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Johannes V. Jensen (1873-1950) |
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Danish novelist, poet, and essayist, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1944. Johannes V. Jensen sought to depict through an idealized Darwinian theory how human development is part of the natural process of evolution. His major works include Kongen's fald (1900-01, The Fall of the King), one of the most significant historical novels in Danish literature, and Den lange rejse (1908-22, The Long Journey), an evolutionary interpretation of history. "The town is pulsing with preparations for war. Without plan, and quite as a matter of course, the beginning of each summer is marked by bustle and outfitting of troops. About the time when the rye flowers each year, the stone steps of Copenhagen teem with peasants, each man sitting distrustfully on his haversack. Great meal-cakes from the area around Ringsted or from Himmelbjerget are brought out, misshapen from their long confinement. Salt flounder from Blaavandshuk are devoured in company with smoked hams from the western heaths. Horsemen, Germans, young noblemen—all swarm in the streets from dawn to dusk. It is June, the time when men mass and ships lie in readiness. The king conquers Sweden at this time every year." Johannes
Vilhelm Jensen was born in the small village of
Farsø,
Himmerland, in North Jutland. He was the second son of the district
veterinary surgeon, Hans Jensen, a descendant on both sides of farmers
and craftsmen, and Marie (Kirstine) Jensen. Jensen was taught by his
mother until the age of eleven. "His early life was spent among a folk
whose ancestors have lived in the same neighborhood for thousands of
years, leaving such numerous traces of their activities that the region
is a veritable Mecca for archaeologists." ('Johannes V. Jensen' by Paul Knaplund, The Sewanee Review, Vol. 33, No. 3, July 1925, p. 332) Under the influence of his father, Jensen developed a fasciation for Darwinism, which became the cornerstone of his thinking. Also Kipling's stories made a deep impact on him. Jensen graduated from the Cathedral School of Viborg in 1893, and subsequently studied medicine at the University of Copenhagen from 1893 to 1898. In 1904 he married Else Marie Ulrik; they had three sons. Jensen's medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, deeply influenced his literary work. Between the novels Danes (1896) and Einar Elkjær (1898), Jensen visited the United States. After these books Jensen gave up his plans for a medical career and devoted himself to writing. Jensen also published romantic potboilers and a series of detective novels which appeared under the pen name Ivar Lykke between 1895 and 1898 in Revuen, a weekly periodical. However, Jensen excluded these works from his oeuvre. His detective, the British Mason, was a parody of Sherlock Holmes. Danskere and Einar Elkjær drew
from the fin
de siècle atmosphere of Copenhagen, but most of Jensen's early writings
were set in his native province. Himmerlandshistorier (1898-1910)
portrayed vividly his native region and its people. It was followed by
a historical novel of the 16th century, Kongens fald,
a fictional biography of King Christian II of Denmark, the last ruler
of the three Scandinavian countries. This work, at once lyrical and
realistic, was a product of light-filled Norwegian summer nights and
the notion of life's transitory. The British writer and literary critic
V.S. Pritchett found it in his review in New Statesman, April 29, 1933, a
"kind of clangorous poetry." The
central characters of story, which takes place from May 1497 to
June 1544, are Mikkel Thøgersen, a
failed student and mercenary soldier, and the Prince (later the King).
Their paths cross first time at the beginning of the book. Mikkel
catches a glimpse of the sixteen-year-old Christian in the evening in a
shop and feels that "a little ray of favor also fell on him outside."
Originally the book was published in three volumes: Foraarets Død (1900, The Death of
Spring), Den store Sommer
(1900, The Great Summer) and Vinteren
(1901, Winter). Believing that the work speaks for itself, Jensen
destroyed all drafts and notes after the publication of the novel. Jensen was a correspondent for the liberal newspaper Politken,
reporting from Spain on the Spanish-American war (1898). "I prophesy
that the Spanish people will be obliterated from the peoples," he
stated in Den gotiske renæssance
(1901). Inspired by Knut Hamsun's Fra
det Moderne Amerikas Aandsliv (1889) he traveled in the United
States in 1896 and 1903. After this trip he
translated the American writer Frank Norris's novel The Octopus,
about the conflict between farmers and railroad. Jensen's preface to
Jack London's The Call of the Wild
(Naar Naturen kalder, translated by Aslaug Mikkelsen, 1907) introduced
the internationally famous writer to the Danish readers. New technological advances inspired the novels Madame d'Ora (1904), and its sequel, Hjulet (1907), and Jensen's descriptions of American cities. His writing on modernity and technological progress earned Jensen a reputation as a the prophet of the machine age. Madame d'Ora played with the idea, that a cinematograph can used as a means to deceive the public. The summer of 1898 Jensen spent in Spain and Germany. This marked also the beginning of his career as a correspondent. In 1900 he wrote articles from the World Exhibition in Paris, and collected these pieces in Den gotiske renæssance (1901), which presented his enthusiasm about a modern, active way of life. The wheel (hjulet) was a symbol of modern American technology, speed, and traffic. At the World Exhibition Jensen had seen a 100 metre Ferris wheel (Grande Roue Paris), originally invented by George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Jensen's father and sister, the writer Thit Jense, were devout spiritualists. Noteworthy, in Madame d'Ora Edmund Hall, a German investor and scientist, whose model was the renowed British chemist Sir William Crookes, begins to doubt the nature of reality and ventures into spiritualism. Like Hall, Crookes conducted experiments in materialization with a female medium. Hall falls in love with the spectral girl, named Eld, who turns out to be part of a murder plot. In his poems Jensen rejected
"Baudelaire's poisonous hall-mark," as he wrote, and turned "to simple
style and sound subject matter." As literary models he kept Goethe,
Heine and Whitman's prose poems, but he also wrote in the Old Norse
style. His first volume of poems, Digte (1906), contained all
the youthful poems. Late in life he returned to poetry with Digte
1901-43 (1943). 'Paa Memphis Station' was inspired by an overnight
stay between Little Rock and Memphis: "Paa Memphis Station / Halvt
vaagen og halvt blundende, / slaaet af en klam Virkelighed, men endnu
borte / i en indre Gus af danaidiske Drømme / staar jeg og hakker
Tænder / paa Memphis Station, Tennessee. / Det regner." The poem was
first published in 1904 in the literary magazine Tilskueren, and then collected in Digte. Half-awake and half-dozing, Eksotiske noveller (1907-1917) was based on journeys in
the Far East. In 1914 Jensen traveled to the United States for the fourth time. Especially he
praised New York: "New York har den skønneste atmosfære in verden." Having developed a longing for foreign places,Jensen
travelled around the world in 1902-03, to the Far East in
1912-13, and to Egypt, Palestine, and North Africa in 1925-26. "While
Hans Christian Andersen and Knut Hamsun kept at a decent distance from
the Oriental (if not primitive) peoples they visited . . . Jensen
preferred getting close, dressing like the native people, sniffing and
breathing them, drinking and partying, kissing and copulating with
them. For Jensen, the contact zone is one of intimate contact." (Journeys from Scandinavia: Travelogues of Africa, Asia, and South America, 1840-2000 by Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, pp. 88-89) Jørgine
(1926) was a story of a deceived peasant girl who saves herself from
disaster by an unromantic marriage and becomes a self-sacrificing
mother. Myter (1907-1944), published in eleven volumes, was a
series of essays and animal, travel, and nature sketches. Jensen's
treatment is poetic; the essay form offers him a means to express his
own ideas. Several of the myths found their way to Den lange rejse,
a six-volume epic cycle, which earned him
the Nobel Prize. Jensen developed in it his partly dubious theories of
evolution and anthropology and described the evolution of the Northern
peoples from the Ice Age to the 15th century, to the explorations of
Christopher Columbus. The first saga takes place in the most primitive times near a huge volcano and introduces a Prometheus. In the next book an outcast with his woman becomes the father of the Nordic race, rediscovers fire, and founds a new civilization. In the third saga another genius invents wagons and boats driven by oar or sail. The later sagas take the reader to historical times: Cimbrians march to Rome and the Vikings go on their raids. Finally the story ends with Christopher Columbus's voyage to America. Columbus begins as an everyday man but he becomes superior to his fate and his age. "Columbus completes the Northern migration and at the same time renders Christianity impossible as a terrestial dream. The Kingdom of Heaven he sought was the Bible's mystical adobe, Paradise; but then he sought it on earth. He knew not that it was rooted in his nature." (The Long Journey: Christopher Columbus, translated by A. G. Chater, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, MCMXXIV, p. xii) Jensen introduced the philosophy of
evolution into literature, because of, according to the author, the
misinterpretation and distortion of Darwinism at the end of the 19th
century. "The concept of the Übermensch had disastrous consequences in
that it led to two world wars, and was destroyed only with the collapse
of Germany in 1945. In the course of opposing this fallacious doctrine,
I have arrived at a new interpretation of the theory of evolution and
its moral implications." (Nobel Lectures: Literature 1901-1967, edited by Horst Frenz, Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1969, p. 403) In 1939 Jensen again visited the United States. "When I met
him, a
slender, reddish blond, rather smallish man, he was at first singularly
inexpessive. Like many of his unsentimental kind from Jutland, he has a
way of being silent that is a power in itself. Silence seems to fall on
him like a doom." ('Preface' by Francis Hackett, The Long Journey
by Johannes V. Jensen, translated from the Danish by A. G. Chater, with
an introduction by Francis Hackett, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945, p.
xii) After the German
army invaded Denmark in 1940, Jensen destroyed much of his diaries and
letters. He was strongly critical of Fascism and anti-Semitism.
Because of the war, no presentation ceremonies were held in Stockholm
in 1944, when the author was awarded the Nobel Prize. "Were one to
determine the degree of maturity of each nation according to its
capacity for reasoning and comprehension, England would come out on top
for her sense of realism, and the man who put forward these basically
English ideas in a simple, unaffected manner was Charles Darwin." ('Banquet speech' by Johannes V. Jensen, Stockholm, December
10, 1945;
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1944/jensen/speech/.
Accessed 1 July 2025) As in the case of the Finnish writer F.E. Sillanpää, who was awarded the prize on the eve of the Winter War in 1939 between Finland and the Soviet Union, the decision of the Swedish Acamedy was undestrod as a gesture of moral support toward the Danish people. Jensen's candidacy had been discussed in 1925 when the honor went to George Bernard Shaw. Johannes V. Jensen died in Copenhagen on November 25, 1950. During the last years of his life, his writings mostly dealt with the theory of evolution. Africa, which came out in 1949, reflected his interest in natural science. For further reading: 'Interpreting America in the Works of Knut Hamsun and Johannes V. Jensen' by Vincent Rasmussem, Nordlit, No. 47 (December 2020); Den uhyggelige fortælling: unaturlig narratologi og Johannes V. Jensens tidlige forfatterskab by Stefan Iversen (2018); 'Scientific Spirit, Spirituality and Spirited Writing. Spiritualism Between Science, Religion and Literature' by Christiane Barz, in Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2010); 'Jensen, Johannes V.' by Maria Mikolchak, in The Facts on File Companion to the World Novel: 1900 to Present, ed. Michael D. Sollars (2008); 'Americanism, Popular Culture and the Primitive: Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Madame D'Ora (1904)' by Michael Cowan, in Orbis Litterarum, Volume 60, Number 2 (2005); 'Johannes V. Jensen's Nobel prize: the story of a homecoming' by Aage Jørgensen, Del 41 af Arbejdspapirer (2005); Johannes V. Jensen. Liv og værk by Lars Handesten (2000); Et Spring ind i et Billede. Johannes V. Jensens mytedigtning, edited by Aage Jørgensen & Anders Thyrring Andersen (2000); 'Jensen, Johannes V.,' in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Volume 2, ed. Stephen R. Serafin (1999); Menneskelinien - mellem Johannes V. Jensen og Herman Bang by Poul Houe (1999); 'Jensen, Johannes V(ilhelm),' in World Authors 1900-1950: Volume 2, ed. Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1995); Kongens fald: En analyse af Johannes V. Jensens roman by Poul Bager (1988); Johannes V. Jensen og den hvide mands byrde. Eksotisme og imperialisme by Bent Haugaard Jeppesen (1984); Johannes Jensen by Sven H. Rossel (1984); A History of Scandinavian Literature, 1870-1980 by Sven H. Rossel (1982); Den unge Johannes V. Jensen 1873-1902 by Oluf Friis (2 vols., 1974); Johannes V. Jensen: Liv og forfatterskab by Leif Nedergaard (1968); Johannes V. Jensen by Jørgen Elbek (1966); Denmark's Johannes V. Jensen by Marion L. Nielsen (1955); Modern Danish Authors, eds. Evelyn Heepe & Niels Heltburg (1946); Johannes V. Jensen: bidrag til hans biografi og karakteristik by K. K. Nicolaisen (1914) Selected works:
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