Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/147

Rh Grundtvig has expressed the opinion that the Chronicle is the joint work of the monks in Sorö convent, who, as above stated, were requested by Archbishop Absalon to write a national chronicle. "Every monk," says Grundtvig, "who could rhyme did his best for the king or kings whose turn it was to be rhymed," and in support of this opinion he points to the striking difference between the different parts of the work in respect to intellectual effort and historical knowledge. This supposition is overruled by the circumstance that in style and language the work unmistakably belongs to the close of the middle age. A third authority in this field of inquiry, the historian of literature, Professor Petersen, leaves the question of the origin of the Rhyme Chronicle undecided for the reason that all reliable information on that point is wanting, and the work itself furnishes no safe clue. The good and the bad are thoroughly intermingled, and the whole is too monotonous to be allowed to serve as a faithful mirror of the changes of popular life through a long period of time. This opinion is doubtless the correct one.

About the time of the reformation, the national vernacular begins, upon the whole, to assert itself with more success, and at this time it is especially employed in the field of religious literature, where, hitherto, the Latin has reigned supreme. Heretofore, men had taken pride in being able to express themselves elegantly and fluently in the Latin tongue, but it gradually became corrupted, and the monks, whose taste for scientific investigations was rapidly declining, did their share towards accomplishing its utter ruin. But in the same degree as the Latin was banished, the vernacular made progress, not only in the conventual Latin, which continued to incorporate into itself an increasing number of Danish words and phrases, but also in the literature and the church service. From the middle of the fifteenth century, Danish