Imaginations of the North and the South in Esaias Tegnér's Poetry

The contrast between the North and the South was a recurrent topos
in Romantic literature, and in Scandinavia it played a crucial role in the
Romantic writers’ search for a national cultural identity. This article
deals with the meaning and function of this imagery in some of Esaias
Tegnér’s most famous poems. Being present already in his patriotic
and partly Classicist poem ‘Svea’ (1811), Tegnér developed and tried
to reconcile the opposition between the North and the South in his
more Romantic poems, such as ‘Skidbladner’ (1812) and ‘Flyttfåglarna’
(1812), and finally created a powerful synthesis of them in his major
literary work, the epic Viking tale Frithiofs saga (1825). One should
note, however, that the words ‘north’ and ‘south’ in Tegnér’s writings
seldom refer to any specific geographic location. They seem rather to
be the names of two extreme poles in his poetics. Working always
together they form what the structuralists used to call a ‘binary
opposition’. As such they are closely related to a whole range of other
binaries: Nature versus Culture, Masculine versus Feminine, the
Spiritual versus the Material, Life versus Death, etc. Consequently,
Tegnér makes use of them in order to develop, elaborate and structure
other kinds of ideas and images. They are, in other words, not a result
of his poetic imagination but a precondition for it. This tendency to
think and write in opposites might be explained by the fact that Tegnér
lived and worked in a period of turbulent transition in Europe, but it
may also have something to do with the swinging moods and tendency
to ‘bipolar disorder’ in his own personality.