Viktor Rydberg

Her death broke the spirit of his father, who yielded to hypochondria and alcoholism, contributing towards his loss of employment and the family's apartment,[4] forcing authorities to board young Viktor out to a series of foster homes, one of which burnt down, further traumatizing the youth.

One biographer notes that: "He had a hard struggle to satisfy the thirst for learning which was a leading passion of his life, but he finally attained distinction in several fields of scholarship.

Having been a supporter of the Jewish cause since his youth, it was MP Viktor Rydberg who gave the keynote speech in the parliamentary debate to enact a law granting all non-Lutherans full civil rights.

His apprehension of unregulated capitalism at the dawn of the industrial age is most fully expressed in his acclaimed poem Den nya Grottesången (The New Grotti Song) in which he delivered a fierce attack on the miserable working conditions in factories of the era, using the mill of Grottasöngr as his literary backdrop.

His works are widely read in schools throughout Sweden, and his poem "Tomten" ("Santa" or "The Gnome") is a Christmas favorite, as well as the lyrics for Gläns över sjö och strand.

Referring to a failed engagement, Judith Moffett writes: We can construct a story of backdoor illicit liaisons and front door respectability from these fragments and others— Rydberg would hardly be the first, if it were true— but he never spoke openly about his private life at any time, and our best guess would still be guesswork.

[citation needed] In 1857, Rydberg's first novel, Fribytaren på Östersjön (The Freebooter of the Baltic; 1857), a historical romance set in the 17th century, incorporating themes of piracy, witchcraft and nautical excursions, was published.

This was soon followed by his first major success, and one of his most popular novels, Singoalla (1858), a "romantic story out of the Middle Ages, permeated with a poetic nature-mysticism, about the tragic love between a knight and a gypsy girl.

4, Part 1, 1904–5, noting that the book "has already been translated into most of the languages of continental Europe", remarks that "Singoalla is a novel occupying a pre-eminent place among Rydberg's prose writings."

"[18] In 1862 he wrote and published Bibelns lära om Kristus (The Bible's Doctrine concerning Christ), a work of contemporary religious criticism, which was hugely successful.

August Strindberg "acknowledged the liberating influence of Rydberg's Bibelns lära om Kristus (The Bible's Doctrine Concerning Christ, 1862) on his generation (like David Friedrich Strauss and Ernst Renan).

According to Rydberg, the contemporary Church was still driven by the ideology of the Dark Ages, and its dualistic notions of good and evil, represented by God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell, contributed towards the horror of the witch-hunts in Europe and America in the recent past.

After a long journey in Italy in 1874, Rydberg published Romerska sägner om apostlarna Petrus och Paulus (Roman Legends concerning the Apostles Peter and Paul 1874) and Romerska Dagar (Roman Days 1877), a series of essays on Italian culture, history and archaeology; The journey is said to have strengthened Rydberg's creative power, as he now produced some of "the finest philosophical lyrics in Swedish literature".

"[26]Even Sophus Bugge acknowledged that Rydberg won the argument, ushering in the modern age of Eddic scholarship by firmly vanquishing the nature-school of mythology.

"[28] Henrik Schück wrote at the turn of the 20th century that he considered Rydberg the "last —and poetically most gifted —of the mythological school founded by Jacob Grimm and represented by such men as Adalbert Kuhn" which is "strongly synthetic" in its understanding of myth.

Rydberg's final publication, an essay titled Den hvita rasens framtid, "The Future of the White Race", was published posthumously as an introduction to the Swedish edition of Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution.

Noting that "Rydberg's conception of race is not equivalent with the modern term; the meaning he gives the word is in fact more cultural than biological, ...he includes Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists living in Asia, America and to some extent Africa in this expression."

Rydberg shared this anxiety: he was very critical to industrialism and unhealthy milieu of the big European metropolises, ...in combination with low nativity this was a dangerous threat to Europe, especially compared to the steadily growing, physically as well as morally sound population in China and the Far East.

[Note 4] While some scholars have praised Rydberg's method,[37] still others have commented on what they see as fundamental flaws in his methodology, objecting to any systematization of the mythology including the one imposed by Snorri Sturlusson, believing it artificial.

However, John Lindow[38] and Margaret Clunies Ross[39] have recently supported a chronological systemization of the most important mythic episodes as inherent in the oral tradition underlying Eddic poetry.

Rydberg believed that most of the Germanic myths were part of a chronological epic, an approach that H. R. Ellis Davidson characterized as arising "from an assumption that the mythology was once complete and rational.

[Note 6] In the first comprehensive review of the work in English, Rydberg's "brilliancy" and "great success" were recognized, alongside an acknowledgement that he sometimes "stumbles badly" in his effort to "reduce chaos to order.

In 2004, Swedish doktorand (PhD student) Anna Lindén reviewed the full two-volume work on mythology, concluding in part that it was not more widely received because it was not fully available in one of the three international languages of scholarship: English, German or French.

Among these may be reckoned the Swede, V. Rydberg, who shows great learning in the combination of various aspects of mythical narratives and according to whom even the cosmogonic myths are to be classed among the original possessions of the primitive Indo-European period.

"[44]As Fredrik Gadde has explained, it was in this context, that "the book was reviewed by several German scholars, who all took up a more or less disparaging attitude towards Rydberg's methods of investigation and his results.

"[45] "Rydberg's work was, then, stamped as a failure, and this verdict from certain points of view cannot be considered unjust, seems to have caused the book to fall into oblivion, a fate which surely it has not deserved.

[47] In 1892, Irish scholar Stopford A. Brooke remarked: "When we have made every allowance for a certain fancifulness, and for the bias which a well-loved theory creates, this book is a real contribution to Northern mythology.

The sagacious Swedish scholar V. Rydberg argued in the same way, considering him only more particularly to be connected with the heavenly fire, the lightning; this seems to be shown by the etymological meaning of the names Byleistr and Farbauti both parents of Loki.