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This series of Scandinavian Classicsis published by The American-Scandinavian Foundation in the belief thatgreater familiarity with the chief literary monuments of the North willhelp Americans to a better understanding of Scandinavians, and thusserve to stimulate their sympathetic coöperation to good ends.
SCANDINAVIAN CLASSICS
VOLUME XIII
NIELS LYHNE
BY
J. P. JACOBSEN
ESTABLISHED BY
NIELS POULSON
NIELS LYHNE
BY
J. P. JACOBSEN
TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH
BY HANNA ASTRUP LARSEN
NEW YORK
THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN FOUNDATION
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1919
Copyright, 1919, by The American-Scandinavian Foundation
D. B. Updike · The Merrymount Press · Boston · U. S. A.[v]
Introduction
To the student of Jens Peter Jacobsen’s life and works,Niels Lyhne has a value apart from its greatness as literature from thefact that it is the book in which the author recorded his own spiritual strugglesand embodied the faith on which he came, finally, to rest his soul indeath as in life. It tells of his early dreams and ideals, his effortsto know and to achieve, his revolt against the dream-swathed dogmas inwhich people take refuge from harsh reality, and his brave acceptanceof what he conceived to be the truth, however dreary and bitter.
The person of the hero is marked for a self-portrait by thedescription, “Niels Lyhne of Lönborggaard, who was twenty-three yearsold, walked with a slight stoop, had beautiful hands and small ears,and was a little timid,”—though friends of Jacobsen’s youth declarethat “a little timid” was far from describing the excessive shynessfrom which he suffered. He himself would sometimes joke about his“North Cimbrian heaviness,” for like Niels Lyhne he was a nativeof Jutland, where the people are more sluggish than the sprightlyislanders. Like him, again, he had a mother who kept alive her romanticspirit in rather humdrum, prosaic surroundings, and who instilled intoher son’s mind from childhood the idea t