INSTITUTIONALIZED CHRISTIAN CULTURE ARRIVED IN Scandinavia in 1104, with the establishment of the see at Lund, geographically in southern Sweden but at that time part of the kingdom of Denmark. It was the first in Scandinavia. Up until that time, Scandinavian Church affairs had been run from the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen in Germany.
A linear conception of time and a new alphabet to replace the runic futhark were among the most fundamental changes the new religion brought with it. Odin and the rest of the Æsir were evicted and put to service outside church walls, as gargoyles to run off water from the guttering. The Christian monks in the monasteries who replaced the travelling skaldic poets of Iceland, Norway and Sweden as the historians of heathen culture did their work in Latin, and on parchment, not in Old Norse and orally. The combination of their ignorance and their disapproval led to the eclipse of vast tracts of knowledge about the customs and beliefs of their ancestors, among which the near-complete disappearance of the pre-Christian constellation names has always struck me as especially poignant. In particular the tale of how the star known to early Scandinavians as Aurvandil’s Toe got its name provoked an unexpected disturbance in me when I began thinking seriously about the Reformation in the north and any possible impact this had in creating that melancholy and darkness of mind that has been, for so long and so strongly, the primary association the outside world has of the inhabitants of Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Shortly after reading the tale in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, I came across Saxo’s long and compelling account in the Gesta Danorum of the murderous intrigues at the Danish court in Elsinore, upon which Shakespeare based his Hamlet. In the course of the sixty pages that the narrative occupies in his history, Saxo describes a duel between two kings, Aurvandil and Koller, which ends with Aurvandil slicing off Koller’s foot and Koller’s bleeding to death. In gratitude, Aurvandil’s ally, King Rørik, gives him his daughter Gurutha in marriage. The couple have a son, Amleth, or in Shakespeare’s spelling, Hamlet. The killing of Aurvandil by his brother Feng, and Feng’s subsequent marriage to his brother’s widow, along with Amleth’s response to it all, are described in Saxo:
Aurvandil, King of Denmark, married Gurutha, the daughter of Rorik, and she bore him a son, whom they named Amleth. Aurvandil’s good fortune stung his brother Feng with jealousy, so that the latter resolved treacherously to waylay his brother, thus showing that goodness is not safe even from those of a man’s own house. And behold when a chance came to murder him, his bloody hand sated the deadly passion of his soul. Then he took the wife of the brother he had butchered, capping unnatural murder with incest. For whoso yields to one iniquity, speedily falls an easier victim to the next, the first being an incentive to the second. Also the man veiled the monstrosity of his deed with such hardihood of cunning, that he made up a mock pretence of goodwill to excuse his crime, and glossed over fratricide with a show of righteousness.
Gerutha, said he, though so gentle that she would do no man the slightest hurt, had been visited with her husband’s most extreme hate; and it was all to save her that he had slain his brother; for he thought it shameful that a lady so meek and unrancorous should suffer the heavy disdain of her husband. Nor did his smooth words fail in their intent; for at courts, where fools are sometimes favoured and backbiters preferred, a lie lacks not credit. Nor did Feng keep from shameful embraces the hands that had slain a brother; pursuing with equal guilt both of his wicked and impious deeds.
Amleth beheld all this, but feared lest too shrewd a behaviour might make his uncle suspect him. So he chose to feign dullness, and pretend an utter lack of wits. This cunning course not only concealed his intelligence but ensured his safety.
Every day he remained in his mother’s house utterly listless and unclean, flinging himself on the ground and bespattering his person with foul and filthy dirt. His discoloured face and visage, smudged with slime, denoted foolish and grotesque madness. All he said was of a piece with these follies; all he did savoured of utter lethargy. In a word, you would not have thought him a man at all, but some absurd abortion due to a mad fit of destiny.
He used at times to sit over the fire, and, raking up the embers with his hands, to fashion wooden crooks, and harden them in the fire, shaping at their tips certain barbs, to make them hold more tightly to their fastenings. When asked what he was about, he said that he was preparing sharp javelins to avenge his father. This answer was not a little scoffed at, all men deriding his idle and ridiculous pursuit; but the thing helped his purpose afterwards.
Now it was his craft in this matter that first awakened in the deeper observers a suspicion of his cunning. For his skill in a trifling art betokened the hidden talent of the craftsman; nor could they believe the spirit dull where the hand had acquired so cunning a workmanship. Lastly, he always watched with the most punctual care over his pile of stakes that he had pointed in the fire. Some people, therefore, declared that his mind was quick enough, and fancied that he only played the simpleton in order to hide his understanding, and veiled some deep purpose under a cunning feint.
As I read this, the idea that Hamlet’s father was in some mysterious way the same person as the dwarf whom Thor, the red-bearded God of Thunder, carried on his back across the celestial River Elivager, became entwined with the recurrence in both tales of an injury to the foot; until presently the whole thing froze into a bizarre but nevertheless organic certainty that Hamlet’s father, referred to in Shakespeare only as King Hamlet to distinguish him from the son, and appearing only briefly and as a ghost in the opening scene, could now with absolute certainty be identified as a dwarf named Aurvandil. It was a thrilling discovery. I thought of the influence it might have on the way directors staged the opening scene. As a hint to the audience the ghost of Hamlet might be played by a very small actor who makes his entry carrying a basket beneath his arm. More to the point, I thought, by making this apparently irrelevant excursion in the book I was hoping to write on Scandinavian culture I could use the subject of Hamlet as the natural starting point for a discussion of the stereotype of the melancholic and brooding Scandinavian which came to succeed that of the bloodthirsty and Christian-hating Viking. It would also introduce the symbolically important site of the castle at Elsinore, or Helsingør as the Danes call it, on the north-east coast of Zealand overlooking the narrowest point of the sound that divides Denmark from Sweden, which re-appears with such surprising regularity and in so many unexpected contexts throughout the history of Scandinavia. Elsinore is not only Prince Hamlet’s home but also the home of his treacherous friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. All three of them, along with Horatio, are students at the University of Wittenberg in Germany, the place where Martin Luther nailed his ‘Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences’ on the door of All Saint’s Church: the crucible of the Reformation. Alas, the complexities of my idea began to give me a headache, and in the end I abandoned it. I switched off my computer and instead settled down on our living-room sofa to watch television. Norwegian State Broadcasting was showing a British series about Shakespeare’s plays. My wife was away for the weekend at a book fair in Bergen and I watched this first programme in the series alone. As luck would have it, it turned out to be about Hamlet. The presenter was the Scottish actor David Tennant. At one point in the programme, Tennant travelled to Stratford-upon-Avon and was seen visiting the props department of the Royal Shakespeare Company. There the wardrobe mistress handed him a large cardboard box, which Tennant opened, and from which he produced a skull, holding it up in one hand and explaining to us that, in his own performance as Hamlet, this particular skull had been used for the famous gravedigger scene. He went on to reveal that it was in fact the head of a real person, a Polish pianist and composer named André Tchaikowsky, who had died as recently as 1982. Tchaikowsky had donated his head to the RSC shortly before his death from colon cancer at the age of forty-six, expressing the hope that it might, one day, be used as Yorick’s. It seems that up until the time of the David Tennant production, directors of the play had avoided using Tchaikowsky’s head because successive casts found the prospect disturbing. In terms of its effect on his performance, however, it was easy to believe Tennant when he spoke of the added intensity it gave to the prince’s words on the brevity of all human life, knowing as he did that he was holding the head of someone who would, until quite recently, have been able to confirm them from personal experience.
Kronberg Castle, Elsinore (Helsingør). Alexander A. Trofimov/Shutterstock.
Drifting off into an idle meditation on the general strangeness of the situation, I presently found myself once again, as so often before, distracted by the perennial oddity of the name ‘Yorick’. This had puzzled me ever since the Friday afternoon double-English lesson at my old secondary school back home in England, when we had a class reading of Hamlet, and I dozed at the back of the classroom as the hot sun flooded through the windows on the long west wing of the school, on its way down over the wide and shining expanse of the Ribble Estuary, and I waited for the bell to end the interminable lesson and release us for the after-school kick-around in the Fairhaven Lake car park. Hearing Frith, the boy reading the part of Hamlet, suddenly stumble over ‘Yorick’ woke me from my doze. Even in those days, long before I had an interest in Scandinavia, I felt certain that ‘Yorick’ could not be a Danish name. But by the time I was fully awake it was too late. Our English teacher, a cherry-cheeked and wispy-haired man named Price, whom I have lately begun to confuse in my memory with H.G. Wells’s Mr Polly, hero of another of our set books, had already offered some kind of explanation, and Frith, having knocked the hurdle down, was staggering on towards the next one.
For years afterwards, the singular oddness of the name remained lodged somewhere at the back of my head and did not surface again until the end of the motoring holiday my wife and I had taken in Denmark to see the Jelling Stone and Lindholm Høje. On our way back home, we spent the last night in Helsingør, before the twenty-minute ferry ride across the waters of the Öresund to Sweden in the morning for the drive up the E6 to Oslo. The castle was just a short walk from the Hotel Hamlet where we had booked in for the night. After a hamburger at the Restaurant Ophelia we strolled along to take a look at it.
I get little sense of place from old castles in which nobody lives. After a few minutes desultorily wandering through a series of large and bare rooms, I went outside and began walking along a high grassy embankment that ran out from the castle. Presently, my interest was attracted by a group of about a dozen middle-aged men and women who were gathered on the stony foreshore, just beyond the castle walls. The day was drizzly and overcast, and they were wearing anoraks with the hoods up and waterproof trousers. Most of them had either a camera or a pair of binoculars around their necks, and periodically one would lift the binoculars to his eyes and peer intently out across the water, or up into the sky. Curiosity overcame me and I made my way across and asked a woman at the edge of the group what it was they were waiting or looking for. They were birdwatchers, she told me, gathered because of reports that a rare type of falcon had been spotted in the skies above Elsinore. Had they seen it? I asked. No, she replied with a smile, not yet. But birdwatchers know how to be patient. As I turned away and headed back along the embankment towards the castle I felt a vague sense of disappointment. I don’t know what I’d been hoping to hear, perhaps that they’d been looking for a Russian submarine that had reportedly been seen surfacing in the Sound. Back at the Elsinore souvenir shop, I bought a coffee mug rimmed with Shakespearean insults (‘Anointed sovereign of sighs and groans’, ‘Quintessence of dust’, ‘Lump of foul deformity’ etc.), a small tin horse on wheels that you pushed along with a handle attached to the back of it, and a book that examined the points of contrast between the castle (and its inhabitants) as imagined by Shakespeare and the castle as it appears in recorded history. Leafing through this book the following morning on the ferry over to Sweden, I learnt that ‘Yorick’ was in fact Shakespeare’s phonetic rendering of the common Danish name ‘Georg’. Say ‘Yorick’ as fast as you can three or four times and you’ll find yourself saying ‘Georg’. A similar explanation resolved the enigma of the instruction given by the Gravedigger to his Companion in the play. Go, get thee to Yaughan, he tells him, Fetch me a stoup of liquor. ‘Yaughan’ is Johan, a name as common then and now in Denmark as ‘John’ is in England. At least three members of Shakespeare’s own company, the Chamberlain’s Men, previously belonged to a troupe employed at Frederik II’s court at Elsinore between 1585 and 1586, and the incidental detail in Shakespeare’s play, such as these names, may well have been acquired from them.
Hamlet, with Yorick’s skull. Wikimedia Commons.
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Over the years, and particularly after watching Kenneth Branagh’s performance as Detective Inspector Kurt Wallander in the television adaptation of the late Henning Mankell’s novels – which, on a scale of bleakness, lies several frozen degrees below that of either of the two Swedish actors who have played the part, Rolf Lassgård and Krister Henriksson – I have found myself wondering whether melancholy is a genuine Scandinavian tribal characteristic, or an artificial creation bearing as little relation to the real thing as, for example, the England of Roger Miller’s old country-music hit ‘England Swings’, with its bobbies on bicycles two by two and the rosy red cheeks of its little children, bears to the real England. It might even be a combination of the genuine and artificial, in which melancholy became a self-validating diagnosis: everyone says we’re gloomy, so we must be. I can’t help thinking that ‘the gloomy Dane’ himself has played some part in creating this tribal identity, a ‘Nordicism’ analogous to the ‘Orientalism’ of which the scholar Edward Said complained some decades ago. Within twenty years of the appearance of Shakespeare’s play, Robert Burton was philosophizing in his Anatomy of Melancholy about the restlessness of certain types of men, to whom the world itself seemed a prison, its seas as narrow as any ditch, who, when they had ‘compassed the globe of the earth, would fain go see what is done on the moon’; but he excluded Scandinavians from his analysis on the grounds that ‘all over Scandia they are imprisoned half the year in stoves, they dare not peep out for cold’.
The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, whose life I wrote a long twenty years ago in a biography that I now feel may have been a touch mean-spirited about the great man, was convinced that it was the topography of Norway that made its people so secretive, so brooding, so guilt-ridden and melancholy. Anyone who wants to understand me, he told an Austrian journalist, must know Norway. The magnificent but severe nature surrounding the people up there in the north, the lonely, secluded life, the farms miles from one another – they lose interest in other people and become concerned only with their own affairs. This is why they become introspective and serious, why they brood and doubt, why they lose faith. At home every other man is a philosopher. The long, dark winters come, he said, swathing the farms in dense fog, and oh how the people long for the sun. But Ibsen’s theory wouldn’t apply to Sweden or Denmark, nor explain the darkness of vision associated with an August Strindberg or a Søren Kierkegaard. Prince Hamlet could never have been a Catholic, any more than Brand, Gregers Werle or any one of a dozen other Ibsen characters could have been Catholics. Besides, part of what Ibsen was communicating in his characterization was the sheer remoteness of Scandinavia, and that includes an idea of its enormous distance from Rome.
So in the end I find I often return to the Reformation in Scandinavia as the only really significant common denominator to consider in any search for the heart of this historical association with melancholy. Its origins are complex and intricately bound up with the politics of the region over the five centuries that divide it from the end of the Viking Age. After the fall of the Jelling dynasty in England, the Viking Age rattled on for another couple of decades. Militarily, it came to an end with Harald Hardrada’s failure to regain the English crown at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066; culturally, it expired in 1104 with establishment of that first Scandinavian archbishopric at Lund. A sense of some kind of unifying tendency slowly began coming into focus. When the strife-weary Icelanders handed over the sovereignty of their country to the Crown of Norway in 1262, they were following a precedent set in the previous year by the Greenlanders. Kings and queens came and went, until quite suddenly, and more by the accident of early deaths and childlessness than any grand design, a unified Scandinavia emerged as a political fact in 1397 with the signing of the Kalmar Agreement, whereby Denmark, Sweden and Norway were united under a single monarch.
In its complete form, the Kalmar Union lasted just over 120 years, and the triangular marriage was never a happy one. The instigator of the union, Margrete of Denmark, was by far its most able leader, and for most of the time the Swedes chafed at their inferior status in the relationship. Following Margrete’s death in 1412, she was succeeded by her nephew, Erik of Pomerania, who at once set off in pursuit of his dream of creating a Scandinavian Baltic empire, an enterprise that would involve him in endless wars against the German states. The crippling cost of these was met by heavy taxation in all three kingdoms, and only partially offset by his initiative in building the first castle on the site at Elsinore in the 1420s. This gave Denmark control of the entrance to the Baltic through the narrow Öresund which Erik and subsequent kings exploited to charge exorbitant tolls. He rarely visited Sweden, and alienated its native aristocracy by appointing Danes and Germans to the command of Swedish fortresses. Deposed in 1439, Erik made his way to Gotland, where he reverted to Viking ways and sustained himself as a pirate before returning to end his days in his native Pomerania. His nephew Christopher of Bavaria was elected to succeed him in 1440, but when Christopher died in 1448, without leaving an heir, the union began to falter. Over the next seventy-five years the three countries were agreed on a common king for only ten of them. By the time Christian II became king in 1513, Sweden was split between a Danish loyalist party, backed by the Catholic Church; and an opposition party under the leadership of a patriot, Sten Sture the Younger, resolved on full Swedish independence. In an effort to compel recognition of his rule, Christian invaded Sweden in 1520 and defeated a Swedish army at Åsunden, in Västergötland, fatally wounding Sture and capturing many of his most prominent supporters.
On 1 November 1520, Christian, already recognized as King of Denmark-Norway, was hailed as the hereditary King of Sweden. A week later, in an attempt to intimidate and subdue any further opposition, the city gates of Stockholm were locked and a purge of dissidents got under way, which subsequently became known as the ‘Stockholm Bloodbath’. Eighty-two people were tried, found guilty of heresy and executed in torrential rain in Stortorvet, a square in the city centre, over the following two days. The names of the victims had been given to the king by three of Sweden’s leading Catholic dignitaries, out of motives that were religious rather than political – Luther had already nailed up his Ninety-Five Theses in Germany and was on the verge of being excommunicated for heresy. To ensure their permanent exclusion from Heaven, the Protestant victims were denied Confession and the Last Rites before execution, and their corpses were burned afterwards. In a symbolic gesture, Sture’s body was exhumed along with that of his infant son so that they could be added to the flames. On his way back to Copenhagen after the slaughter, Christian chose a route that took him through the heart of central Sweden, carrying out further barbarisms as he went.
Gustav Eriksson – the later Gustav I Vasa – was among those Sture supporters captured in the initial fighting. He escaped and fled to Lübeck, where he learned that his father, two of his uncles and several other relatives had been among those executed in the Stockholm rain. With financial help from the Hanseatic rulers of Lübeck, he returned to Sweden, gathered an army and rose against the tyrant Christian, defeating him and in the process gaining the crown of a newly independent Sweden for himself.
Gustav Vasa was able to harness the strong current of anti-Catholic sentiment in Sweden following the Stockholm Bloodbath. After his election as King Gustav in 1523, he actively nourished it by summoning the young radical Olaus Petri from his theological studies at Wittenberg to be secretary of state to the city’s council, and by allowing him to preach Lutheran doctrine from the pulpit of Storkyrkan, the most important church in Stockholm. He offered his very public support to Olaus Petri when the latter became the target of abuse from Catholics following his marriage in 1524. Petri’s main opponent was Hans Brask, the Bishop of Linköping, who enjoyed the great advantage of having a printing press at his disposal. Once he became aware of this, Gustav ordered that the press belonging to the church in Uppsala be removed to Stockholm, thus giving the reformer a chance to defend himself against his opponents on equal terms. In due course, Olaus Petri also used the press to produce an Evangelical devotional book and, in 1526, a translation of the New Testament into Swedish. Fifteen years later, the whole Bible became available in Swedish in a translation known as the Gustav Vasa Bible, a cultural monument that acquired a status in Sweden comparable to that of the King James Bible in England, and one that endured as the standard Swedish translation until 1917.
In 1527 the new king announced his support for an open discussion between Lutherans and Catholics on the theological disagreements that had arisen in recent years. The revolt against Denmark had landed him in debt and his support for the reformers had this deeply pragmatic edge to it. Without access to some of the Catholic Church’s wealth – it owned over 20 per cent of land in Sweden – the newly independent country would be unable to meet its debts. The leader of the Catholics, Hans Brask, refused even to talk to the heretics, and Gustav threatened to abdicate with immediate effect. The prospect of a constitutional crisis brought immediate dividends, with the Catholics promising him their financial support on condition that he did not interfere with the Catholic liturgy. An extensive programme of reclaiming church property and lands for the Crown and the aristocracy got under way.
From this artfully manipulated crisis, Gustav emerged as a curious throwback to pre-Christian times – a Protestant Christian godi, a king-bishop whose power over the new Lutheran Church was based on its newness, and on its dependence on him. Determined to avoid the mistakes of his Catholic predecessors, he was careful to keep the reformed Church as poor and as pure as its preaching advertised it should be. Yet like so many revolutionary leaders before him, Gustav craved the authority of what he had just overthrown in order to satisfy his sense of his own legitimacy. Alone among the Scandinavian countries, Sweden retained, as it does to this day, the doctrine of the Apostolic Succession, which holds that the only valid ministry is one based on bishops whose office has descended from the Apostles.
With the degradation of the Roman Catholic Church in 1536, a long period of intellectual and cultural barrenness ensued. Five centuries earlier, the arrival of institutional Christianity in Iceland and Norway heralded a cultural decline in which the arts and skills of the skaldic poets, so deeply rooted in heathen lore and heathen values, had all but disappeared; the almost equally dramatic changes entrained by the Reformation had a similarly negative effect on Swedish culture for much of what remained of the sixteenth century. For decades, no Swedish writers, poets, dramatists or composers of note appeared. Gustav allowed the Catholic schools, the centres of learning in the country, and the University of Uppsala itself, to fall into pitiful decline. There is an irony in the fact that it is Gustav himself who, in this cultural desert, emerges as one of the few interesting and memorable figures, an arrogant and vivid correspondent whose letters, even when dealing with matters of state, are always personal, trenchant and devastatingly to the point. When Hans Brask wrote to complain that Gustav was doing nothing to prevent the cloisters being used as military bivouacs, Gustav put him and all he stood for firmly in its place: ‘Where you write that this took place in violation of the freedom of the Church and against the law which we have sworn to uphold, I know well enough that necessity breaks the law – not only the law of man but at times even God’s law.’ The king was as brusque in dealing with complaints from his lay subjects, reminding them of the bad old days under Danish hegemony and urging them to be grateful for the peace and safety he had brought them: ‘Look to your houses, fields, meadows, wives, children, beasts of burden and cattle, and refrain from voicing your opinions on our political and religious rule.’
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One might almost say that Protestantism was used by the rebels in Sweden as a tool in their struggle to break free of Danish domination within the Kalmar Union. The revolutionary element was largely absent from the Reformation’s arrival in Denmark, where Luther’s ideas entered the country from neighbouring Saxony almost through a process of osmosis. Christian II gave early indications of an interest in Protestantism when he invited a reforming priest from Saxony to preach in Copenhagen in 1521; but the manifestly incompetent way in which he had dealt with the revolution in Sweden and his autocratic behaviour at home alienated the native aristocracy and left his ability to carry through such a fundamental reform in question. As a young man, Christian had been his father’s viceroy in Norway, and he had fallen in love there with a woman named Dyveke Sigbritsdatter whose mother ran a tavern in Bergen. He took Dyveke and her mother back to Copenhagen with him when he became king in 1513 and continued the relationship despite his marriage, in 1515, to Isabella of Austria. In what might almost have been a rejected sub-plot for Hamlet, Dyveke died in mysterious circumstances at the age of twenty-seven and was buried in the church of the Carmelite monastery at Elsinore. The grieving king vented his anger on a young nobleman named Torbjørn Oxe, whom he believed to have poisoned her with a gift of cherries, and had him executed for a crime of which he was almost certainly not guilty.
By 1523, a coalition of aristocrats and bishops had had enough of the king’s excesses. They deposed him and offered the throne to his uncle, Frederik. Christian fled to Germany, where he tried to persuade his brother-in-law, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, to help him recover the throne. He then put his potential ally in an impossible position by converting to Lutheranism. Six years later, he realized the errors of his ways and converted back to the Catholic faith. This proved enough for Charles to help him land a small army in Norway, from where he hoped to begin a campaign to regain his throne. He was, however, soon tricked on board a ship with the promise of negotiations and then whisked away to the fortress at Kalundborg, where he spent the remaining twenty-seven years of his life in a civilized confinement, permitted to entertain, hunt and wander at his pleasure within the town boundaries.
His successor, Frederik, wisely avoided a too passionate involvement in the issues of the day. He did not openly break with Rome but regularly appointed Lutherans as his royal chaplains, and in 1526 approved the appointment of an archbishop who had been rejected by the pope, thus bringing the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in Denmark to a de facto end by rejecting the tradition of the Apostolic Succession.
In 1536 Frederik’s successor, Christian III, inherited a country that was almost bankrupt. Christian applied to the Church – as owners of 40 per cent of all land in Denmark – for economic support, and when this was refused he took matters into his own hands. On 12 August 1536 he closed Copenhagen for the day and had the Catholic bishops arrested and confiscated their property, legislating for the end of a separate episcopal administration in Denmark and introducing a single, secular administration to control all affairs of state, including the Church: the state Church had arrived.
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As an almost incidental result of this process, which also gives some indication of just how far behind Norway had fallen in what remained of the Kalmar Union, the legislation that made Lutheranism the state religion of Denmark also redefined Norway as simply another part of the Danish Crown, with the same provincial status as Jylland, Fyn and Sjælland. This marked the start of what Norwegians call their ‘400-year night’, though many modern Norwegian historians dispute the implication that this was a period of unrelieved cultural and political exploitation. For the Danish Crown, the appropriation of Norway proved hugely lucrative, for the king’s income more than doubled following the confiscation of Church estates there.
In Sweden, with the exception of Stockholm, religious reform had been an imposition of the passionate few on the contented many. The situation in Norway was similar. There were few signs of any vivid interest in the currents of intellectual and religious awakening sweeping across the rest of northern Europe, and no apparent desire for change. What the average Norwegian knew of the Reformation amounted to little more than the activities of the Hanseatic League, the German commercial elite centred on Bergen, who were allowed to hold their own Protestant services, in German, on the city’s main docks. So unpopular was the practice that some kind of bomb was once placed under the house of their Lutheran preacher, and his life saved only when a disloyal shower of Bergen rain extinguished the fuse before the device could detonate.
The result of the Norwegians’ indifference to the enforced ritual and liturgical changes imposed upon them from Denmark was that, for some time, very little observable change took place. Hans Rev, the Bishop of Oslo, was taken to Denmark, where he allowed himself to be rebranded a ‘Superintendent’, as Lutheran bishops were henceforth to be known, before returning to Oslo and resuming office, so becoming quite possibly the only man ever to have served successive terms as a bishop in both the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches.
With familiar faces to comfort their congregations, and despite the Danish Ordinance of 1539 that fixed the order of service with Luther’s catechism as its standard of doctrine, Church matters in Norway chugged along contentedly for the next twenty or thirty years, until the emergence of a new generation of priests to succeed those local pragmatists who had made the switch with an easy conscience. These young men brought with them a passion for liturgical reform that caused great offence to the conservative instincts of Norway’s largely rural population. When the new minister at Jondal, in Hordaland, introduced a ban on the chanting of lauds and Hail Marys, and on the use of Holy Water in the church, and tried to prevent members of the congregation from kneeling before the altar with a cross, his flock grew so angry that they killed him. A number of other priests suffered the same fate for the zeal with which they tried to enforce Lutheran theology.
One notable effect of the overthrow of the richly traditional Catholic Church in the Scandinavian north was a revival of belief in the Devil. This Devil was neither the imp of later Scandinavian folklore nor the half-comical monster created by the early Christian demonization of Odin and the rest of the Æsir. This was the much more sinister biblical creation, the force that competed with God himself for the worship of believers. And with Devil worship came the witch-hunt and the persecution of men and women who had become the object of the dislike or envy of the local population, and who might find themselves scapegoats for all manner of natural disasters, shipwrecks, sickness and accidents. Between 1560 and 1710, twenty-three men and women were tried as witches in Bergen, among them Anne Pedersdotter Beyer, widow of Absalon Pederssøn Beyer, the most famous and influential Norwegian Lutheran of the age and in his time a Wittenberg pupil of the great theologian Philip Melanchthon. At her trial, Anne found herself accused of the murder of six people by visiting fatal illnesses upon them. Elina, her maid, gave evidence to the court that her mistress had used her as a mount to fly to witches’ covens at Lyderhorn and Fløyen. There, she had overheard her planning attacks on Bergen, to be disguised as natural disasters. Other witnesses spoke of having seen Anne consorting with a group of demons, including a creature with no head. Among the alleged victims was a child. Despite Anne pointing out that many children had died in the town, and that the death of a single individual could not be laid at her door, she was found guilty and burnt at the stake, on 17 April 1590.
In time, however, the new Lutheran liturgy became as much a part of the national cultures of Denmark, Norway and Sweden as the old Catholicism had been. In a step-like way that recalls the Icelanders’ staggered replacement of the Ásatru, the heathen culture and heathen practices by Christianity six centuries earlier, the Swedes introduced a ban on Catholic worship in public in 1595 and made the faith itself illegal a few years later. Converts to the old religion were obliged by law to leave the country – a stipulation that at one point led, as we shall see, to a constitutional crisis – and the prohibition survived until 1860. The second paragraph of the Norwegian constitution of 1814, in flat contradiction of the claim in the opening sentence that Norway was a free, independent and indivisible kingdom, decreed that Lutheranism was the religion of the state, that immigrants were obliged to raise their children as Lutherans, and that Jesuits, monks and practising Jews would not be admitted to the kingdom.
In aesthetic terms, the result was a spiritual life that lacks the glamour and mystery of Catholic architecture and ritual, but offers instead the austere and simple beauties of the characteristic white wooden churches that the visitor to Scandinavia will observe everywhere, sometimes in the most appealing and isolated places.
An enduring effect of the Devil’s return after the adoption of Lutheranism has been that religious swearing retains a force and power in the Scandinavian languages that it has completely lost in English. Fy faen!, Helvete! and Jævlig are all swear-words meaning, respectively, ‘The Devil take it!’, ‘Hell!’ and ‘Devilish’ – innocuous enough to English ears, and yet phrases that are still avoided in polite conversation among Scandinavians. Except in the harshest and most brutalized social environments the sexually based slang that has replaced it in English is rarely encountered. Of late it seems this has been experienced as a lack, and for an English visitor in the twenty-first century an unnerving feature of modern Scandinavia is the import into all three languages of the word ‘fucking’ as an adjective, usually with an ‘s’ added and without the sexual specificity, as in Hvem har tatt min fuckings blyant (‘Who’s taken my bloody pencil?!’). Naturally, being just another foreign word, it has none of the taboo force it still – just about – retains in English. With an almost charming naivety the boy-band duo Robin and Bugge use the word more than twenty times in their 2016 recording ‘Fuck You’.* Not long ago, outside the National Theatre in the centre of Oslo, I saw a poster for a coming attraction, a new play by a Norwegian called Fuck My Life, which was going to try and explain to adult audiences ‘what it is like to be a young person today’. And a few years ago I might, had I been so inclined, have visited the cinema complex at the Colosseum just over the road from where I live to see Fucking Åmal, a film by the Swedish director Lukas Moodysson about the boredom and futility of life in a small Swedish town. Weirdly but understandably, the title had to be changed for English audiences to Show Me Love.
The nuances of cursing remain enigmatic and hard to convey across the language barrier. Some twenty years ago English newspapers were delighted to be able to report that Norway’s then Minister for the Environment, a bluff, genuinely working-class man named Thorbjørn Berntsen, in an exchange of views over England’s Sellafield nuclear plant, had referred to John Selwyn Gummer, his opposite number in the UK, as a ‘shitbag’. Berntsen found the press interest from the UK bewildering. ‘Shitbag’ is a literal translation of the word he used – drittsekk – but a literal translation renders the word far cruder and more aggressive than it is to the ears of a Norwegian, who uses it divorced from its semantic root in much the same way as the English might call someone a ‘silly bugger’ without reflecting on the literal meaning of the word bugger. Norwegian also has its share of unintended translingual puns. Long before I was ever interested in Norway, I remember a photograph of Harold Wilson in Private Eye looking very thoughtful with his pipe and his Gannex mac and captioned ‘Full Fart’, which some eagle-eyed English joker had spotted in a Norwegian newspaper. The actual meaning was ‘Full speed’.
*
In the five centuries since the Reformation came to Scandinavia, there has never been rivalry between the Church and the state, for the simple reason that the Reformation made them the same thing, though the term ‘state church’ did not come into use until the middle of the nineteenth century. State-driven, rather than a protest from below, it enjoyed instant support as a monarchical project, and has ensured that the moral and legal codes remain identical. The roots of the ‘Protestant work ethic’ are to be found in the socio-religious ideology that appeared with the Lutheran Reformation, well illustrated by the way in which Olaus Petri in Sweden managed to refine perceptions of the monastic system so that social disapproval was directed not at the system itself but at the members of the Mendicant orders – healthy and able-bodied adults who lived off ‘alms’ and were, to Protestant eyes, no better than ordinary beggars. For centuries, the idea persisted that everybody should work and pull their weight in society. Begging as a crime was removed from the statute books in Sweden only in 1964, by which time it was simply redundant, and in Norway as late as 2006, for the same reasons. Drug-addicted beggars and rough-sleepers were no longer seen on the streets of Oslo as the hostel system provided beds for all who needed them, a magazine to sell on the streets for those able-bodied enough to work, and the protection and security of a generous welfare system for the rest. As though the cosmos in some way objected to such an outstanding social achievement, tribal families of Roma people with a way of life based on begging, busking and collecting deposit bottles almost immediately appeared on the streets of Norway and Sweden to replace the native beggars, aware that they could not be moved on by law. The Danes have no law against begging either, but the police have the right to move people on, and a failure to do so when instructed is an offence.
The near-abolition of poverty in all three Scandinavian societies might credibly be ascribed to the creation of the state Churches. The fusion of Church and state made ethical obligations inescapably a part of the duties of government. In doing so it also imposed a requirement for a degree of social conformity that some found – and still do find – oppressive. In his 1933 novel En flyktning krysser sitt spor (A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks), the Danish-Norwegian novelist Axel Sandemose formulated ten propositions which he called the Laws of Jante, and which he claimed summarized the indoctrination to which most Scandinavians willingly subjected themselves in pursuit of the greater good of social harmony:
Du skal ikke tro at du er noe / Don’t ever think you are something.
Du skal ikke tro at du er like så meget som oss / Don’t ever think you’re worth as much as us.
Du skal ikke tro du er klokere enn oss / Don’t ever think you are cleverer than us.
Du skal ikke innbille deg du er bedre enn oss / Don’t ever think you’re better than us.
Du skal ikke tro du vet mere enn oss / Don’t ever think you know more than us.
Du skal ikke tro du er mere enn oss / Don’t ever think you are more than us.
Du skal ikke tro at du duger til noe / Don’t ever think you’ll amount to something.
Du skal ikke le av oss / Don’t ever laugh at us.
Du skal ikke tro at noen bryr seg om deg / Don’t ever think anyone cares about you.
Du skal ikke tro at du kan lære oss noe / Don’t ever think you can teach us anything.
These commandments are necessarily an exaggeration, and reflect the fact that the societies involved are small by European standards, and have historically never had the kind of wealth such as that which created permanent class differences in large countries like France, Germany and Great Britain. But most Scandinavians recognize there is an element of truth in them, that it is harder to stand against the crowd in a small country than in a large one. This may, in passing, explain why some of the most famous Scandinavian writers, artists and filmmakers – those such as Kierkegaard, Ibsen, Hamsun, Munch, Strindberg, Sigrid Undset, Ingmar Bergman and Karl Ove Knausgård – have a tendency to be extreme figures, since considerable personal courage and ethical conviction are required if such voices are to survive disapproval long enough for people to start listening to what they have to say.
But beyond these mere historical facts and generalizations on the subject of Protestantism and its legacy in the north, I could not rid myself of the thought that there was some more profound theological aspect to the whole thing that I had not quite got hold of, and that would give me the sort of clear link between the Reformation and Scandinavian melancholy that I was looking for. Accordingly, I sent an email to Geir Baardsen and arranged to meet him to talk about these imponderables. Geir had started out studying theology with a view to becoming a priest, but abandoned his studies a long time ago and was now a successful novelist.
We met at Oslo’s Literature House, a large white building centrally situated near the royal palace, at the junction of Hegdehaugsveien and Parkveien, with a coffee bar and bookshop on the ground floor and conference and lecture rooms on the upper floors. The top floor is occupied by a large quiet room with individual desk-spaces, where up to forty writers and translators work in profound silence. We sat by an open window and, to the wheezing sounds of an old Roma woman playing, over and over again on her accordion, the same forlorn bars from Michel Legrand’s ‘Les Parapluies de Cherbourg’, began to talk. I wasn’t quite sure how to get our discussion going, but knowing that Geir was an admirer of the Swedish playwright Lars Norén and had written a couple of essays about him, I had jotted down some questions about Norén as a way of starting the ball rolling. I had read Geir’s online review of a performance of Hamlet at Elsinore that Norén had directed, and I thought I would ask whether he thought Norén’s attraction to this play at this time could in any way be connected to his involvement in the events that unwittingly facilitated the murders of two policemen at Malexander in 1999, an episode I intended to write about in some detail in my book on Scandinavian cultural history.† As far as I knew Norén had never expressed himself at any length about what happened at Malexander and I asked Geir whether he thought his wish to direct Hamlet might, on one level, be interpreted as a desire to re-examine the idea of self-doubt through the prism of the greatest play ever written on the subject.
Geir’s response was that none of this had occurred to him, and that he really didn’t know too much about the Malexander murders anyway. I felt the wind going out of my sails; but bringing up Hamlet led him on to make some general observations on the subject of Scandinavian melancholy. He said that it was striking, and probably due to something deeper than just tourist enterprise, that the play has been performed at Elsinore many times, the first time as long ago as 1816, and that the first Nordic film of Hamlet was made there in 1910. Indeed, it was almost as though Scandinavians had embraced the cliché as a truth. I reminded him of Henrik Ibsen’s idea that it was the landscape of Norway and the lonely secluded lives of the people that were responsible for their dark and brooding cast of mind. He said he thought Ibsen might have been onto something, but that he himself attached more importance to the role of a single element absolutely central to Lutheranism: the doctrine of sola fide, which distinguishes Roman Catholicism and northern Protestantism so essentially from each other, this idea that faith alone is the only road to salvation. I am talking, he said, about the essential loneliness and isolation of a mind that subscribes to this idea that salvation has nothing to do with good works, that it is only possible as a gift of God’s grace and attainable only through the intensity and purity of one’s faith in Jesus Christ. Consider what Shakespeare did in Hamlet. He took Saxo’s story of incest, fratricide and double regicide set in pre-historical times and transposed it to a contemporary, post-Reformation setting. Nothing more clearly shows the visionary modernity of his mind than this artistic decision. ‘To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer a sea of troubles, or to take up arms and by opposing, end them’: Hamlet’s torment is intensified by the peculiarly Protestant fact that he has no one to tell him what to do. The responsibility to think the dilemma through to the end is his and his alone. There you have the essential loneliness of the Protestant soul. This goes for Ibsen’s characters too. The sympathetic as well as the unsympathetic, they all suffer alone.
Over a second cup of coffee Geir went on to say that the associations excited by the themes and atmosphere of Ibsen’s Brand, Ghosts and Hedda Gabler as being, in foreign eyes, typically Scandinavian in their darkness, fanaticism and melancholy had in fact been intensified, and probably deliberately so, by Ibsen’s adoption in his later years of what amounted to a uniform of black suit, black frock coat and black top hat, which he habitually wore in public and which made him the most instantly recognizable literary celebrity across all of Europe in the last years of the nineteenth century. Geir smiled and said that you could say Ibsen was a professional Scandinavian; but the great thing about him was that he never lent his name to any cause nor allowed himself to be associated with any political party. His plays say everything important he had to say. He never tried to add to them outside the theatre walls. And don’t forget either, he added, for emphasis wagging the thin wooden pin he had been given to stir his latte with, that there was a fashion for melancholy among Shakespeare’s public. His audiences would have recognized Hamlet at once as answering, in his powers of articulation, in his acute mind, his rebellious and sensitive nature, his hatred of authority, his attraction to suicide, his uncontrolled outbursts of feeling, to the very image of the fashionable seventeenth-century melancholic.
I could see his point, but somewhere along the line I felt that my attempt to tie the Reformation in Scandinavia to the historical association with melancholy had failed. Perhaps the closest Geir had got to what I wanted him to say was his comment on the loneliness of the Protestant soul, and the weight of personal responsibility attaching to a relationship with God that was face-to-face, mind-to-mind, so that one was directly answerable to God for all of one’s crimes and one’s thought-crimes, and the whole thing was not rendered somehow symbolic and trivialized by the intermediation of a Catholic priest. Since I didn’t really know Geir that well, I was a little stuck to know what we were going to talk about next. As my gaze flickered over the shelves and tables of the bookshop opposite where we sat, I noticed a copy of Niels Geelmuyden’s book about the priest Børre Knudsen, a biography first published back in the 1980s when Knudsen was still alive. It had been reissued now to coincide with a documentary about him, which had just been showing at a couple of the smaller cinemas in town, and which went by the title En Prest og en Plage (‘A Priest and a Plague’), a title that puns on the well-known saying in Norwegian that someone is a pest og en plage, a nuisance and a plague. When I came to Norway to live permanently back in 1983, the newspapers had been full of this man and his furious and lonely war against the expanding concept in Norway of abortion on demand. As far as I know, he was a figure unique to Norway in the passion of his opposition and the degree of uproar he caused; I don’t think either Sweden or Denmark had anyone similar. Børre Knudsen was an object of horror and contempt to the radicals of the 1980s. I had seen the film recently and recalled suddenly a particular scene from it. Knudsen is on his knees in front of an abortion clinic, palms together in front of his face and singing psalms with an absorbed abandon. As usual he is alone and confronting a crowd who are as passionate in their support for abortion as he is against it. Now a woman steps forward from the chanting, baying mob surrounding Knudsen and clamps a hand firmly around his mouth. For a moment it looks as though he is going to pull her hand away, but then he lets his own hand fall back again. I can never forget the look of stunned horror that came into his eyes at that moment.
There’s a famous novel by Johan Bojer called The Last Viking, and as I shook hands and said goodbye to Geir outside the Literature House the phrase ‘The Last Priest’ suddenly came into my mind. Børre Knudsen was the last priest. In Norway and quite possibly the whole of Scandinavia. Børre Knudsen, like something out of a Van Dyck painting with his thick white neck ruff, the wide dark spade of his beard and the clean-shaven upper lip, his anachronistic appearance and ancient passion the last fading echoes down through the centuries of the upheaval that was the Reformation slowly disappearing behind the hum and buzz of modern times. In the midst of this abortion furore he was invited to Rome to attend an expenses-paid pro-life conference. The delegates were granted an audience with John Paul II, and when his turn came Børre Knudsen did not hesitate. He approached the pope and requested, as a matter of urgency, that he lift the papal bull of excommunication against Martin Luther that had been issued back in 1521. John Paul gravely assured him that this was something the papacy was still working on. There’s a last scene in the 2014 film, by which time Knudsen is old, his beard is white, and the battle against abortion on demand has long been lost. You’ve seen how the fierceness of his dedication to the cause cost him everything – his calling, his job, his home, even the love of his own children. Now he’s walking down a leafy lane near his remote little country home in Balsfjord, singing in a loud, clear voice some darkly melodious psalm, quite probably one of the many he composed himself, his arm shaking and jerking with Parkinson’s as he marches along, head held high, blazing blue eyes that could see through the sun, and his passion is so palpable that no matter where you stand on that issue you cannot but be awestruck.
Citizens of all three Scandinavian countries pay a Church tax of just under 1 per cent of their income, but the Danish Church is now the only one of the three that remains a state Church. The Swedish, the most radical of the three communities and still having the largest Lutheran Church in the world with over 6 million members, introduced the separation back in 2000. In 2009 its willingness to conduct gay marriage ceremonies led the Russian and Syrian Orthodox churches to end their co-operation with it, and for the same reason several African churches have stopped accepting financial support from the Swedish Church. Although it owes more to the sharp decline in Christian belief over the last sixty or seventy years and the administrative difficulties caused by the sudden and unexpected presence in the country of large numbers of Muslims and Catholics, the separation between Church and state enacted in Norway in 2012 probably owes much to the country’s experiences with Børre Knudsen, and a recognition of the fact that the secularization and rationalization of society has moved so far since the time of the Reformation that the state and the Church can no longer be considered the same thing.
* Sung in Norwegian apart from the title. You can hear the track at https://youtu.be/igUq6EEuNCw.
† See Chapter 14 for a full discussion of events preceding, during, and after the Malexander incident.