About the most well-known Stories
Knud Sørensen on Blicher's stories
By : Knud Sørensen
Blicher was forty-one when, in February 1824, he published his first attempt to tell a story in prose. Until then he had been recognised as a poet, and the short story was not yet accepted as a genre in Danish literary circles; but he was short of money and had agreed to supply material for a magazine entitled Readersī Fruits, designed for the literate middle classes and the increasing number of readers in rural districts following upon the Primary Education Act of 1814. It was primarily entertaining and seldom featured anything of literary merit.
Fragments from the Diary of a Parish Clerk
was the first result of Blicherīs endeavours, and chiefly responsible for the year 1824 becoming famous in retrospect for the breakthrough of Danish prose.
Blicher may possibly have got the idea for the title and genre from a story translated from the English and subtitled "Extracts from the Diary of a Poor English Country Parson"; this had been published a couple of years previously, without mention of the authorīs name, in a volume of Readersī Fruits to which Blicher had contributed some poems. Precisely the diary form, told in the first person, was ideal for Blicher the poet, who was yet to become the narrator; here he was able to leave his readers to connect up the snatches of narrative to form a plot.
When the story was collected in book form nine years later Blicher made several changes and abbreviated the title to The Diary of a Parish Clerk. It is the latter edition from 1833 that has been used in this selection.
Blicher partially modelled his heroine on an authentic person, the noblewoman Marie Grubbe, 1640-1718, of Thiele Manor. Her life took a socially downhill course and was known to Blicher from older sources. He has likewise known Thiele Manor between Viborg and Randers, where his father had been a private tutor.
But Blicher was not interested in historical authenticity; he created his own chief female protagonist, Miss Sophie, and transferred the action to 1708-1753, during which period the narrator, Morten Vinge, son of the parish clerk from Føulum, writes his diary. Denmarkīs war against Sweden on the side of Russia 1709-20 influences Morten Vingeīs fate.
The Gamekeeper at Aunsbjerg
from 1839 is based on Blicherīs childhood experiences during his more or less enforced stays at the manor. Built on two factual though entirely disconnected events the execution of a servant for killing his sweetheart and the death of a gamekeeper, one Vilhelm Johansen, who had been thrown from his horse the plot itself is nevertheless purely fictitious.
Though the story refers to the gamekeeper as Vilhelm, the reader is immediately informed that he was in fact French. He had come to Denmark as orderly for a Danish general who had been serving under the French flag during the Seven Yearsī War (in which Prussia and England were fighting France and her allies) when Frederick the Great of Prussia routed the French at Rossbach, Thuringia (1757). At the end of the story, after his death, his full name, Guillaume de Martonniere, is revealed, while the existence of some letters that might possibly throw light on his previous life is hinted at.
Alas, How Changed!
was initially published in the journal Northern Lights, of which Blicher was then co-editor. The story was printed in October 1828 and signed "P.Sp.".
"P.Sp." stands for Peer Spillemand (Peer the Fiddler) a pseudonym Blicher adopted when he wished to bring the more jovial, satirical and cynical side of his personality to bear. He even has Peer criticise some of Steen Steensen Blicherīs proposals for reforming society!
The story was written at a time when Blicher was somewhat despondent and had a fellow feeling for the pastor he describes the one-time bel esprit who, like Blicher himself, "lived in a quiet, tucked-away spot in the north of Jutland". This he intimates when the narrator asks his old friend how many children he has. "One for each finger", he replies, expressing how difficult it was to keep them in clothes, while "to send any of them away to study would be quite out of the question."
Ten children! That was what Blicher himself was responsible for at the time the story was written.
The Hosier and His Daughter,
published in Northern Lights in January 1829, is still like The Diary of a Parish Clerk one of Blicherīs most popular stories. However different they may be, both embrace a conflict between love and the social order and reveal a fundamentally tragic view of life. But whereas the latter is set in the past, the former is set in Blicherīs own time among the farming community he knew and understood so well. In the surrounding moorlands a home knitting industry chiefly devoted to stockings had sprung up, and many such travelling "hosiers" made a considerable income from selling their wares in Copenhagen or Hamburg.
The story is an example of the poetic realism wherein Blicherīs especial strength lies; brief lyrical descriptions of the moorland scenery contrast starkly with human trouble and suffering and lend the story its special character its balance and perspective.
The Pastor of Vejlbye
was printed in Northern Lights in May 1829, subtitled "A Crime Story".
With the exception of an important appendix it is again written in diary form and based on an authentic event. In 1626 Pastor Søren Qvist of Vejlbye near Grenå was sentenced to death, on the basis of the circumstantial evidence, for having killed his coachman, Jesper Hovgaard, in 1607. After his execution one of his sons bored deeper into the case, and during the course of a new trial in 1634 it came to light that the chief witness and one other had committed perjury. Both were sentenced to death.
Out of this authentic account Blicher creates a tragedy unusually compelling because, unlike its historical model, he makes the pastor confess to a crime for which he is wrongfully accused. Psychologically speaking, it is Søren Qvistīs belief in the social order, and first and foremost in the God he serves, that makes it impossible for him not to submit to the charge and the alleged proof. It must have been so, otherwise the almighty God would have intervened.
Some weighty evidence has been produced to the effect that, via a summary in Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence from 1874 by the American S.M. Philips, The Pastor of Vejlbye gave Mark Twain the idea for some of the episodes in Tom Sawyer, Detective, first published in Harperīs Magazine in 1896.
Tardy Awakening
(Northern Lights, March 1828), like The Diary of a Parish Clerk, is characterized by the ambivalence between the narratorīs voice and the authorīs own standpoint. Superficially a condemnatory description of double adultery, but below the surface a description of a bigoted, closed society in which inquisitive outrage covers over envy and jealousy, the story shocked Blicherīs contemporaries. Particularly the sections not related by the storyteller, consisting of "documentary" letters from Elise to her lover and portraying a woman who has the courage to live out her feelings, were difficult to stomach at the time.
The Three Festival Eves
is one of Blicherīs late stories, printed for the first time in a Danish popular almanac for 1841. It strikingly conveys a change in Blicherīs own conception of himself as writer and "social critic".
Whereas in the much earlier story The Hosier and His Daughter Blicher clearly addresses the educated reader, telling him or her about the countryside and the peasantry who inhabit it before getting round to the story itself, in The Three Festival Eves Blicher presumes that the reader knows the milieu, and narrates the story from the peasantsī point of view, employing their traditional narrative form. He has become the writer who writes about and for the people.
Blicher sets the story in a past speckled with villeins and bands of outlaws, but his motive for doing so was extremely topical. From 1836 onwards Blicher was busy working for a federation between Denmark, Sweden and Norway, for a free constitution and for general armament of the entire population. Its partial aim was to strengthen Denmark in relation to Germany, whom Blicher then regarded as a threat, and whose national turmoil subsequently led to the so-called Three Yearsī War of 1848-50, in which an attempt by Schleswig-Holstein to detach itself from Denmark was supported by Prussia and other German states. Whereas Blicher had hitherto regarded the absolute monarchy as the pillar of society, he now placed all future hope in the people; it is Strong Sejer, the representative of the people, who displays strength and drive and becomes the saviour of society.
Blicher is not only regarded as Denmarkīs first important short-story writer, but also as the writer who widened the literary, and thereby also the general conception of Denmark to include the Jutland countryside and its people. He will also go down in Danish history as having helped to generate the national will that led to the bloodless revolution of 1848 and a free constitution the following year.
He himself never came to experience the fulfilment of his political dreams. He died in Spentrup on 26 March 1848.
Knud Sørensen is a Danish author.
The article was first published in The Diary of a Parish Clerk, London 1996
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