N.F.S.Grundtvig: Educationist Extraordinary

The School for Life, 2011

To say something pertinent about the acceptance of N.F.S. Grundtvig's work outside of Denmark, two areas of interest immediately spring to mind: (1) the reception of his educational ideas as documented by important writings on or related to adult education or lifelong learning, with a focus on those by writers who have read his work, and (2) the same reception as seen in action by the establishment of People's High Schools (a principal outcome of Grundtvig's educational philosophy) in non-Danish countries. Such a division, in fact, mirrors the same specialization that has occurred in Denmark. As Korsgaard (2002b) pointed out, most of the Danish publications about the educational ideas of Grundtvig can be divided into two approaches: the theoretical (pedagogical thoughts) and the practical (the Grundtvigian People's High School). He also emphasized:

The Bridge, 1995

Scandinavian Studies, 2005

This dissertation is a study on monsters, marginalization and dehumanization in the learned tradition of Icelandic saga writers in the Middle Ages. Its theoretical frame rests on the foundation of social constructionism, feminist philosophy and dehumanization studies and is thus in keeping with similar studies on continental literature. The method is a mixture of the history of ideas and literary criticism, and the preferred method of source-criticism is to view them as remnants of contemporary mentalities and ideologies. The study views the period from the advent of writing in Iceland down to the Reformation year 1550, but most of the sources taken into consideration are in their oldest form extant in 14th and 15th century manuscripts. Younger sources are also used for comparison, from the end of the 16th century all the way to the 20th. Thus in some respects this is a longitudinal study, though the bulk of its analysis rests in the 14th century. A comparison is made between the ideas of monsters found in European books of learning and the ones found in similar books written in Iceland. The results of that comparison are then used as basis for an analysis of the following Icelandic sagas: Þorvalds þáttr víðförla, Eiríks saga víðförla, Yngvars saga víðförla, Eiríks saga rauða, Grænlendinga saga, Ketils saga hængs, Gríms saga loðinkinna, Örvar-Odds saga, Áns saga bogsveigis, Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, as well as all sagas which portray blámenn to a greater or lesser degree. The main findings of the study are that pre-racial discourse is found in a substantial amount of medieval Icelandic manuscripts. In them Nordic oral tradition is mixed with European encyclopedic tradition so that it is difficult to distinguish between them, yet it is clear that the ecclesiastic ideology that separated people into men and monsters based on origin, religion and appearance was well known to Icelandic writers and employed extensively. In this their attempts to redefine Iceland is also apparent, to move Iceland from the periphery and bring it closer to the center of Christian Europe. Thus monsters offer a unique insight into the self-image of Icelanders, as their social, religious and biological opposities in all respects.

1700-tal: Nordic Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2024

Tacitus' Germania was translated into Danish twice in the 1790s, first by the historian and jurist Gustav Ludvig Baden (1764-1839) in 1795, and then by his father, the professor of rhetoric Jacob Baden (1735-1805) in 1797. Both translations can be understood as part of a sustained effort to introduce Tacitean and other concepts from classical literature to enrich philosophical reasoning in the vernacular. The politics of the translations were radically at odds. Through the rhetorical use of conceptual vocabulary, exhaustive footnotes, and an unstable temporality, G. L. Baden constructed a narrative of a democratic republican and rationalist 'golden age' relevant for contemporary Denmark-Norway. Jacob Baden's foreignizing translation was a conservative response. It employed a stable modern historicity which separated the 'golden age' from the barbarous reality of northern antiquity. The article raises the question of the significance of oblique argument in the constrained Danish-Norwegian public sphere of the 1790s. The form of G. L. Baden's translation is characterised by a temporal and linguistic strategic ambiguity. This provided a veil of deniability for the translator, but the translation was clearly understood to be a radical polemic, eliciting reactions in the public sphere.

2002

N.F.S. Grundtvig was a priest, historian, poet, and founder of the Danish Folk High School. He believed that education for adults should be geared to adults and wanted schools to be independent of the church. Grundtvig was among the first to call for Denmark's schools to use the native Danish language. Grundtvig believed that each group or culture of people who shared the same language had its own national spirit or folk's spirit that should allow for free and fruitful interaction between generations and all social classes. He advocated establishing folk schools that would cater exclusively to the life experiences of adults, and he envisioned the folk school's mission as helping students think for themselves, learn to distinguish between true and false values, provide useful subjects that students wanted to know, and arouse students' interest and widen their horizon with a new view of the world. According to Grundtvig, folk schools would include time for individual work in a library, and conversations. Grundtvig's influence extended to the United States, where he also influenced the work of several specialists in adult education, including Malcolm Knowles, Martin Knowlton, Olive Campbell, and Myles Horton and the development of institutions such as Ashland College, Elderhostel, Campbell Folk School and Highlander Folk School. (Contains 12 references.) (MN) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.