When Grundtvig Fell in Love

Feature: When Grundtvig fell in Love (and why it matters)

By Brad Busbee

Today being Valentine's Day and this being Church and Life, a publication dedicated to the Grundtvigian tradition, it makes sense to look at a time in the life of N.F.S. Grundtvig when love changed him and, eventually, came to influence the idea of Danishness. When Grundtvig fell in love, he became the Grundtvig we know today.

The year was 1805. Having completed his studies in Copenhagen in 1803 and spent the intervening years as a divinity graduate student, partly at his brother’s rectory and partly at home in Udby, N.S.F. Grundtvig became a tutor on the island of Langeland at the estate of a country gentleman named Karl Steensen de Leth. The experience would change his life.

At twenty-two years old, Grundtvig had always been socially awkward. The Copenhagen years and, later, the social life surrounding his brother’s rectory had taught him how to conduct himself in society, but he was entirely unprepared for his encounter with Constance de Leth, the lady of Egelykke. Constance was about six years older than Grundtvig. She was not at all a noteworthy or distinguished person, but she was beautiful, cheerful, and warm, and she had a lively sense of humor. Above all, she had literary interests, and she became a member of the reading group that Grundtvig organized among the local clergy.

Grundtvig arrived at Egelykke with a theory that love was just a joke - and he left as a hopeful romantic. In his youth he had been inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment, and he had come to place great emphasis on human reason. But sweeping across Europe was Germanic Romanticism, a movement emphasizing emotion and imagination rather than reason. In the winter of 1802-03, Grundtvig had attended lectures by his cousin Henrik Steffens in Copenhagen about a “historico-poetic” view of human life. Steffens’s lectures had a lasting impact on many of those present, including some of the greatest minds of 19^th Century Denmark, men like the poet Adam Oehlenschläger and the physicist H. C. Ørsted. Grundtvig, however, had left unaffected. He had listened with skeptical wonder and even laughed outright at some of Steffens’s ideas. Central to the movement was Johan Wolfgang von Goethe's tale of obsessive unrequited love, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), in which the young lover experiences profound despair and eventually commits suicide. Across Europe, the book had given rise to the "Werther Period"; young men looked to the novel as a model for how rejected lovers might behave. Grundtvig outwardly scorned these aspects of Romanticism, but he absorbed them and put them away where they lay ready to germinate when the time came.

That time came in the winter of 1805. On December 5^th and 12^th, he wrote in his diary:

Now the time had come. I saw a woman, and I, love's coldest and bitterest contemner loved at first sight, as deeply, as ardently, as is possible for a mortal. The past vanished before my eyes, or, rather, coalesced with the present, which appeared in the form of my beloved. Yes, I have lived, lived in this world and encompassed all around me with love, because all seemed to exist for the sake of one and to revolve about the one point where my thoughts and feelings converged. Yet brief was this bliss, for I needed only to know that I loved to become as unhappy as I could be. The decencies stood as an unscalable wall between us, and nature had in addition set a yawning gulf between our existences. (quoted from Koch, p. 19)

S.A.J. Bradley, who also translated these pages from Grundtvig’s journal, notes that the style is uncharacteristically florid and that ten pages are missing from the end of the entry. Were those missing pages ripped out in a moment of crisis or were they removed years later in reflective embarrassment? Whatever the case, the language of the passage is a rare instance of Grundtvig struggling between rational thought and previously unimaginable romantic emotion. Elsewhere in his journal, he writes, "I dare not, cannot fling myself back into the purposeless stream where ordinary people roll along like leaves in a brook. Either I must hope for new power from above, or, like a stone in the water, sink and be scoffed at by leaves and sicks which wonder why I do not float as they do" (Koch p. 21). While we can never know whether Grundtvig was ever actually in danger of self harm, as the passage seems to suggest, it is clear that he quickly turns back to his faith in God, writing, "Now for the first time do I hear the heavenly spirit speak plainly through [the Apostle] Paul: when all shall have passed away, there still remain faith, hope, and love" (Koch p. 21).

Grundtvig kept his feelings secret as far as he could. At the time, even Constance herself was hardly aware, or at least did not realize, the storm she'd caused in Grundtvig's heart. Every year until Constance's death in 1827, Grundtvig sent her a birthday letter. We wouldn’t have known about the depths of his feelings for her if his diaries hadn’t been preserved. After all, Grundtvig moved on and was happily married three times, first to Elisabeth Blicher in 1818, with whom he had three children. The same year that Elisabeth died, Grundtvig married his second wife, Marie Toft, who died in childbirth, and he married his third wife, Asta Reedtz, years later when he was 75! There is no evidence that he didn't love them all.

The question remains: why is so much attention given to Grundtvig’s love crisis of 1805? Such feelings are, of course, part of the human experience. At some point, most of us feel the pain of unrequited love. Why should Grundtvig’s experience be unique? Why does it matter? Yes, Grundtvig was changed by it, but most of us emerge from such experiences changed.

The answer is that for inheritors of the Grundtvigian tradition, like many of the readers of this publication, the implications are broad and deep. It’s commonly believed that Grundtvig might never have become a poet without the experience. Before his encounter with Constance Leth, he hadn't written anything particularly literary. For Danes today, a world without Grundtvig's hymns, poems, and songs would be a sad, grey place: In fact, of the 791 hymns in the Danish Hymnbook (2002), 253 are his. Edward Broadbridge points out that "Grundtvig's hymns and songs were part of the spiritual luggage that accompanied the emigrants" to North America (p. 19). The first edition of the Danish-American Songbook from 1888, edited by Grundtvig's son Frederick (by his second wife), contained 58 songs by Grundtvig out of a total 352. These are just a few examples of the influential energy generated by this private incident in 1805.

In 1939, the poet and playwright Kaj Munk wrote Egelykke, a play about this episode in Grundtvig’s life. In the introduction, Munk describes the gravity of the event in Grundtvig's formation:

He built his faith on nothing,

But in his mind were hope and peril met

In combat which well-nigh burst the battle ring.

While he lay crushed there in exhaustion's grip,

Life came to him, the riddle of life itself,

And gave its name as Love. (p. 100)

Elsewhere, Munk wrote that Constance was "den Kvinde, som gjorde Grundtvig til Grundtvig" (the woman who made Grundtvig into Grundtvig, Nationaltidende, 1941). We might go a step further and say that this incident awakened in Grundtvig passions that intensified his love of God and the people of Denmark. He came to realize that human beings have forces deep within them that they don't know are there. Of these, the most powerful force is love, an awesome, divine spark that can be seen in his preaching, his poems, his essays, and his educational theories that contributed to the conduct and ideology of the Danish people, possibly more than any other Dane in history.

Texts Cited (and further reading):

Broadbridge, Edward, translator and editor. Living WellSprings: The Hymns, Songs, and Poems of N.F.S. Grundtvig. Aarhus University Press, 2015.

Bradley, S.A.J., translator and editor. N.F.S. Grundtvig: A Life Recalled: An Anthology of Biographical Source-Texts. Aarhus University Press,

           2008.

Koch, Hal. Grundtvig, translated by Llewellen Jones, Antioch Press, 1952.

Munk, Kaj. Egelykke, in Scandinavian Plays of the Twentieth Century, translated by Llewellen Jones, Princeton University Press for the American-Scandinavian foundation, 1961.

Munk, Kaj. "To Mennesker mødes.“ Nationaltidende, February, 3, 1941.