Adam Oehlenschläger

Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger (Copenhagen, 1779-1850) was a Danish poet and playwright and a central figure of Romanticism in his country's literature. He wrote in Danish at a time when Danish culture was torn between the Enlightenment inheritance and new currents from Germany, and his work marked a turning point in Nordic letters.

He grew up in Vesterbro, then a suburb of Copenhagen, and received only the most basic schooling. He tried acting without success, then studied law and soon gave it up for poetry. In 1802 a long conversation with the philosopher Henrik Steffens, just back from Germany, introduced him to the ideas of Goethe, Schiller and Schelling. That encounter inspired Guldhornene, a poem often regarded as the starting point of Danish Romanticism.

Between 1805 and 1810 he travelled through Germany, France, Switzerland and Italy, and during these years he wrote tragedies such as Hakon Jarl and Axel og Valborg. On his return he was hailed as the country's finest poet and held a chair in aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen. His output ranged across epic verse, drama and prose, drawing on Norse myth and saga. Critics often note a decline in his creative force after his work on Helge.

His legacy is considerable. He was one of the leading pioneers of Romanticism in Europe, and apart from Ludvig Holberg, no Danish writer before 1870 had a comparable reach. His song Der er et yndigt land became the national anthem of Denmark. In 1829 he was crowned in Lund Cathedral as the king of Nordic poetry. He died in Copenhagen in 1850.