Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/188

170 a sublime and generous spirit, richly endowed and developed and ripened to a rare degree of nobleness by life's severe school. It is unquestionably the best prose work from the seventeenth century.

Though the scientific efforts of the period of learning paid but little attention to the national element, still the latter was not wholly disregarded. On the contrary, there flowed through this entire period a national and to some extent a popular current; which, though it was not strong enough to give the times a direction different from that after which the period is named, still it is of great interest as a continuation or result of the great popular movement created by the Reformation, and on account of the influence it may be said to have had in general on the relation between the literature and the people.

Among the men who rendered special service to this cause, we must not forget to mention (1542-1616), a son of a merchant in Veile (Vedel) from which town he received his surname. In his earlier years he travelled for a few years abroad as Tyge Brahe's tutor, became magister in Wittenberg, and after his return to Denmark, court preacher to Frederik II. From his earliest youth he had applied himself with diligence to the study of national history, and receiving encouragement from many friends, he undertook the important task of translating Saxo Grammaticus, and his version of this celebrated work was published in 1575. In this manner this book at length became accessible to the whole people. It was exquisitely translated into a remarkably pure and noble language, a fact which is of all the more credit to Vedel, when we consider that he was, properly speaking, the first to break the ground for the historical style. Vedel's translation of Saxo, on account of its comparatively excellent Danish, occupies in fact a foremost rank in the literature of its time, and it will forever remain