His father, whose name had been Esaias Lucasson, took the surname of Tegnérus—altered by his fifth son, the poet, to Tegnér—from the village of Tegnaby in the province of Småland, where he was born.

[1] In 1799 Esaias Tegnér, hitherto educated in the country, entered Lund University, where he graduated in philosophy in 1802, and continued as tutor until 1810, when he was elected Greek lecturer.

In the same year was founded in Stockholm the Gothic League (Götiska förbundet), a sort of club of young and patriotic men of letters, of whom Tegnér quickly became the chief.

The club published a magazine, entitled Iduna, in which it printed a great deal of excellent poetry, and ventilated its views, particularly as regards the study of Icelandic literature and old Norse history.

In a famous address given by Tegnér in 1817, he celebrates the Protestant Reformation as a breakthrough for human liberty and progress and praises the national liberation movements of his day.

Of these, the romance of Axel (1822) and the delicately chiselled idyl of Nattvardsbarnen (1820), translated by Longfellow, take a secondary place in comparison with Tegnér's masterpiece of worldwide fame.

Already before its last canto it was famous throughout Europe; the aged Goethe took up his pen to commend to his countrymen this alte, kräftige, gigantischbarbarische Dichtart and desired Amalie von Imhoff to translate it into German.

This romantic paraphrase of an ancient saga was composed in twenty-four cantos, all differing in verse form, modeled somewhat, on an earlier Danish masterpiece, Helge of Oehlenschläger.

It is far from satisfying the demands of more recent antiquarian research, but it still is allowed to give the freshest existing impression, in imaginative form, of life in early Scandinavia.

It transferred him from his study in Lund to the bishop's palace in Växjö; it marked the first breakdown of his health, which had hitherto been excellent; and it witnessed a singular moral crisis in the inner history of the poet, about which much has been written, but of which little is known.

[1] It is a remarkable sign of the condition of Sweden at that time that a man without a Christian heritage, and with little interest in formal religious matters, should be offered and should accept a bishop's crosier.