Volume 52, Issue 1

This article analyzes the function of Christian intertexts in Selma Lagerlöf’s Nils Holgersson’s Marvelous Journey Through Sweden (1906/7). The intertexts structure the story both narratively and ethically. For the most part, however, they are not explicitly used as Christian. The intention of the book is not to transmit these stories, but to translate them into the new, national discourse. They were stripped of their original religious context and placed in the service of what might be called a national religion. In this process, the loss of the Christian framework did not mean the abolition of central ethical elements that were significant for Protestant practice. In particular, the pietistic heritage of a work ethic, the necessity of learning and education in order to become a true Christian – or, in its secular version, a true human citizen of the world with respect for others, taking responsibility for one’s own life and that of others, being humble and industrious – are central to the propagated morality of Nils Holgersson’s travelling school. Moreover, the transition from vertically to horizontally ordered space in the course of nationalizing the organization of the imagined community of Sweden seems to demand that the location of metaphysical transcendence be moved from heaven to earth; nature takes the place of the divine.

Zusammenfassung The article explores the question to what extent Søren Kierkegaard’s journals, unpublished during his lifetime, manifest a Protestant work ethic in the sense of Max Weber. The journals bear witness to a daily writing process that provides information about Kierkegaard’s conception of his profession as a religious writer. They can be placed in the tradition of pietistic diaries and testify to the awareness of being called as an author. By focusing on the two terms produktivitet and virksomhed , which Kierkegaard uses to reflect on his own activity, numerous parallels can be drawn with Weber’s „concept of profession in ascetic Protestantism“. Accordingly, Kierkegaard speaks of an „intellectual capital“ that he has earned and that he leaves to a posterity without being able to dispose of the use of this inheritance.

In this article, a revised classification of Faroese dialects is presented. Unlike previous classifications, this one takes into account the development and synchronic distribution of unstressed - i ’s and - u ’s, which has given rise to changes in the inflectional system. In addition to this, it looks both at stressed vowels and aspirated vs. non-aspirated - p , - t , - k after long vowels. As a result of this evidence, necessary changes to the generally accepted classification system are proposed, with four general dialect areas including transition areas.

The aim of this article is to explore how non-Christian deities are described, in comparison to the Christian God, in three Old Norse texts, belonging to different genres: Heimskringla , Barlaams saga og Jósafats , Elíss saga ok Rosamundu . These texts describe the pantheons of the Nordic cultures, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Saracens. The main question that I discuss is whether these texts may be seen as transmitting useful knowledge and information about these religions and pantheons to their Nordic audiences or whether they are meant to mainly serve the mandate of their Christian authors. I interpret my results by deploying cognitive literary theory and the concept of mentalization. To conclude, I discuss whether the way non-Christian deities are described may be seen as a mental guide for Old Norse readers to practise mentalization according to the Christian empathetic scripts, in order to reach a deeper cognitive and religious conviction and thus strengthen their Christian identities and communities during the times of the Crusades.

The article offers a re-assessment of a little-known novel by Eyvind Johnson, Nittonhundrasjutton (1930–31), which was published purely in periodical form and has received very limited critical attention hitherto. The article approaches the novel through the theoretical lens of the widening and softening tendencies that characterise current understandings of the field of modernist literature. The appreciation of Johnson’s novel is informed, furthermore, by new insights into the role of interwar modernism in registering and responding to the afterlife of war as well as the spectre of a future war. The article argues that the sidelining of the novel in the reception of Johnson’s work is attributable more to its unusual publication mode than to any lack of artistic merit. After providing perspectives on the circumstances that surrounded Johnson’s creation of the novel, the article goes on to substantiate and scrutinise the novel’s modernist display of innovative temporalities and spatialities as well as its satirical sophistication. The article concludes that the novel deserves recognition for its original depiction of the fractured reality of wartime as it is lived and felt hundreds of kilometres from the core war zone.

This article explores heteropian, utopian and dystopian places in Erlend O. Nødtvedt’s 2017 novel, Vestlandet , in order to better understand how the author uses references to regional historical and contemporary figures and events to construct what Edward Said labeled a cultural archive in a larger anti-imperialist project. Language, landscape, and identity form the core of Nødtvedt’s project. This raucously humorous novel activates the Foucauldian heteropias of indefinitely accumulating time and of the festival, as well as Marc Augé’s notion of the non-place in order to comment upon the perceived cultural and political divide between western and eastern Norway.