About the Author

The Danish realist writer Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943)

won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1917 for "his
authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark". He
satirised the authoritarian establishment of Denmark and
sympathised with the rural proletariat. His major novels
have been translated into English, but the stories presented
here are made available in English for the first time.

About the Translator

John Lynch taught himself Danish and German, and later
obtained the degree of BA in these languages at the
University of Newcastle. He has taught English in Danish
and German schools and has also worked in Sweden and
Iceland. After studying at the University of East Anglia, he
was awarded the degree of MA in Scandinavian Studies. He
holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Librarianship and his
varied career included a spell as a college tutor librarian in
Banbury. In addition to the present work, John Lynch has
also translated a Danish novel The Fantasists, by Hans
Egede Schack (published by Austin Macauley in 2013) and
A Prussian in Victorian London, an account of London life
in the mid-nineteenth century by the German novelist
Theodor Fontane (published by Austin Macauley in 2014).

Translated from the Danish by John Lynch

Copyright John Lynch

The right of John Lynch to be identified as translator of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the
publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims
for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British
Library.

ISBN 978 1 84963 560 8

www.austinmacauley.com
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4

Acknowledgments
The translator wishes to thank Lars Peter Rmhild, formerly
Lecturer in Literature at the University of Copenhagen, for
his thoughtful and perceptive Foreword.

Foreword

On the Parish

16

The Grim Reaper

23

Idyll

36

The Polar Bear

50

Clouds

95

Gallows Hill at Ilum

97

Two Friends

111

The First Gendarme

135

Haunted

142

A Story about Love

164

Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943), novelist and story teller, was

among the foremost Danish writers at the end of the 19th
century and the beginning of the 20th. He was even awarded
the Nobel Prize in 1917 or, rather, half of it, the other half
going to an insignificant but pro-German Danish writer, Karl
Gjellerup. The Swedish Academy's balance or bias during the
First World War did not allow a clearly anti-Prussian writer
even from a neutral country, like Pontoppidan, to get the whole
cake. As an artist and man Pontoppidan belonged to the great
wave of realism in Europe in the 19th century, with figures
like Zola, Verga, Ea, Hardy, Ibsen, and Tolstoy (and other
great Russians). Like the two last-named masters Pontoppidan
might be characterized as an anti-puritan puritan; like all of
them he was a clear-sighted painter of the conflicts and defeats
in human and social life in the period. But of course he wrote
out of personal and local experience.
Henrik Pontoppidan was the son of a vicar, living for most
of his boyhood at Randers, a provincial town in eastern
Jutland. It was an old family of Lutheran church people, his
father a rather stiff and reticent character, who looked with
some misgivings on this boy's moral standard and whole
future. Indeed Henrik did not follow the more or less
predestined way of his brothers through the local gymnasium
and (some of them) to theological study at Copenhagen
University. He wanted to be an engineer and was, after a
preparatory class, admitted to the Polytechnical School in
Copenhagen. So Henrik's beginnings were partly a break with
family tradition and family belief; he looked towards personal
independence, technology and modern times.
He broke off, however, without completing his
polytechnical exam. His father having died, he was then taken

care of by his eldest brother Morten, who had been a

clergyman and became so again, but had recently started a folk
high-school in northern Zealand. Such schools were part of the
cultural aspirations and rise of the farming classes, often
inspired by the religious movement around the great preacher
N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783-1872). Morten Pontoppidan's school
was soon a success, and he hired his younger brother Henrik as
a teacher (in physics and related subjects), well knowing that
his deepest wish was to become a writer. Henrik stayed with
his brother a couple of years, but they finally split because it
was not acceptable to introduce Darwin's theories and the like
in the teaching. On the other hand, Morten belonged to the
political Left and a few years later had to spend some months
in prison, sentenced for libel of the Conservative Prime
Minister. They were agitated days in Denmark's inner political
life in the last decades of the 19th century; they meant much to
the young ongoing writer, and we shall return to them in a
moment. Let it just be mentioned here that the political
conflicts and passions were one of the three great experiences
he met as a young man in Northern Zealand.
Of the other two, of equal importance, must first be
mentioned his confrontation with the poverty and misery of the
lower classes in rural Denmark. He cannot, it is true, have been
completely ignorant of the lives of poor people in the
provincial life of his childhood or later as a student in
Copenhagen, but it was only now he met them at close
quarters. I think it shook him for his whole life, even if it was
mostly in his early stories that he took les miserables as
protagonists, thus in the three first stories in Mr. Lynch's
selection here. Let it be remembered that the great Danish
proletarian writer Martin Andersen Nev (Pelle the
Conqueror, 1906-1910) always saluted Pontoppidan as his
master.
The other important and, if you will, quite normal
experience of the young Henrik Pontoppidan was that he
married. The bride was a farmer's daughter, who for a period
had served in Morten's folk high school. The young couple
made their home in the neighbourhood of the wife's parents, so
10

Pontoppidan got a close knowledge of the social milieu in this

part of the country. Also of its different layers: his parents-inlaw did not belong to the poorer people. Part of the
engagement of both Morten and Henrik was to meet or join the
people, rather like the endeavour of some of the characters in
Tolstoy's and other Russian writers' work. Pontoppidan's large
picture of a related project was his first great novel The
Promised Land (1891-1895), where the project fails. "Dreams
do not come true," says a heroine of Flaubert's novel
Leducation sentimentale. Nor did the dream of Henrik's
marriage succeed. After a few years his wife divorced him and
took their children with her. It remained an enduring source of
pain for Pontoppidan, even if the failure of the marriage
mainly was his "fault", and he had a happier, lifelong marriage
with a Copenhagen lady afterwards. In the Story about Love ,
which ends Mr. Lynch's chronologically organized selection
here, you can still feel the happiness and the remorse reflected
(with thorough reshaping of the persons involved). Note also
the fate of most of the main female characters, not least the
best of them, in his whole oeuvre.
So if a great part of Pontoppidan's fiction does have a
stamp of sad tales, it can to some degree be traced back to
decisive experiences in his young days: socially, personally,
and politically. We must return for a moment to the last
mentioned item, which plays a direct role in three of the stories
in this volume.
Democracy had a slow and sometimes painful progress in
Denmark, partly mixed up with the disastrous conflict with
Germany concerning the two duchies, Schleswig and Holstein,
whose majority wished to opt out of the Danish King's realm.
They succeeded in a war in 1864 between Denmark and
Germany with Austria. (Pontoppidan had early memories of
the German-Austrian occupation of Jutland and even by the
Austrian commander of his parental vicarage at Randers;
almost at the end of his life Pontoppidan witnessed the German
occupation of the immediately surrendering Denmark on April
9th 1940 a young relative visiting him then reports seeing

11

him white with rage, pacing up and down his small flat near
Copenhagen.)
What happened after the 1864 war and the reform of the
constitution, was a slow movement on the inner political stage.
The Left party (mainly middle farmers) grew, at last winning
the majority in the Lower House ("Folketinget"), but the
majority in the Upper House ("Landstinget") remained with
the Right Party, and the King stubbornly chose the Right to
form governments; only in 1901 did the system change to
parliamentary democracy. Time and again in the last decades
before that, the Left tried to block the way for the government
by voting against the national budget. The government
answered by introducing provisional budgets and let them
function; in some quarters this was seen as a breach of the
constitution. The atmosphere was particularly tense in 1885,
when there was also an attempt to kill the Prime Minister. The
attempt was not organized, but made in the street by a
Copenhagen worker with a pistol. He failed, just as scattered
endeavours to mobilize the rural population in gun clubs and
the like came to nothing. The government took action very fast
and resolutely. Among other things it established a
gendarmerie (in blue uniforms), which showed itself
throughout the country. In sum, it was not an actual revolution
as young people like Pontoppidan at certain moments might
have hoped for which was quenched here, but an unfulfilled
revolution. This is the topic of Pontoppidan's story collection
Clouds (1890), which includes three sketches translated here:
Gallows Hill at Ileum, Two Friends and The First
Gendarme. The young writer's indignation and his satirical
view are evident in them as in a clerical (or anti-clerical)
displacement in the longer Isbjrnen (1887). Two Friends
touches on the human costs of the political tensions in a
provincial town, where typically the civil servants and the
petty bourgeoisie would support the Right government; in this
case the vicar, like Pontoppidan's brother Morten, does not.
Pontoppidan is mainly, but perhaps not justly, remembered
for his three long novels, each originally published in shorter
or longer series of separate volumes, and later condensed.
12

They are: 1) the trilogy The Promised Land from the 1890s;
the two first and best volumes were translated into English
as Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1892) and The Promised
Land (1896); they deal with the idealistic, but failed attempt of
a young clergyman to assimilate himself to his local, rural
flock. From the following decade is 2) Lykke-Per, the long
story of a clergyman's son, who tries to make his own way as
an inventor and entrepreneur in the modernisation of Denmark;
he sees his professional career as well as his family lives first
with a rich Jewish lady, afterwards with a softer type of
innocent young woman break down, but finds his own
identity and acceptance of existing conditions as a simple
outsider on the Jutland coast; this novel contains a rich gallery
of characters and typical milieux of the period. The last
mentioned feature is also predominant in 3) Pontoppidan's last
multivolume novel, De Ddes Rige (Realm of the Dead),
published around the beginning of World War I and dealing
with representatives of leading circles in politics, culture,
religion, and the press; the red thread is a difficult love story,
but in the main the novel describes a series of independent but
connected lives and characters in Denmark in the years just
before the Great War.
So it is not without justice that Pontoppidan's large novels
have been seen in their entire bulk as a wide-ranging picture of
the nation in the decades around 1900.
Many of the characters are impressive, some quite deep
and complicated. Whether Pontoppidan's novels are entirely
successful as well-shaped artistic compositions is another
question. In fact Pontoppidan had a luckier hand in (short)
story writing, which he cultivated before and beside the three
monumental novels.
Pontoppidan's shorter fiction is mainly of two different
dimensions; both are represented in this volume. There is the
short story proper, as, say, Maupassant's or most of Chekhov's.
Pontoppidan wrote most of his short stories early in his career
thus also six of the first seven in this volume. They reflect
the young writer's experience of life in the countryside,
particularly the lives of poor people, and his observation of the
13

revolution that did not take place in the 1880s. The stories are
wonderfully economical; pointed, but not melodramatic;
sometimes in a satirical vein. Indignation and compassion are
what move the young writer, but he remains in full control of
his feelings.
Another kind of story is longer: it is what might be called a
novella" in English, or "pov'est" in Russian (as many long
stories from the period, e.g. some of Chekhov's most famous).
Pontoppidan himself called them "small novels" and had them
published in separate volumes if sometimes quite slim
volumes. They are of varying length; among the shorter are the
three in this selection: The Polar Bear, Haunted, and A Story
about Love. The first, from 1887 and based on a real,
scandalous clergyman in Jutland a generation earlier, features
the nearest Pontoppidan ever comes to a happy Rabelaisian
humour; but of course the tendency of the whole portrait and
story is satirical, out of the author's hatred of pedantic
(theological) bureaucracy and underdog compliance.
Greenland as a sort of naturalist Arcadia goes back to
Pontoppidan's student days, when he missed participation in a
geological expedition to the Northern colony, so Greenland
remained one of his lost dreams.
It is tempting to contrast this robust and aggressive novella
from the period of Scandinavian critical realism with Haunted,
written on the other side of the fin de siecle, and its melancholy
and scary psychology. With that the Nordic angst it
certainly abounds. An important, if minor, character in this
story is the vicar. He is not a villain, as the clergyman in so
many other works of Pontoppidan's, nor a martyr, as in a few
others (e.g. The Polar Bear!), but a moderate and personally an
amiable sort of man; he does not believe in Hell! But read
again and ponder the vestiges of religion in this story. Notice
also the classical construction of the action, hung on a hardly
perceptible event the closed window. I would rank this story
among Pontoppidan's almost impeccable texts.
It seems that in most cases (with this rather an exception)
Pontoppidan was not completely satisfied with his works. He
14

often diligently occupied himself with revising, tidying,

condensing, and re-working them in new editions. It was
spectacularly the case with his famous three novels, which he
soon re-published surely, but not only, with regard to new
sales to a forthcoming public. In a lecture on Pontoppidan in
1910 the important critic Georg Brandes rather irritatedly
remarked that a poet and here he included also a novelist
should preferably improve in his next work, not in the work
already published. This is just one remark of many in
controversies among local literary critics over the years as to
which edition of a work by Pontoppidan was to be preferred.
Many criteria and varying decisions resulted, except from the
long-lived author, who let his publishers reprint only the
Ausgabe letzter Hand. So this has also been the choice of his
new English translator in this selection. But it deserves
mentioning that the late novella A Story about Love, a great
success with the Danish public, originally of 1918, the year
following his half Nobel Prize, was subjected to a very
radical and substantial re-writing by its author. The 1918
edition has a moderately happy ending with the lifelong
marriage of Dr Vadum with his beloved. Later reprints up to
1930 add lumps of new material (voyaging experience,
casualties from the Great War, etc.), but, most important,
change the ending very much, in the sombre direction that you
can read in this translation. One can only guess about the
motives that carried Pontoppidan to such radical reshaping of
the perspective. There are surely more reasons than one for his
preference of a sad tale instead of the one he conceived in
1918. It may be that he found it more truthful. In both versions
the story is a homage to the generous and courageous female
love standing up against social and religious pressures (she is a
believer) conquering even the closed and depressive character
of her beloved man, partially perhaps a self-portrait of the
author.

Lars Peter Rmhild

15

One afternoon there was a big commotion round in the alley

beyond the horse-pond where four or five grimy cottagerhovels lie bunched together below School Hill.
Something really serious was afoot; Stine Bdkers was
going to be put in The Box.
This is the popular designation for the districts large,
reconstructed workhouse, the pride and adornment of the
locality. It would be difficult indeed to imagine anything so
little reminiscent of those old, dirty and smelly parish
poorhouses, where in times gone by people were crammed
together haphazardly and allowed to live at their own sweet
will. The Institution stands right royally on top of a bushy
hill out towards the fjord built in red and grey bricks, with
finials on top of the gables and His Majestys monogram
glittering in gold on a blue ground above the entrance door.
Strangers passing by on the road will certainly not rate it
less than a royal gaol or the like; and more than one soberminded man, who has ventured within the plank-fence tipped
with iron spikes and inspected the enormous stairways, the
heaters and the ornamented ceilings, has gravely shaken his
head and hinted at extravagance.
Unless he happened to go up into one of the large halls,
where the inmates are sitting in rows under the windows
weaving rush-mats and making baskets men and women
each in their own wing. There is always something depressing
at the sight of such a collection of elderly, world-weary people,
for whom existence has nothing further to offer especially
where the long drawn-out wretchedness of life has already left
such deep marks of affliction as on these.

16

It is the worn-out creatures, the frayed lives, from the

hovels and shanties of the district, who are brought together
inside these walls when the hand grows too weak and the back
too bent to bear the burdens of life any longer. Here they sit
now, all dressed the same like brothers and sisters, with clean
linen and as well-combed and scrubbed as they scarcely ever
thought they would be in this world but at the same time so
quiet and curiously pensive, as though eternity in fact had
already begun for them in these large, solemn rooms, where
light from the high windows falls in with celestial brilliance,
and where the slightest cough or hawk echoes beneath the roof
as in a church.
Hushed and devoutly they move their stiff, gnarled fingers,
fasten the thread in the straw, knot and tighten, hour after hour
with mechanical regularity only now and then starting up at
the sound of the Inspectors creaking slippers as he approaches
up the steps. Then an anxious tremor runs down the rows. And
when his large God-the-Father-figure appears in the door, old
heads duck still an inch deeper down over the mats.
The only thing which brings a little stimulating variation in
the monotony of the long day is the clanging of the dinner-bell.
The moment this sounds, everyone gets up, carefully brushes
the straw fragments from his lap down on to the prescribed
little heap on the floor and goes out on to the stairway, where a
supervisor arranges them in lines two by two. At a given sign
they then march down to the kitchen service-hatch, from which
soon after they climb up, each with a pot cautiously between
the hands and with their set features thawed out as it were by
the delicious vapours rising up to their noses.
In the mornings the meal consists of a pint of boiled,
brown water called beer officially and a quarter pound of
dry ryebread, which they energetically and greedily suck in
with their toothless gums, because they assiduously soak it in
water. At lunch-time it is gruel and a herring, or cabbage-stew
with turnips and potatoes together with the smell of the
Inspectors beefsteak, when on their pot-march they snatch a
moments pause outside the door to his private kitchen. Pork is
served for supper together with a slice of dry ryebread and half
17

a pitcher of milk and water, after which the supervisor does a

round through the rooms to ensure that nothing is wasted
needlessly nor concealed.
On the whole everything takes place with a precision and
order which must be termed exemplary. From the time the
inmates are called from their beds at four oclock in the
morning until the regulation evening review, where amongst
other things the days work is measured and assessed, there
reigns a punctuality and discipline which cannot be bettered in
any recruit training barracks. It is quite surprising with what
agility these stupid, old people everywhere and on every
occasion know how to find their places and understand their
duties. Even the most stubborn temperaments and the most
unreasonable cranks and where are they found more
frequently than amongst frail old folks! are honed in the
course of a fortnight into the most compliant parts of the
mechanism and on their first Sunday off present themselves at
once before the outside world with this inexpressible common
stamp of lean and scrubbed domesticity which characterises
them all every bit as well as the grey homespun uniform itself.
Everyone must readily acknowledge now that in the
present Inspector they have found a man who to a rare degree
is cut out for the position he is charged with filling. Large and
formidable, so that the very floors tremble beneath his step,
with all the bibulous majesty and stolid sang-froid of an old
N.C.O., he conducts his administration firmly and
authoritatively. Bearing himself as if he had swallowed a cane
or at least had one hidden under his tightly buttoned-up coat,
he performs his rounds up the stairways and through the rooms
in order, with his unerring gift for discovering every least
irregularity or most trifling piece of neglect, to exercise the
institutions discipline in accordance with regulation.
To that end there are in the basement a number of small,
dark, well locked rooms the Clink where sinners are put
in with a plank bed, a bag of straw and a New Testament in
order there to reflect upon and do penance for their offence for
a few days ... a punishment, for which the Inspector as an old
military man has a natural partiality, and to which he from his
18

own outraged sense of duty adds besides the docking of the

food-rations ... for the benefit of his renowned prize-sow
Gine.
Naturally it can come as no surprise whatsoever after all
this, that from every side the Institution is extolled as a really
model establishment. It is not in any way boastfulness which
causes the Inspector to confide with pride in the interested
stranger, whom he obligingly escorts around the extensive
building, that it has constituted the prototype for a number of
similar compassionate sanctuaries in surrounding districts. In
fact, up and down the country there are to be found brother and
sister institutions which do not fall short in any substantial
regard, but point by point show association with their original
right down to that with His Majestys monogram as a
reassuring seal above the entrance door.

Strangely enough the poor people of the district do not

seem to be at all appreciative of this palace which has been so
generously provided for their old age. Indeed it is scarcely too
much to say that its mere mention can cause the stoutest hourlabourer to pale with fright.
Nor had Stine Bdkers properly known how to appreciate
its ingenious ventilation system and fine architectural lines;
and when they came that afternoon to fetch her, and the onehorse cart ordered to carry out the removal stopped outside her
door, she could by no means be induced to accompany it; and
when they were going to use force, she resisted so passionately
that her screams summoned people from all over the town.
There was a terrible stir. In the end the alley was half full
of all kinds of people who came running up; and through the
shouts, laughter, dog-barking, and the hilarity of children just
coming home from school, Stine could be heard swearing,
cursing and screaming inside her room, in such a way as only a
drunken and dotty crone has breath enough for.
A dilapidated folding-bed, a worm-eaten chest and various
small old bits of junk her entire furniture they had just
managed to wrest from her with difficulty and conjure away
19

through the windows. From outside people could clearly see

how she paced backwards and forwards with threatening
gestures inside the empty room.
In point of fact it had not been unusual of late for
townspeople to see Stine in such a state of agitation. She had
formerly been an honest and hardworking woman who, after
her husbands death, had supported herself and many children
by hard work in the beet and potato fields and altogether
anywhere where there was need of a broad back and a pair of
nimble hands. But since injuring her hand in a steam threshing
machine one harvest, she had increasingly turned to that great
comforter of the poor, to the bounty of gin. From the moment
it became clear to her that resistance was futile, and that sooner
or later the workhouse would be her final refuge, she became
completely uncontrollable ... and now she was walking about
over the floor inside like a wild animal, ill-treated, smeared
with dirt, the cap slipping back from her half-bald crown.
A group of noisy men and lads gathered in the doorway
sought in a good-natured way to make her see reason. But
every time one of them approached or simply reached out his
hand towards her, she arched up with rage and stamped her
feet. Now and then she went over to the window and spat out
at the boys who were yelling and then the clamour simply
would not stop.
Finally the parish constable who had been called arrived.
He came straight from the threshing barn ill-humoured
and hot with chaff sticking in his hair and in his new, grey
homespun breeches.
Quickly he pushed his way through the crowd and went
into the room. Here he stopped in the middle of the floor with
his legs far apart and his spread hands resting on his hips.
When Stine realised who was facing her, she shut up at
once. Glowering, she slowly retreated across the room and
placed herself in the innermost corner as in a defensive
position.
The parish constable followed her with the heavy, ominous
tread of his clogs.

20