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© 2025. All rights reserved.
Site created with
Hakyll.
Modified theme
lanyon-hakyll
based on
Lanyon.
J.P. Jacobsen, trans. Tiina Nunnally (Penguin, 2006)
PHI 423 — Wednesday, March 25, 2026
You are not expected to read all 187 pages of Niels Lyhne before class. Read the three chunks below. Within each chunk, some passages require close attention; others can be read more lightly — the notes below will tell you which is which.
Chunk 1 — Origins and the loss of faith: Chapters I–IV (pp. 1–40)
Chunk 2 — Love, women, and the examined atheism: Chapters VI–IX, excerpts (pp. 49–107) > Read carefully: pp. 59–68 (Chapter VII), pp. 87–107 (Chapter IX). Read lightly: pp. 49–58 (Chapter VI).
Chunk 3 — The reckoning: Chapters XI–XIV, excerpts (pp. 125–187) > Read carefully: pp. 125–132, pp. 138–140, pp. 160–187. Skim: pp. 132–138, pp. 140–159.
These five themes are the main threads we will follow in seminar. They overlap — that is intentional. The most important passages in the novel sit precisely at the intersections.
1. Romantic imagination and its discontents. From the opening pages, Niels Lyhne is a novel about a particular way of inhabiting the world: through poetry, idealization, and longing for a reality more beautiful than the one available. Bartholine wants to live inside a poem. Niels inherits this orientation. Jacobsen’s central question is whether this romantic imagination is a gift, an affliction, or both — and what it costs the people around those who possess it.
2. Love, marriage, and disillusionment. The novel’s structure is essentially a series of disillusionment — Bartholine’s marriage, Niels’s love for Fru Boye, Fennimore and Erik’s marriage, Niels and Gerda. Each follows the same arc: an ideal is projected onto a person or a future, and reality fails to sustain it. But Jacobsen is not simply cynical about love; he is trying to understand what it means to love honestly, without the protective veil of idealization.
3. The idealization of women — and women’s response to it. Several of the novel’s women see clearly what Niels cannot: that the male habit of placing women on a pedestal is not reverence but a form of control, and that the pedestal and the fall from it are the same gesture. This theme emerges most explicitly in the Chapter VII conversation with Fru Boye and in Fennimore’s speech in Chapter XI. Pay attention to how much the women in this novel understand that the men do not.
4. Life without God: atheism as a way of living, not just believing. Niels Lyhne is often described as the great Scandinavian novel of atheism. But what Jacobsen is interested in is not the intellectual position — Niels loses his faith easily enough in Chapter IV — but whether atheism can be sustained as a way of living. Dr. Hjerrild (Chapter IX) articulates the challenge directly: it is one thing to hold atheism as a belief; it is another to inhabit a world without consolation when life actually demands it. This theme anticipates twentieth-century existentialism, especially the emphasis on authenticity and the absence of any external framework that gives life meaning.
5. Facing death without consolation. Death in Niels Lyhne is not metaphorical. Edele dies; Bartholine dies; Gerda dies; their child dies; Niels himself dies. Each death is a test of what the characters actually believe when they can no longer protect themselves with ideas. Gerda’s deathbed recantation — she had accepted Niels’s atheism; dying, she reaches back for a priest — is the novel’s most tormenting scene, and it concentrates everything else Jacobsen has been asking into a single, unanswerable image.
The novel opens not with Niels but with his mother, Bartholine Blid, as a young woman. Jacobsen’s portrait of her is saturated with a particular kind of romantic longing — the longing to live inside a poem rather than in the world as it actually is. Pay attention to the quality of Bartholine’s inner life: the books she reads, the fantasies she cultivates, the way she relates to beauty and nature. She is the first of the novel’s many characters who inhabit what we might call an “illusion-world.”
Questions to consider: What does Bartholine want from life? In what sense is her desire specifically aesthetic or literary? How does Jacobsen’s prose style — lyrical, hovering, sensuous — mirror the consciousness he is describing?
When Bartholine marries the elder Lyhne, she discovers that he is simply a man — an ordinary, limited, earthbound human being. The marriage that was supposed to fulfill her romantic dreams instead reveals the gap between the world of imagination and the world of fact. This is the novel’s first enactment of a pattern that will repeat throughout: the collision between an ideal and reality, between what one dreams and what one gets.
Questions to consider: How does Jacobsen describe Bartholine’s disillusionment? Is it presented as a failure of her imagination, a failure of reality, or something more ambiguous? What does it mean that this disillusionment happens before we even meet the novel’s protagonist?
On page 15 we are introduced to two figures who will shape Niels’s early development: his aunt Edele Lyhne and his tutor Herr Bigum. Edele functions for Niels as his first vision of female erotic beauty — she is beautiful, remote, a little melancholy, and thoroughly idealized. Read her introduction with attention to how Jacobsen renders her through Niels’s eyes.
Herr Bigum is a magnificently drawn figure of comic-tragic self-delusion. He is convinced that he is one of the greatest thinkers in the history of philosophy — so great, in fact, that the ordinary business of writing down one’s thoughts in books is beneath him. His philosophy exists in his head, and there it will remain. Read the description of Bigum carefully: he is not simply a figure of fun, but an early portrait of a mind that has confused its inner grandeur with actual achievement.
The climax of this section is Bigum’s declaration of love to Edele. It is a painful and strangely powerful scene: a man who lives entirely in an imaginary world of self-importance suddenly making himself vulnerable in the real world of human feeling, and being devastated by the result.
The section closes with a passage that is central to the novel’s whole meaning. After witnessing Bigum’s humiliation, Niels reflects:
“For the first time he had felt fear about life, for the first time he had truly understood that when life had sentenced you to suffer, this sentence was neither a pretense nor a threat — you were dragged to the rack and then you were tortured, and no fairy-tale liberation came at the last moment, no sudden awakening as if from a bad dream.”
Questions to consider: What has Niels learned? Note that this is a childhood lesson — he encounters the cruelty of life at a very young age. How does this connect to the disillusionment of his mother in Chapter II? Is there a pattern emerging?
Edele dies young. Her death is rendered with the same hovering, lyrical quality as her earlier descriptions — beautiful and cold. For Niels, the loss is not merely personal; it is the loss of a vision of what the world might be.
Edele’s death triggers Niels’s first serious confrontation with religious belief. He had prayed for her recovery; God did not answer. This loss of faith is one of the novel’s most important threads — Niels Lyhne is sometimes described as the great Scandinavian novel of atheism, and this is where that theme begins. Read these pages carefully.
Questions to consider: What kind of God had Niels believed in? What kind of world does he find himself in once that faith collapses? How does Jacobsen connect the loss of religious faith to the larger theme of disillusionment?
Chapter V introduces Erik Refstrup, who will become an important figure later in the novel. This chapter is primarily background; you may read it more lightly. The key thing to take away is a sense of who Erik is and how he and Niels relate to each other.
Chapter VI introduces Fru Boye, one of the most important women in the novel. She is beautiful, magnetic, and intellectually alive — and Niels falls in love with her almost despite himself. We do not yet get a deep revelation of her character; we are given impressions, attractions, and a first glimpse of the peculiar quality of Niels’s love.
The key passage comes on page 58:
“Against his will he fell in love with Fru Boye, but he did not tell her about it, for this was no young and open love, full of hope. He loved her as a creature of another, finer, and happier race than his own, and thus there was a rancor to his love, and an instinctual bitterness toward this race in her.”
Questions to consider: What does it mean to love someone with “rancor”? Niels’s love for Fru Boye is entangled with a sense of distance and inferiority — of loving across an unbridgeable gap. How does this connect to the pattern of idealization we have already seen in Bartholine and in Niels’s feeling for Edele?
On an impulse, Niels wanders through the city and decides to call on Fru Boye. She is home. The conversation that follows (pp. 61–65) is one of the novel’s most important passages on the relationship between men and women — specifically on the male habit of idealizing women: placing them on a pedestal, worshipping them as something above ordinary humanity, and then, inevitably, resenting them for failing to live up to the idol.
Questions to consider: What does Fru Boye understand about how men see her that Niels does not yet understand about himself? Is there something self-serving or self-protective in the idealization of women? What is the relationship between putting someone on a pedestal and pulling them off it?
Chapter VIII opens with a period of creative and social activity for Niels (pp. 69–75) before the chapter’s central events. Niels’s father then dies, and Niels is haunted by regret — he had not paid sufficient attention to their relationship while there was still time. His mother, gravely ill, fears she will die without ever having truly lived; she mourns all the experiences she was never allowed to have. But she recovers, and Niels takes her on a long journey through Europe — an attempt to give her the wider world she had always dreamed of.
The journey is, characteristically, a disappointment. The actual cities and landscapes do not match the ones she had imagined. They spend the winter in Clarens, on Lake Geneva — a location freighted with literary associations (Rousseau, Byron, the Romantic tradition of passionate longing) — and there, in the spring, she dies.
Questions to consider: Bartholine’s life began in longing and ends in longing. What does Jacobsen seem to be saying about the kind of romantic imagination she represents? Is there a critique here, or only elegy? Notice the pattern: the journey that was supposed to fulfill a dream ends instead in confirming that the dream and reality do not coincide.
This is one of the novel’s most important chapters. After his mother’s death, Niels hurries back to Copenhagen — and finds that something has changed irrevocably.
Read pp. 87–96 carefully. Fru Boye tells Niels that she has become engaged, and the conversation in which she explains her decision is essential. She is not simply capitulating to social convention without knowing it — she knows exactly what she is doing and why. Her explanation is a direct confrontation with the gap between the world of romantic idealism and the world as it actually is, the world of practical necessity and social constraint.
The chapter closes: “Three weeks later, Fru Boye was married, and now Niels Lyhne was all alone.” (p. 96)
Questions to consider: What reasons does Fru Boye give for her choice? Does she present it as a defeat, a compromise, or something else? Recall the conversation in Chapter VII about men placing women on pedestals — does Fru Boye’s decision here confirm or complicate what she said then? And what does Niels’s reaction reveal about the nature of his love for her?
Niels, now utterly alone, happens to encounter Dr. Hjerrild — also eating a solitary dinner on Christmas Eve. The conversation that develops between them is the novel’s most direct and philosophically sustained treatment of atheism. Hjerrild is a committed, reflective unbeliever, and his conversation with Niels forces into the open the question of what it actually means — not as a theoretical position but as a way of living — to inhabit a world without God.
Questions to consider: What does Hjerrild say that Niels cannot? What is the difference between Niels’s atheism and Hjerrild’s? Is it merely a matter of conviction, or does it run deeper — into character, courage, or the capacity to face reality without consolation? How does this conversation connect to the themes of illusion and disillusionment we have been following throughout?
[Background — read lightly.] Niels and Erik return to Lønborggaard, where they encounter Niels’s cousin Fennimore. She is charming and vivacious, and both men are essentially in love with her. This chapter sets up Chapter XI but does not require close reading; the key takeaway is simply a sense of who Fennimore is.
This is the novel’s longest chapter and contains three passages worth reading carefully, separated by material you can skim.
[Read carefully.]
The philosophical weight opens the chapter. Fennimore and Erik’s marriage has collapsed into indifference after two years. Jacobsen’s description is worth reading slowly:
“Gradually a harsh, brutal indifference came over her, and she stopped despairing just as she had stopped hoping.”
“For Erik, too, it was bitter to awaken, although with a man’s prosaic foresightedness he had told himself that it had to happen eventually.”
This is Bartholine’s disillusionment all over again — but now rendered from both sides, and without any softening. Erik, a painter, also finds that his artistic inspiration has dried up. He writes to Niels begging him to come from Copenhagen.
[Read carefully.]
Niels arrives intending to help but instead falls into an affair with Fennimore. Before the affair fully develops, there is a crucial conversation between them on a walk. Fennimore confronts Niels directly about the male habit of idealizing women:
“Why do you cast us up toward the stars with one hand when you have to pull us down with the other? Can’t you just let us walk on the earth beside you, as a human being, and not a bit more? It’s impossible for us to take firm control in prose when you blind us with your will-o’-the-wisps of poetry. Leave us alone, just leave us alone, for God’s sake!”
This is the most direct statement of the theme first raised in the Chapter VII conversation with Fru Boye. Read it alongside that earlier passage.
[Skim.] The affair deepens. Erik is killed in a carriage accident in Aalborg. Fennimore receives the telegram alone and is overwhelmed with guilt. These pages are emotionally powerful but the themes are largely carried by what follows.
[Read carefully.]
Fennimore meets Niels as he skates across the fjord to tell him of Erik’s death, and what follows is the most devastating indictment of Niels in the entire novel. She turns on him with ferocious, raw fury: when he arrived she was honorable, she had never done harm, but he came with his poetry and his idealism and dragged her down. The chapter ends with a quiet, lethal final line — “She had learned something from Niels, after all” — meaning that what she absorbed from his romantic worldview was enough to make her feel like merely a quarrelsome woman rather than a tragic heroine: another illusion dismantled.
Questions to consider: Fennimore’s accusation is that Niels’s romanticism — his poetry, his “will-o’-the-wisps” — is not merely useless but actively harmful. Does the novel endorse her indictment? Is there a difference between Niels’s idealization of women and his atheism, or are they symptoms of the same underlying temperament? And what does the final line mean: what exactly has Fennimore “learned” from Niels?
[Skim.] A brief interlude. Niels travels to Riva on Lake Garda and meets a Madame Odéro, who one day simply vanishes. Niels is left alone again. This chapter requires no close reading; its function is to deepen the novel’s atmosphere of loss and solitude before the final movement.
[Read carefully — this is the philosophical climax of the novel.]
Niels returns to Lønborggaard and falls in love with the young Gerda. They marry. In a development that is unique in the novel, this relationship is not simply undone by disillusionment — Niels genuinely loves Gerda, and he brings her into his world, converting her to his hard-won atheism. She accepts it. For a moment it seems as if Niels has finally found a way to live honestly in the world without illusion.
Then Gerda dies. And at the very last moment — on her deathbed — she loses her atheistic faith. She asks for a priest. She receives the sacraments.
This is the most tormenting scene in the book. Niels had persuaded her to give up the consolations of religion; now, dying, she reaches back for them. Was he wrong to convert her? Does the deathbed recantation reveal that atheism cannot be sustained when life actually demands it — that it is, finally, a fair-weather faith? Or does it reveal something else?
Their child also dies. The chapter ends:
“Toward the morning, by the time the farm’s old doctor drove in through the gate, Niels was alone.”
He is alone in the world. This is the sentence the entire novel has been moving toward.
Questions to consider: Recall the Hjerrild dinner (pp. 99–107). Hjerrild presented atheism as something that must be lived, not merely held as a belief. Has Niels succeeded in living it? What does Gerda’s deathbed recantation cost him — and what does it mean? Is Jacobsen suggesting that atheism is heroic, impossible, or both?
[Read carefully.]
The novel’s brief final chapter brings Niels’s life to its close and draws together everything that has come before. These five pages are a summation of a life defined by loss, disillusionment, and the repeated failure of every vision — romantic, artistic, philosophical — that Niels had placed his hopes in. Read them as the novel’s verdict on its own story.
Questions to consider: What is the final image of Niels that Jacobsen leaves us with? Has he achieved anything — in his atheism, in his relationships, in his life as such? Is the novel’s conclusion tragic, resigned, or something else? And returning to where we began: how does Niels’s end reflect back on his mother Bartholine, who opened the novel with her own unanswered longing?