding "no textual evidence" to support what he called an "empathetic reading" of the biography. Rydberg himself never spoke openly about his private life; on that question, as Moffett wrote, "our best guess would still be guesswork."