The Lutheranized Beginnings of Swedish Fable History

The paper discusses how the early reception in Swedish of the Aesopic fable was filtered through German Lutheranism. The main focus of the paper is on the country’s very first vernacular fable collection, Hundrade Esopi Fabler (A Hundred Fables of Aesop), published in Stockholm in 1603. This volume is a faithful translation of the German collection Hundert Fabeln aus Esopo, composed in the 1570s by Nathan Chytraeus, a Latin Professor at the university of Rostock and the younger brother of the orthodox Lutheran theologian David Chrytaeus. The latter had an enormous impact on the religious-confessional development in Scandinavia during the second part of the 16th century. As the text material itself of the fable collection also has a clear Lutheranizing tendency, the paper claims that the publishing of Hundrade Esopi Fabler in 1603 must be regarded as a contribution to the ongoing process of Lutheran confessionalization in Sweden.