BERGEN IN THE HISTORY OF NORWEGIAN LITERATURE

The city of Bergen, founded in 1070, was first and foremost a transit harbour, with facilities for storage and export of dried fish, and for import of goods from the Continent and the British Isles. The royal residence and the clerical and civil centre of administration were situated at Holmen (today known as the Castle of Bergenhus) at the mouth of the harbour. And this is where the literary history of Bergen begins, in the 11^th century, with the monks, the clergymen and the royal clerks who worked here. They wrote sermons, translated French lyrical epics about wandering knights into Norse prose, and made copies of royal laws and decrees.

They wrote with pen and ink on parchment, using the "insural" or Anglo-Saxon script, but the older rune script, scratched into wood or stone, continued to be in use. When parts of Bryggen (the Wharf), the tenements on the east side of the Bergen harbour were excavated after a fire in 1955, the archaeologists found more than 500 slates and wooden sticks with inscriptions in runes. One of these was a Norse love poem that included a quote from Ovid in Latin. The Norwegian poet was anonymous, like most of his contemporaries.

Bergen did not for long keep its status as the royal residence in an independent North Sea power. In the 14^th century the administration was moved to Oslo. The country entered into a union with Denmark, and German merchants, the Hanseatic League, took over most of the foreign trade. The first "modern" author writing in and about Bergen complained bitterly about the loss of independence and about what to him seemed to be the foreigners’ economic exploitation of the city. (Modern historians tend to take a more balanced view of the role of the Hanseatic League.) This author was the teacher of theology Absalon Pederssønn Beyer (1528-1575), whose Diary is one of our main sources of knowledge of daily life in Bergen at the time. He describes a small town of less than 10,000 inhabitants with several hundred taprooms. There was much drunkenness, and brawls – some of them ending fatally – were common occurrences.

In contrast to this, the poetess Dorothe Engelbretsdatter (1634-1716) wrote pious hymns about sin, repentance and salvation, using imagery drawn from her life as a housewife and mother. She became so popular that in 1684 the King of Denmark and Norway awarded her exemption from taxation – the first modern "poet’s pension" in Norwegian literary history.

1684 was also the year that the scholar and dramatist Ludvig Holberg was born. He left Bergen when he was 19 years old, and, after travelling for some years in Europe, spent the rest of his life as a professor in Copenhagen, where he died in 1754. He is often referred to as "the father of Danish literature" and his comedies, strongly influenced by Molière, take place in a Danish setting; but some of the central characters in these plays are clearly marked by Holberg’s memories of daily life in the town where he was born. He also wrote a History of Bergen and a science fiction novel, Niels Klim, where the hero’s journey to a world inside the earth starts in a cave in Bergen.

In the course of the 18^th century, Norway’s economic strength grew steadily and made the country’s role in the union with Denmark a more equal one. In Bergen, Norwegian merchants took control of the foreign trade. Together with high-ranking civil servants, this class constituted the base of a cultural public with strong European ties. By the end of the century, Bergen had an amateur symphonic orchestra performing contemporary European music, e.g. symphonies by Joseph Haydn, and an amateur dramatic society with its own 900-seat theatre. (The building was destroyed in a bomb attack in 1944). A major figure in the cultural life of the town was the author Claus Fasting (1746-1791), a humanitarian public prosecutor and the editor of the periodical Provincial Blade (Provincial Papers), where he published excerpts from French Enlightenment writers.

In 1850 the famous violinist Ole Bull (1810-1880) founded the first Norwegian national theatre in Bergen, using the building from 1800. The young Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) learnt the dramatic trade there: he was engaged as a playwright and instructor at the theatre from 1851 to 1857. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832-1910) was the managing director of the theatre from 1857 to 1859, and wrote the Norwegian national anthem ("Ja, vi elsker dette landet") during his stay in Bergen.

The second half of the 19^th century saw the town being transformed into a modern industrial city with growing class antagonism and social unrest. The population rose from 26,500 in 1855 to 78,000 in 1914. The greatest literary name among those writing about and describing the town is Amalie Skram (1846-1906). If she had written in a major language, she would today have ranked among the greatest realists of the 19^th century. Her main work, Hellemyrsfolket (The People of Hellemyren), published in four volumes between 1887and 1898, is written with a naturalistic approach, and relates the story of a Bergen family through four generations. This work displays Skram’s characteristically vivid descriptions of daily life, her intimate knowledge of work and trade as well as her strong awareness of the sources of social conflict and individual fate.

The journalist and playwright Nordahl Grieg, born in Bergen in 1902 and killed in a bomber plane over Berlin in 1943, was the first Norwegian dramatist to break with the Ibsen tradition and make use of fast-changing, contrasting scenes in the mode of Eisenstein’s Soviet films. One of his plays, Vår ære og vår makt (Our honour and our glory, 1935), is set in Bergen during the First World War, when neutral Norwegian ships were sunk by German submarines and hundreds of seamen were killed, while some ship-owners hauled in enormous profits.

The economic and social history of modern Bergen serves as a background in the novels of Kåre Fasting (1907-1983). His work has been neglected by literary critics and historians, but a TV producer would find that they are structured in a way that makes them an excellent starting point for a television series of high quality. Fasting’s contemporary, Torborg Nedreaas (1906-1987), is a Bergen writer who ranks among the most popular and widely read Norwegian novelists of the 20^th century. She adopted a feminist approach long before feminism was re-discovered about 1970. She hated Fascism and oppression, and in her short stories she defended the young girls who were despised for consorting with German soldiers. In the novel Av måneskinn gror det ingenting (Nothing grows out of moonlight, 1947), shows how blind love leads a young girl into degradation and despair. Her main work, however, is a series of short stories and novels about a girl growing up in Bergen in the years around the First World War, in a middle-class family situated between luxury homes on the one hand and poor tenement houses on the other. The titles are Trylleglasset (The magic glass, 1950), Stoppested (Stopping places, 1953), Musikk fra en blå brønn (Music from a blue well, 1960) and Ved neste nymåne (At the next new moon, 1971).

Many writers live and work in today's Bergen. Among those with a high national standing are the poet, essayist and professor of rhetorics Georg Johannesen (b. 1931), and the playwright and novelist Cecilie Løveid (b. 1951). Two others have achieved a European standing, with several translations and performances. The crime writer Gunnar Staalesen (b. 1947) is being presented as a crime writer in a separate article in this programme. He has also dramatized Amalie Skrams Hellemyrsfolket (see above) and made a major play out of it. This year will appear the third part of a novel trilogy describing Bergen in the 20th century - from New Year's Eve 1900 to the same evening in the year 1999. The first two volumes were 1900. Morgenrød ("1900. Sunrise", 1997) and 1950. High Noon (1998). The playwright Jon Fosse (1959) has had several plays translated and performed on European stages. They have little likeness to the Ibsen-tradition or to the political theatre of Nordahl Grieg; their impact rests with the poetic qualities of the semi-realistic dialogue. The main titles are Namnet ("The Name", 1995), Nokon kjem til å komme ("Someone is Going to Come", 1996) and Barnet ("The Child", 1997). For his novels, Melancholia I-II, 1995-1996 must be mentioned as a highlight.

Willy Dahl
professor emeritus,
formerly professor of Scandinavian literature at the Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literature, University of Bergen.