Danish Texts — Notes and Essays

Scholarly commentary on the texts in the catalog. Notes describe a single work — what our edition covers, the editorial decisions behind it, and what is in the book. Essays argue for a conclusion, usually across several works. Both are written and kept in the danish-texts repository, beside the texts they discuss.

Essays

Before the Heterogeneous Magnitudes

Rasmus Nielsen in May 1849

Nielsen's doctrine that faith and knowledge are uensartede Størrelser is usually credited to his encounter with Kierkegaard. But he states heterogeneity of the natural and the supernatural, in his own emphasis, in a book finished before he reviewed the Postscript — and in the review the word is still largely Kierkegaard's, being quoted. Dating the pivot from the three books of 1849–50.

Between Two Bombardments

A Life of Hans Brøchner

The catalog bio sketches the professor. A Fredericia local-history page adds the life behind him: a childhood cut short by his mother's death, a Roman engagement broken by religion, a family fortune burned twice by the same town's two bombardments, a brief term in parliament, an early widowing — and a bibliography whose shape, read against the dates, turns out to follow the life closely.

The Doctor's Son Called Gabrielis

A Life of F.C. Sibbern

The catalog bio gives the professor of 1813–1870. A literary-historical portrait from the Royal Danish Library's text portal, written to introduce Sibbern's own Gabrielis novels, gives the life around him — and along the way explains where the pen name came from, why a Norwegian professorship went begging, and how losing a woman to silence rather than to a rival produced the book he is now chiefly remembered for. Kim Minke's chapter in Dansk litteraturs historie, added here, supplies what a biography leaves out: the doctrine of personality that came out of the same crisis, the »livspoesi« of the late continuation, and the case for reading the first Gabrielis book not as a wertheriade but as the first Danish Bildungsroman.

Notes on individual works

Rasmus Nielsen

Hans Brøchner

Kristian Kroman

»Relativitetsprincipet« (1915)

Kroman's rejection of special relativity opened the only sustained critical discussion the theory received in Denmark. On the shape of that debate in Fysisk Tidsskrift, on Høffding's reply to it in »Relation som Kategori«, on why the article was so hard to find, and on the state of our edition: five of the seven items now stand in Danish and English.

Niels Bohr

Commentary written before this page was generated is still collected on the older notes page, and is being moved across a few authors at a time.