The Danish pastor banned from preaching who inspired the folk high school
N. F. S. Grundtvig wrote or translated around 1,500 hymns, helped draft Denmark's first constitution and shaped modern Danish national identity. He is also regarded as the ideological father of the folk high school, though for seven years the Church of Denmark would not let him preach after he called a theology professor anti-Christian.
Born on 8 September 1783 in Udby, the son of a Lutheran pastor, Grundtvig grew up in a devout home where his mother also cherished old Norse legends. He studied theology at the University of Copenhagen from 1801 and, near the end, took up Icelandic and the sagas. As a young man he was introverted and awkward, and nothing he wrote in those years appeared in print while he lived. Northern Mythology in 1808 brought his first real success.
His first sermon, in 1810, attacked the Copenhagen clergy, and publishing it provoked calls for punishment. That same year a religious crisis turned him into a fervent Lutheran. In 1825 his pamphlet The Church's Rejoinder denounced Henrik Nicolai Clausen, who had argued that the Bible alone could not fully express Christianity; Grundtvig was prosecuted for libel, fined and barred from preaching for seven years. He used the time to visit England three times and study Anglo-Saxon.
From 1839 until his death he served as pastor of the Vartov workhouse church in Copenhagen, preaching every Sunday to large congregations. His hymn book changed Danish worship by replacing slow orthodox Lutheran melodies with hymns by national poets. In politics he moved from conservative to thoroughgoing liberal and sat in the 1848 Constituent Assembly, and in 1861 he received the honorary rank of bishop without a diocese.
Grundtvig wanted education to prepare people for active life in society rather than produce learned scholars, with practical skills alongside national poetry and history. A plan to turn Sorø Academy into such a popular school nearly happened under Christian VIII, whose queen admired him, but collapsed after the king died in 1848. He also dreamed of a Great Nordic University in Gothenburg. His writing is hard for outsiders to penetrate, so abroad he is far less celebrated than two Danes of the same era, Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard. He died on 2 September 1872.
Source: N. F. S. Grundtvig
