Ole Lund Kirkegaard (1940-1979) was the
children's writer. The predominant theme of all his books is the relationship
between children and adults. With insight and well-chosen exaggeration he
depicts children's experience of a world full of small and large adventures –
and full of unsympathetic grown-ups.
In 1967 he published Lille Virgil [Little Virgil], the first of a series of humorous
books for children. These are books that have reached the status of classics,
the favourites of many children both in Denmark and in numerous countries where
they have been published.
Ole Lund Kirkegaard writes himself into
children's literary history like a modern Mark Twain, his figures are close
relations of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. And yet this is his own universe:
at once both timeless and indefinable – they are set in Kalleby, in Pjort – or
some other small town. It is characteristic of just about all the stories to be
played out in small communities where everyone knows each other.
Through both text and illustrations he
manages to create a wonderfully strange universe, where the children portrayed
are not good and nicely brought up children. On the contrary, his leading
characters are children who preserve their naivity and curiosity. The
experiences and views of the children are what matter – and which lead to a
series of humorous and grotesque situations when the children's world clashes
with well-regulated adult one.
Within these 'ordinary' settings are
enacted big and small adventures. The magical form and the longing for
adventure are most strongly present in Albert
(1968) and Hodja fra Pjort [Hodja
from Pjort] (1970). In both these the anti-naïve hero is the leading character:
Albert, who dreams of being a pirate – and sails down the stream in a barrel to
explore the world outside Kalleby. And Hodja, who wants so much to see the
world beyond Pjort, gets a flying carpet to make his dreams come true. Both
boys come from a world full of grown-ups trying to cheat the children. But as
in all good stories it is the good naïve hero who beats the villains.
In Little Virgil (1967) the reader is
introduced to Ole Lund Kirkegaard's magical universe for the first time. The
story is told in a number of brief episodes in which Little Virgil with his
friends Oskar and Carl Emil meets with one grotesque adventure after the other:
they try to find a mate for 'the one and only stork', who has landed on the
grocer's shop roof – and end up by causing problems for the grocer when they
borrow a goose from the sharp-tongued Mrs Madsen. They discover a dragon with
two heads – and when no one believes them they take it to school – to the
terror of their teacher. All their experiences are the kind grown-ups would
call crazy pranks. They are always getting into trouble with the conventional
adult world. But they are never blamed in any way, neither by the author or
most of the grown-ups in the story.
