A Brill Calendar: December 3

The "Molière of the North"

Few trend-watchers seem to be aware that the Scandinavian peoples live presently on the cutting edge of cultural change.

This can be balanced against the observation that the United States of America can’t serve as prototype of cultural modernization.

If you don’t believe your ‘transnational eyes’ reading the previous sentence, please consult the ‘Atlas of European Values’, page 129 (2005, Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden and Tilburg University, the Netherlands, ISBN 90 04 14460 9). Your surprise is related to demographical realities and cultural assumptions of long standing. The total of Finns, Swedes, Norwegians and Danes, historically intimately connected and living in lands almost 20 times as vast as the BeNeLux territory, is outnumbered by the number of Luxembourgers, Belgians and the Dutch lumped together.

The outer-north of the European subcontinent developed, by the same token, a fascinating variable and distinctive array of advances in European history. Many of them hardly known - let alone appropriately valued - in the southern parts of this geographical domain.

It is seldom, for instance, that a genius like Ludvig Holberg (Bergen, December 3 1684 – Copenhagen, January 28, 1754), a sparkling incarnation of the European Enlightenment and a founding father of Scandinavian literature, a man who created a new kind of wit & humour as well an unprecedented theatre tradition, is put in any cultural spotlight below the geographical line running from Kiel to Saint Petersburg.

During his lifetime Holberg was already called ‘Molière of the North’. It takes patient optimism to wait for the day that Molière will be called ‘Holberg of the South’. Cultural development is not at the beck & call of reversibility and symmetry.