Erindringer

Harald Høffding’s Erindringer (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1928; 324 pp. and an Indhold) is his account of his life from his childhood to 1924, in eight chapters named only by their years: I. 1843–1861, II. 1861–1874, III. 1874–1883, IV. 1883–1894, V. 1894–1904, VI. 1904–1914, VII. 1914–1922, VIII. 1922–1924. A note printed beneath the Indhold says that chapters I–VI were written in the winter of 1915–16, VII in 1922 and VIII in the spring of 1924, and that a read-through before printing added some parentheses and notes. Chapter II covers the student years and the press discussion of winter 1865–66 over Rasmus Nielsen’s doctrine of faith and knowledge, which ties the book to the Nielsen, Brøchner and Brandes texts in this collection; later chapters take in Høffding’s friendships with Brandes, Bjørnson, Ibsen, William James and Pontoppidan, his travels, the war years and the questions of South Jutland, and his old age in the Carlsberg Honorary Residence.

The text

A diplomatic transcription of the whole book from the page images of the 1928 first printing: the title page, the Forord, chapters I–VIII and the Indhold, with every printed page marked in the margin at the word where it begins.

The English translation (Memoirs) follows the transcription paragraph for paragraph and carries the same page numbers in its margin. What Høffding quotes in German, Swedish, Norwegian, French, English or Greek is left in the original; Danish verse is translated. Titles of books and journals are given as printed.

A withdrawn predecessor. Until September 2026 this page offered a text of selected paragraphs of chapter II, with an English translation, taken from the 2021 Lindhardt og Ringhof e-book rather than from the page. Both were withdrawn. The present text was made from the scan; the e-book served only as a check (below), never as the text.

Editorial note

Source. A scan of the 1928 first printing (“Oplag: 2000 Eksemplarer”, Gyldendals Forlagstrykkeri) from Slægtsforskernes Bibliotek (Danskernes Historie Online), 327 PDF pages with an ABBYY text layer.

Page map. Printed p. N = PDF page N + 2, uniform through the book; measured from 216 of the scan’s own folios. The Forord stands on an unnumbered page cited as [6], the Indhold on one after p. 324 cited as [325]. The chapter IV figure in the Indhold is 121 (the text layer’s “I2J” is a damaged 1).

Conventions. The book is set in antiqua with old-style figures. Its emphasis is italic, rendered as italic. Orthography stands as printed. Footnotes are marked “1)” and numbered afresh on each page, as in the book. White lines and the short rules between sections are reproduced. Letters in angle brackets ⟨ ⟩ are supplied by the editor where the scan, not the print, has lost them: p. 61, “⟨tæn⟩kte”, at the damaged foot of the page, where another copy should be checked.

Printer’s errors — about a hundred — are transcribed as printed and marked in the source at the place: non-words such as “hverande”, “igennm”, “menenskelige”, “Bskoppen”, “Fankrig”, wrong endings (“mine legemlige Konstitution”, “tildel”), and names as the book spells them (“Drachman”, “Wengelnalp”, “Pringl-Pattison”). The head of chapter VI (p. 224) prints “V”, and the Indhold “VI·”.

How the accuracy was established. Forty-one pages (pp. 39–51, 55–69, 77–82, 90–95 and the Indhold) were transcribed at the image in September 2026 and read again in full by readers who had not transcribed them. The rest of the book was built in October 2026 from the scan’s text layer and checked against it in four ways: against an independent OCR of every page, every disagreement settled at the image or by the vote of the e-book; against the e-book itself, every remaining difference read at the image; by reading 89 pages in full at the image (every page with a footnote, verse, a chapter head, a rule or an italic, and a random sample of twelve ordinary pages); and by the translation, whose translators listed every doubtful spot in the Danish for a reading at the image. The rebuilt text reproduces the September reading of the 41 pages word for word. The random sample put the error rate before the last two checks at about one word in twelve pages, and those checks corrected about as many again on the pages not read in full. The full record is in the comment header of transcription.tex.

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