Johan Herman Wessel

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Johan Herman Wessel

Johan Herman Wessel (6 October 1742 – 29 December 1785) was a Norwegian-Danish poet. Some of his satirical poems are still popular.

Biography

The son of a painter, he was born and raised in Vestby, Akershus, Norway, and was the elder brother of mathematician Caspar Wessel. He was a relative of the naval hero Peder Tordenskjold.

Living most of his (bohemian) life in Copenhagen dependent on casual work and weakened by a bad health and drinking Wessel became the popular and admired centre of Norske Selskab ("The Norwegian Society") a very important club of Norwegian literary figures cultivating their national identity in Copenhagen, and writing in classical metres. He died, aged 43, in Copenhagen.

Illustration by Theodor Kittelsen for The Smith and the Baker

First of all Wessel is known for his many humorous and satiric verse tales (ed. 1784-1785), referring to man’s foolishness and injustice. Most famous is Smeden og Bageren (“The Smith and the Baker”) about the only smith of a village who is pardoned for manslaughter since the village people need one, while a more superfluous baker is executed instead (there are two bakers, the village only needs one) in order to observe the rules that “life pays life”.

In Herremanden (“The Squire”) a man coming to Hell makes unpleasant discoveries of the origin of his own son while Hundemordet (“The Dog Murder”) tells about wrangle about trivial things.

The style of Wessel is deliberate elaborate and digressive and at the same time elegant and witty. Another genre is the epigram that he mastered, especially his short, witty, impudent, precise and also self-ironic commemorative poems. Many of them are still quoted.

His satirical play Kierlighed uden Strømper (i. e. Love without Stockings, 1772—with epilogue, 1774) is a generic parody of neoclassical tragedy; it takes place in a daily milieu of banal conflicts but observes the formal rules of “heroic language”. It is still performed.

Another play is Anno 7603, written in 1781. It has a low literary value, and it has never been performed—it is held in such low esteem that it is often omitted from lists of his works[1] —but it has some cult status since this is one of the first examples of time travel in fiction.[2] The main characters, Leander and Julie, are moved by a fairy[3] to a future (AD 7603) in which gender roles have been switched and only women are allowed to fight in the military.

The traditional restaurant Wesselstuen in Bergen, Norway contains many of his works as decorations.

Sources

  1. ↑ Stewart, Jon Bartley (2009). Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions: Literature, drama, and music. Ashgate Publishing. p. 249. ISBN 978-0-7546-6820-6. Retrieved 14 July 2011. 
  2. ↑ Nahin, Paul J. (2011). Time Travel: A Writer's Guide to the Real Science of Plausible Time Travel. JHU Press. p. xv. ISBN 978-1-4214-0082-2. Retrieved 14 July 2011. 
  3. ↑ Nahin, Paul J. (1999). Time machines: time travel in physics, metaphysics, and science fiction. Springer. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-387-98571-8. Retrieved 14 July 2011. 
  • Liv Bliksrud, Johan Herman Wessel og hans tid, Wesselakademiet, 2000.. ISBN 82-92033-01-7 (Norwegian).
  • Liv Bliksrud, Den smilende makten : Norske Selskab i København og Johan Herman Wessel, Aschehoug, 1999. ISBN 82-03-18146-5. (Norwegian).
Authority control
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.