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The fact that Holberg was a Norwegian, was not the least
important of the circumstances that throughout the century aroused
the people of Norway to a clear consciousness of their nationality’s
full citizenship in the world. The latter half of the 18th century
opened an ever-widening chasm between the Danish and Norwegian
talents that succeeded Holberg. Through the half-German court,
and the encouragement it gave to the German bard, Klopstock,
who had been summoned to Copenhagen, the nationality of the
Danish literature was for some time seriously menaced. At the
same time the Norwegians, notwithstanding the community of
written language and university, were undergoing a healthy
development in the direction of national separatism. The desire
for independence was concentrated in the demand for a separate
Norwegian university. This did not arise merely from a desire
to feel that their sons had been educated on native soil, but also
from a germinating Norwegian science, which felt itself justified
in gathering about a national seat of learning. For a time the
nation had to content itself with a «Videnskabernes Selskab»
(Literary and Philosophical Society) in Trondhjem (1760), presided over
by the naturalist, Bishop Gunnerus, and Schøning, the historian.
Among Norwegian-born men of science in Denmark, the names
of the botanist, Martin Vahl, and the mathematician Caspar
Wessel, should be recorded. In belles-lettres, Tullin, the young
drawing-room poet in Kristiania, gained great renown, both in
Norway and Denmark, by his lyrics formed on the pattern of the
modern English lyrical poetry. It was a Norwegian, N. K. Bredal,
who, two or three years after Holberg’s death, revived the
Copenhagen taste for a Danish stage; and his example induced another
young Norwegian, Johan Nordal Brun, to write tragedies in the
bombastic style of the period. The subject of one of these was
taken from the Norwegian saga age, and by the defiant tone it
adopted towards the Danish, aroused the first public controversy
between the young spokesmen of the two sister nationalities (1772).
In the heat of the battle, Brun sang his afterwards so famous
national song, «For Norge, kjæmpers fødeland» (For Norway, the
birth-land of warriors), which, however, he did not venture to print.
The silly bombast that flooded Bredal’s stage awakened in a third
young Norwegian the desire to protest in the name of good taste.
This was Johan Herman Wessel, whose immortal travesty,
«Kjærlighed uden strømper» (Love without Stockings), drowned
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