Lundensaren_mars2019_Historictext

A duckling visits Lund

Stora Södergatan with the Stäket building (centre) is from a wash-drawing by J M Stäck from 1840. The protagonist of the article below probably arrived in Lund via this street in both 1839 and 1840. Photo source: Lund i närbild (1950).

In mid-April 1840, a young, Danish author was on a visit to Lund. It was not the first time, as a year earlier, in 1839, he had taken a trip through Skåne and the small university town was also on his itinerary. However, he did not have very pleasant memories of the first visit to Lund. In his diary you can read that the weather, although he visited in June, was “bitter and cold”, and that during the trip driving rain got into his carriage, even though it was covered. On arrival, the young Dane went to a barber for a shave, but even this turned out not to be a very enjoyable experience. It was not only that the barber and his clothes gave off a horrible stench, but that his customer got ashy shaving soap in his mouth and in addition the razor was “like a cheese grater”. The cathedral, which he saw later, was certainly a more impressive experience, but even here he was disturbed by a spider’s web over the crypt’s image of Christ and by a “a modern decorated organ”. Things looked up when he found two familiar names of fellow Danes carved into the sandstone of Finn the giant’s pillar. Also on the plus side, he noted that in the Gleerupska bookshop he could sign up for a copy of the Swedish author Karl August Nicander’s collected works, and that he got the opportunity to socialise with another Swedish poet, “student Strandberg”, namely the favourite poet among Lund students at the time, C V A Strandberg, who wrote under the pseudonym of Talis Qualis. They would see each other again

An embittered author

At the time of his second visit to Lund in 1840, the Danish author was 35 and had over a decade of mixed authorship behind him: poems, short stories, novels, travelogues and plays. It would be wrong to claim that he had not already received both good reviews and public successes, but even so in his memoirs he states that up until around this time he had not really felt the full appreciation that he wished for. This particularly applied to his plays. Since childhood, the young author has had a special passion for the theatre, and his first works had been plays – which were rejected.

Of his later works for the theatre, some were rejected and some were actually staged, but even in the latter case, the problem according to his memoirs was that the actors and other theatre people showed very little appreciation of – and therefore left very little of the spotlight to – the playwright, who consequently was consigned to the shadows, even when the plays were staged. And so, the result for him was that “The theatre was for a number of years a place that made me embittered to a great extent about my life”. The big turning point came around the turn of the year 1839/40: the author’s latest play The Mulatto became a great hit, and even though initially he was too tense and stressed before the opening night to really enjoy the success, Andersen wrote in his memoirs that it was “from now that my career as a writer actually started”.

Welcome, son of Dana!

The Danish premiere of The Mulatto was on 3 December 1839, but the play spread quickly to Sweden and was staged in cities as well as in rural areas, both in Swedish and the original Danish. In Malmö, for example, it was presented by a visiting Danish theatre company, and was loudly cheered, among others by a large contingent of Lund students in the audience. Just over five months later its author was in Skåne, invited as a guest of Baron Wrangel to his estate in Hyby. However, on the journey over the Öresund strait Andersen was persuaded by a Swedish officer to instead go directly to the theatre in Malmö. On that evening, his play was not on, but another popular Danish play, Østergade og Vestergade by Thomas Overskou, but in any case the audience were clearly familiar with the author of The Mulatto; “and soon everyone in the theatre knew I was there, I now became the real play”, he wrote – probably not displeased – in a letter to a friend some days later. He was also persuaded to stay until it was possible to arrange “a banquet at Stadt Hamburg, where I was given speeches and toasts”. One of the speakers was none other than his literary acquaintance from Lund the year before, C V A Strandberg, who had quickly written some verses for the Danish guest including this:

Welcome, son of Dana!
Travelling on the free ocean,
Your path was towards the North:
You are a Scandinavian!

This, however, was just a gentle warm up for the tributes that H C Andersen – the actual protagonist of our account – would receive from Lund’s students.

A portrait of H C Andersen by Christian Albrecht Jensen 1836. Photo source: Wikimedia Commons.

The followers of the mind meet the master

From Malmö, Andersen travelled to his planned stay in Hyby, but just a few days later there were persistent appeals from Lund that his presence was requested in the city before the students went home for Easter; this was “because so many young people wanted the pleasure of making my acquaintance”. Said and done: Andersen’s host gave him a lift to Lund. He was first invited to dinner at the City Hall on Stortorget (which at that time was often used as a hotel and restaurant) and then to tea at the home of a widow “who had very beautiful daughters”. Up to now, Andersen probably felt that the interest in him was within reasonable limits. But there was much more to come! Andersen described the subsequent events in a letter written a few days later:

It was approaching eight o’clock when the poet Strandberg turned up and said that he wanted to prepare me, as in a half hour the students would come to celebrate me. I trembled with anxiety and asked if we could keep them away. I was still so young and lacking in experience, but he said that it had been decided. While I waited as a poor sinner, the clock struck eight and – I will never forget this Good Friday evening – the lady said, “Here comes Academia!” I looked out into the street and it was full of people; students, surely several hundred of them were marching and singing. They surrounded the house. I had to go out on the steps and when they recognised me, they all took off their hats. It made a very strong impression on me, my knees almost buckled.

As a representative of the students, the graduate Bernhard Cronholm, stepped forward and paid tribute to Andersen’s achievements as a writer. His novels and poems were both mentioned, but not least his current play The Mulatto, which according to Andersen’s quote from Cronholm “expressed the great idea of the times: the victory of the mind!” In front of its author, it was stated that “The followers of the mind […] kneel before the master”; words that were followed by three resounding cheers.

It should be mentioned that Cronholm probably had a not insignificant part in Andersen’s idol status among Lund students. He was not only a student, but also a newspaper man – he is probably not least remembered as the founder of the Snäll-Posten newspaper, the forerunner of today’s Sydsvenskan – and in that capacity he had written to Andersen a few months earlier and asked him for a contribution to the Swedish-Danish literary yearbook entitled Hertha. Andersen, who at that time was aware of the Scandinavian movement that not least was growing among the university students in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, responded by sending the poem, “We are one people, we are called Scandinavians”. Cronholm handed on the poem to the popular composer and conductor of the Lund University Male Voice Choir, Otto Lindblad, who set the poem to music, and both the text and sheet music were published in Hertha in January 1840. In other words, for Lund students that spring, Andersen was not only known as an author and a champion of “the victory of the mind”, but also someone who shared their great ideal: the idea of Scandinavian fellowship.

After Cronholm’s speech, Andersen said a few words in which he declared his great debt of gratitude to the students – a debt he hoped to repay in the future – which was followed by more cheers before Cronholm spoke again and issued an exhortation to the Danish guest: “When Europe soon recognises the great poet H. C. A., do not forget that it was the students in Lund who were first to pay you the tribute you deserve!”

He did not forget. In his memoirs, The Fairy Tale of my Life, published 15 years later, Andersen describes the “deep, unforgettable impression” this “first public show of respect” had on him, but also how frightened he was that there and then he had not really deserved it:

[…] all my limbs were shaking. I was almost in a feverish state, when I saw the crowd of students, all with their blue caps on their heads [the Lund University student cap at this time had a dark-blue crown]. Arm in arm they approached the house; yes, I had a sense of humility, such a very real recognition of my shortcomings that I felt pressed against the earth when they honoured me. When they all took off their hats as I appeared, I had to summon all my powers so that I did not burst out crying. Feeling so undeserving of this honour, I tried to spot derision in anyone’s face but saw only benevolent people; any sign of doubt at this moment would have wounded me deeply.

Clearly, the students became aware of Andersen’s anxiety and tried to reassure him:

“Don’t think more about it! Be happy with us!” said a couple of the Swedish friends. They were all so cheerful, but a seriousness had entered my soul; I am often reminded of this evening, and no noble person who reads these notes will consider me vain for having dwelt so long on this moment of my life”.

The experience in Lund shares a chapter in Andersen’s memoirs with the success in Denmark of The Mulatto – two events at this time in his life that he describes as a turning point: the point where “mitt rette Livs Foraar” – the real spring of his life – began. Perhaps it can be said that it was here that the ugly duckling Andersen seriously dared to start believing that perhaps he was a more splendid bird than that?

Andersen thanked the Lund students for their felicitations in 1840 with a specially written poem, “The Student from Lund”. The poem was dedicated to the student male voice choir conductor, Otto Lindblad, who also set music to this poem. Photo source: Lund University male Voice Choir.

No longer a duckling on return visit

In The Fairy Tale of my Life, Andersen writes that his thoughts still flew “with gratitude and happiness” to Lund, but also states with a certain regret that he never returned to the city. This, however, would change. Ten years after his memoirs were published, in October 1865, Andersen returned to Lund, this time as the invited guest to a Saturday soirée at the Academic Society. He was now 60, recognised and read worldwide, and possessed both the title of professor and a state author’s salary. The newly hatched duckling of 1840 had, to put it briefly, become a fully-fledged swan, and the honouring of the celebrity guest reflected that. The walls of the Small Hall (located on the west side of the AF Building’s ground floor) were decorated with the coats of arms of the student nations surrounded by Swedish and Danish flags, the lectern was draped in the Danish flag and behind it stood the student union’s standard, embroidered and donated some years earlier by a group of Copenhagen ladies at a Nordic student meeting. Around one-third of the union’s 300 members attended the event.

The student union standard from 1862, donated by a group of Danish ladies, which acted as a backdrop for H C Andersen’s appearance at the Academic Society three years later. Photo source: Academic Society Archive.

This time, the proceedings were more subdued and dignified. August Quennerstedt, a recently appointed associate professor of zoology, who later became a professor and vice-chancellor, recounted that the evening began with a light supper, which was “initially eaten in silence or murmured conversation”. However, after a time the meal took on a “livelier atmosphere” as it usually does “when so many students are brought together”. Naturally, there were speeches: first by the head of the Academic Society’s social committee, the future law professor, Pehr Assarsson, and then by Andersen, who spoke about his previous visit. It was, according to Quennerstedt “well-founded: most of those present had not been born at the time”. After that, the student male voice choir performed and a student poet, Hening Wendell, read a newly-written tribute poem for the Danish guest.

The highlight was, of course, when Andersen stood behind the lectern and told some of his fairy tales: The Old Oak Tree’s Last dream, It’s Quite True and The Butterfly. However, Quennerstedt commented, with a certain disappointment, that he did not read Den grimme Ælling – The Ugly Duckling. “It was, after all, his own concentrated life story”, wrote Quennerstedt later, “perhaps it was the feeling of just that which meant he did not want to read it in this particular circle.”

In return, Quennerstedt had the opportunity to have a short conversation with the celebrity guest, and told him that a collection of Andersen’s fairy tales in Danish was the first book that Quennerstedt bought in Lund as a young student, “even though it certainly wasn’t the fairy tales on which I would be examined”. He also related how he took another of Andersen’s books to a very remote place. Early on in his student years, Quennerstedt had taken part in a research expedition to Spitsbergen with the famous polar explorer Nordenskiöld. Just as they were about to depart, a friend turned up and returned a borrowed copy of Andersen’s A Picturebook Without Pictures, which without further ado accompanied him on the trip, where it “came in useful, as Nordenskiöld read it with great pleasure between investigations of the Kolfjellet mountain in Belsund”.

Andersen’s later incarnations in Lund

Poster for the Jesperspexet student revue, H C Andersen, from 2001. Photo source: Jesperspexet

As far as I know, Andersen’s visit in 1865 was his last to Lund, and he died ten years later. However, this has not prevented him in later years from appearing for Lund students, although in other incarnations. Around 1910, for example, a member of the Helsingkrona student nation, Malte Rhödin, was known as “the unsurpassed interpreter of H C Andersen”. Like Andersen himself, he performed at the Academic Society’s soirées, but also on at least one occasion with great success at the student union in Copenhagen. The founder of the Academic Society’s Archive, Tusse Sjögren, described Rhödin’s performance as an Andersen interpreter as follows:

He strode in wearing his long gown, shoes with shiny buckles, and top hat, and with his protruding nose and glittering eyes, he was the spitting image of the great poet. In addition, he had an important ability: he spoke perfect Danish.

Unfortunately, Rhödin was not only an exceptional Andersen interpreter, he was also something of a “recluse, always oversensitive, at times sick from melancholy”. In January 1913, he was found dead in a field beside the road to Dalby.

Fortunately, our story does not need to end on such a sad note. Almost one hundred years after Rhödin’s death, Andersen was again on the Academic Society’s stage in 2001, and now under purely cheerful circumstances, namely as the titular hero in a Jesperspex student revue entitled H C Andersen!

Fredrik Tersmeden
Archivist at Records Management and Archives

Main sources:

H C Andersen: Mit livs eventyr (Copenhagen 1855)

H.C. Andersens dagbøger (digital version of Andersen’s diaries on the Royal Danish Library’s website)

Kirsten Dreyer: H C Andersen – En brevbiografi (annotated digital version of
Andersen’s letters on the Royal Danish Library’s website)

August Quennerstedt: “En studentafton på 1860-talet” in Under Lundagårds kronor –
Minnen upptecknade af gamla studenter. Ny samling (Lund 1921)

Tusse Sjögren: 10-tals student (Academic Society Yearbook 1993; Lund 1994)