Esaias Tegner Biography

Esaias Tegnér (Kyrkerud, Värmland 13 November 1782 (1782-11-13) – 2 November 1846 (1846-11-03)), was a Swedish writer, professor of Greek language, and bishop. He was during the 19th century regarded as the father of modern poetry in Sweden, mainly through the national romantique epos Frithjof's Saga. He has been called Sweden's first modern man. Much is known about him, and he also wrote openly about himself.

The majority of the many poems from Tegnér in his little room in Lund are short, but some are in lyrics. They are today shown to visitors as the Tegnér museum. His celebrated Song to the Sun dates from 1817. He completed three poems of a more ambitious character, on which his fame chiefly rests. Of these, two, the romance of Axel (1822) and the delicately-chiselled idyl of Nattvardsbarnen ("The First Communion," 1820), translated by Longfellow, take a secondary place in comparison with Tegnér's masterpiece, of worldwide fame.

In 1819 he also became a member of the distinguished Swedish Academy, on seat 8.

Claim to recognition

In 1820 he published in Iduna fragments of an epic on which he was working: Frithjof's saga (The Story of Frithiof). In 1822 he published five more cantos, and in 1825 the entire poem. Already before its last canto it was famous throughout Europe; the aged Goethe took up his pen to commend to his countrymen this "alte, kräftige, gigantischbarbarische Dichtart," and desired Amalie von Imhoff to translate it into German. This romantic paraphrase of an ancient saga was composed in twenty-four cantos, all differing in verse form, modelled somewhat, it is only fair to say, on an earlier Danish masterpiece, the Helge of Oehlenschläger.

Frithjof's saga was during the 19th century the best known of all Swedish productions; it is said to have been translated twenty-two times into English, twenty times into German, and once at least into every European language. It is far from satisfying the demands of more recent antiquarian research, but it still is allowed to give the freshest existing impression, in imaginative form, of life in early Scandinavia. In later years Tegnér began, but left unfinished, two important epical poems, Gerda and Kronbruden.