The Boys from the Stone Fortress

By : Bjarne Dalsgaard Svendsen

There were three great men (plus a couple of women, but it is the men we are talking about now) who especially influenced twentieth-century children’s literature in Denmark. Gunnar Jørgensen (the Flemming books), Torry Gredsted (Paw, etc.) and Thøger Birkeland.
   The Flemming books, which were in print up into the 1970s (!) are among the most odious children’s books ever published. Under the drippingly sentimental motto, italicised at the front of all ten volumes Strive! – with the powerful arm of love, Gunnar Jørgensen dumped such a huge bucket of guilt on his readers that no one has entirely surmounted his books. I remember a particularly cheap shot in which Flemming’s father says “The dark circles your mother has had under her eyes for the past few months are due in no mean account, my boy, to you.” (Cited from memory). Flemming is blamed for his mother’s illness! I cannot imagine anything more awful. (It should be mentioned in passing that Gunnar Jørgensen never distanced himself from the men in his books – so, the father’s words were Gunnar Jørgensen’s own words).

Torry Gredsted did not write as well as Gunnar Jørgensen (who wrote brilliantly, Herman Bang-inspired as he was). Nevertheless, he was able to put together some exciting stories. Paw (Paw) and Paw in the Primeval Forest (Paw i urskoven) were each in their way beautiful, discerning books – though with a dose of refined arch-romanticism. Some of his other books were certainly well-conceived and exotic but, in hindsight, rather militant in its viewpoints. A man was a man and a boy was someone who followed the rules – that is, the men threw the dice every time. And if the boy did not accept it, he was a scoundrel who was abducted, laughed at or deservedly abandoned. That is the way it was – no discussion. Good, old-fashioned Horatio Alger morality. Even the most hard-hearted boy readers could fall for that trap. It was this unfortunate tradition that Thøger Birkeland did battle with in his first, now unassailable book, The Boys from the Stone Fortress. Thøger Birkeland did not flaunt any maudlin mother fixation. He did not browbeat with his youthful readers with any fascistic cult of the father. No, he wrote a book that had two boys as its main characters, probably for the first time in Danish literature), living with their single mother. He wrote in an unobtrusive and intuitive style about the older boy’s attempts to get work and bring a little money home – and the younger boy, who together with his friends fought against the “Castles,” another clique of boys. And he wrote – and has always written – without Astrid Lindgren’s “lost paradise” sentimentality.

To my way of thinking, it was then and there that Danish children’s literature moved away from being the so-called adult author’s unacknowledged therapy sessions, worship of authority – or simply pseudo-didactic nonsense – toward defining itself as an independent branch of literature. Of course, many good books for children were written before The Boys from the Stone Fortress, but it was with this book that a new era of children’s literature was ushered in.
   I have it from the horse’s mouth that 1,000 copies of the book were issued when it was first published (not many for a children’s book at that time) – and it was reviewed in only one newspaper, the Communist daily Land og Folk, which allowed that the solidarity among the boys was fine and well described. It has never been reprinted and probably never will be. And, perhaps, that is okay, because as the debut it was, it is not without weaknesses. Still, it deserves to have its title reproduced correctly, because it was the book that founded children’s literature in Denmark and deserves to be considered as one of the world’s finest.

Excerpt from Politiken, 30 March 2002

Translated by Russell Dees