Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/25

Rh course of time, its peculiar national life has preserved its germinating power, which has frequently given startling signs of life, and which finally in the fulness of time developed a surprising wealth of flowers that from the beginning of this century to the present day give the people in all the Scandinavian lands a literary individuality in the strictest sense their own.

If the question be asked, of what interest it can be to foreign readers to make a special study of the literary history of the Scandinavian peoples, the first answer must be that this literature occupies a respectable and important position by the side of the literatures of the other civilized peoples. It deserves recognition not only as the intellectual product of a race to which has been assigned a prominent part in the world's history, but also on account of its own peculiar merits. The northern mind has both in the past and in modern times produced a considerable number of works of great intrinsic value. Poets like Holberg and Bellmann, like Oelenschläger and Tegnér, like Paludan-Müller and Runeberg, like Andersen and Almquist, Björnson and Ibsen, and many others, to say nothing of a large number of writers in other branches of literature, would be an ornament to any country, and there can be no doubt that the fact that not a much larger number of Scandinavian authors than the few whose works are partially translated into foreign tongues, are known abroad, must be accounted for by the paucity of the Scandinavian peoples, the difficulty of their languages, and the modest position they hold, especially in the history of our own time. The names mentioned are taken almost at random, and the list could easily be increased