Research Journal: “The Gentle Bond of a Common Country”
Emily Veblen’s parents emigrated from Norway in the late 1840s, settling first in Wisconsin, where Emily was born in 1855, before making their way to rural Nerstrand, Minnesota. In a memoir written in 1940, Veblen remembers that “when we went to school, we passed the open door of the smithy and looked in, ‘and saw the sparks that flew from his anvil,’ many a time, ‘like chaff from a threshing floor,’ as Longfellow says.”
Oscar Overby’s parents emigrated from Norway in 1882 and settled in Griggs County, North Dakota, where Oscar was born in 1892. As he grew older, he found himself tempted to write the story of his life. In his seventies, when he finally sat down to write, Overby noted that the temptation to tell his story “was never stronger than when a houseful of wonderful grandchildren ‘climb over the arms of your chair … surround you, and seem to be everywhere,’ as poet Longfellow has so aptly put it. —Tell us more, grandpa!”
Emily Veblen and Oscar Overby both attended American public schools at a time when the poetry of Longfellow was drilled into the heads of schoolchildren as part of the standard curriculum. Even as his critical reputation declined after his death in 1882, Longfellow was canonized as “the American national poet.” His poetry was accessible and wholesome. It was believed to model proper English usage, develop sound literary taste, and stimulate healthy moral sentiments. It was something every American was expected to know. Longfellow’s poetry had the power to shape how Americans remembered, thought, and talked about their experience. When Emily Veblen remembered the real Norwegian American blacksmith of her childhood, her memory was filtered through the lens of Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith.” When she and Oscar Overby stirred the waters of memory, bits of Longfellow’s poetry floated to the surface.
For the children of immigrants, who might be steeped in the language and customs of their parents at home, the public school was where they learned how to be Americans. But learning to be an American was not simply a matter of reading the same poems and following a standard curriculum. For Oscar Overby, it meant doing this while sharing a classroom with others who were different from himself. Reflecting on his early schooling in rural North Dakota, Overby wrote:
An educational experience of considerable note was not only to learn to know Washington and Lincoln by name, but to find foreigners in the seat right next to me who could not understand a word of my Norwegian chatter. Yes, on the “West Prairie” we had Irish and French neighbors, who opened new doorways to wider horizons. The next step was to develop enough courage to walk in. The one-room schoolhouse helped immeasurably in the process. It provided a realistic introduction to democracy; and I am grateful that my parents endorsed the process, and taught me to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The American in me was born…
The democratic ideals of fairness, openness, and inclusion, as formulated in the Golden Rule, were to Overby the most important lessons of the one-room schoolhouse. And this was a lesson that Longfellow reinforced.
When the Northfield News asked Northfield, Minnesota, public school students in December 1895 what books they had read that year, Longfellow—especially Longfellow’s Evangeline—was on the list of many of the students. One seventh grader, Thora Hille, wrote:
I have read Bryant’s poem about the trees in the woods and Longfellow’s poem about Evangeline. I prefer Evangeline. The reason why I like Evangeline the best is because it has many pretty figures of speech, such as similes and metaphors, and it also teaches many good lessons, how to treat others as we would be treated ourselves.
Whether or not children actually preferred literature that delivered lessons in good behavior, they had at least learned to claim such a preference. As Angela Sorby writes in Schoolroom Poets, “when students wrote personal responses to his [Longfellow’s] work, these responses seem conditioned by institutional expectations and teachers’ demands.” These reponses tell us something about the moral lessons poetry was expected to teach.
Thora Hille was the daughter of Norwegian immigrants. So was Anna Hanson, who as an eighth grader in 1899 wrote an essay on Longfellow that was also published in the Northfield News. The prompt was: “Which famous character would you like to be, and why?” Anna chose Longfellow:
I choose this one because I think it would have been a very grand thing to have written some of the most beautiful and interesting poems which he has written and with which he had left a great monument in the thoughts of the American people.
In writing I would want to compose somewhat like Longfellow’s grand poem “Evangeline.” To me this poem is very beautiful, telling, as it does so well, about the pleasant and peaceful life of the people in the simple homes in Acadia and then when they were in the midst of their happiness, they were compelled to leave homes and go, they knew not where…
Like Thora Hille, Anna Hanson had learned her lessons well. They were part of a generation of immigrant children who absorbed their American identity, at least in part, through Longfellow.
Evangeline is a poem about people driven from their homes and forced to wander in search of a new home elsewhere. As Anna Hanson’s response suggests, it may have been this aspect of the poem that accounts for its appeal to the children of immigrants, whose parents left their ancestral home for a new country. The children of immigrants, who shared the bond of two countries, may have recognized themselves in Longfellow’s description of Evangeline’s small party of Acadian refugees meeting other Acadians and Creoles in Louisiana:
Friend clasped friend in his arms; and they who before were as strangers,
Meeting in exile, became straightaway as friends to each other,
Drawn by the gentle bond of a common country together.
To historian William R. Thayer, it was no coincidence that Longfellow’s status as America’s national poet coincided with a period of large-scale immigration to the United States. In an address to the American Historical Association in 1907, Thayer said:
Immigration on a large scale had begun, and it was slowly to change the nature of our racial stock. Henceforth Latin and Teuton, Scandinavian and Slav must contribute their ingredients to the composite American character. Now Longfellow, beyond all other Americans, knew the spirit of those peoples through their literatures, and by translating many of their poems and by retelling many of their favorite stories he prepared the way for some sort of sympathetic meeting when the strangers began to pour into the United States. The service which he rendered to our culture by infusing into it strains from the Continental reservoirs has been freely acknowledged, but his even greater service as spokesman to the New American has been almost overlooked. That New American is by inheritance a cosmopolite; it required a poet of cosmopolitan culture and sympathy to be his spokesman. Here, again, Longfellow displays the trait of universality which make him of all our poets the most accessible to our oldest and youngest citizens alike. We may well be grateful that our new populations can through him come to know our ideals of duty, service, dignity, courage, self-sacrifice, kindliness, friendship, affection, and patriotism; for it is, after all, on these that the character of man and nation must be built.
While critics dismissed Longfellow as old-fashioned, Thayer argued for the poet’s continuing relevance as a representative of an increasingly multicultural America. Longfellow himself had written that in America a “National Literature,” which is “the expression of the National character,” would be “a composite one,” embracing the characteristics of the various ethnic groups that constituted America. The most universal, he said, would be the most national. Thus, while critics wrote off Longfellow’s universality as “commonplace,” Thayer regarded it as an accessible entry point into a common understanding of what it means to be an American.
Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863) is perhaps the best representation of Thayer’s multicultural American Longfellow. In the book, travellers from various backgrounds—three Americans, a Sicilian, a Spanish Jew, and a Norwegian musician modeled after Longfellow’s friend Ole Bull—exchange songs and stories around the hearth of a country inn. One of the travelers is an American theologian, who “preached to all men everywhere/The Gospel of the Golden Rule,” reminding us that there is a moral lesson to be learned from people of different backgrounds—“diversified, but still the same,” to borrow a line from the Theologian—who gather to share their stories. Longfellow’s wayside inn is, like Overby’s one-room schoolhouse, a place where listening to someone from a foreign land opens “new doorways to wider horizons.”
The landlord of the inn begins the storytelling by sharing the patriotic American story of “Paul Revere’s Ride.” The travellers follow with the stories they have brought with them from Europe, including the Norwegian musician’s “The Saga of King Olaf,” the bloody tale, inspired by the Old Norse Heimskringla, of Olaf Tryggvason’s attempts to convert Norway to Christianity by the sword.
When Herbert M. Skinner, a school official from Indiana, visited Northfield, Minnesota, in the summer of 1883, he had the feeling that he “was indeed in King Olaf’s dominions.” In an article written for the Indianapolis Sunday Sentinel and reprinted in the Rice County Journal, he wrote about the Norwegian immigrants he encountered in Northfield and filtered his impressions through the lens of Longfellow’s poem:
I looked for Einar Tamberskelver, for Thorberg Skafting, and for Bjorn and Berk. I think I should know them all, when
Bjorn and Berk
Watched the sailors at work,
Heavens! How they swore!
Doubtless they swore with equal fervor at the taverns [in Northfield].
No, they were not there. The Norwegians whom I met were quite, industrious, thrifty and intelligent men, with whom it was a pleasure to meet. As a class, they are of fine physical appearance, many of them of a high degree of beauty. In Minnesota I have seen many an Einar Tamberskelver, like the one of old, who bare
To the winds his golden hair,
By the mainmast stood,
Graceful was his form and slender,
And his eyes were deep and tender
As a woman’s in the splendor
Of her maidenhood.
Although he acknowledges that the sober Norwegians of Northfield, Minnesota, were nothing like the wild Norsemen of the saga, he keeps returning to Longfellow as his point of reference.
Skinner’s tour of Northfield ends on the campus of St. Olaf College, where he sits down for an interview with the college president, Rev. Thorbjorn Mohn. At the end of the interview, Skinner steers the conversation to Longfellow.
“What do you think, Professor, of the ‘Saga of King Olaf’ by Longfellow?” Skinner asks.
“It is a beautiful poem,” Rev. Mohn says. “One of Longfellow’s best.”
“But what I want to know is, does it portray the spirit as well as the thought of the original? Is it a true saga, or merely an English imitation?”
“It is a true saga,” Mohn tells him. “In its choice of words, in its meter and its spirit, it is a very faithful reproduction of the old Norse poem.”
The conversation between the two men enacts Thayer’s claim that Longfellow “prepared the way for some sort of sympathetic meeting” between native-born Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock like Skinner and recent immigrants like the Norwegian Rev. Mohn. For immigrants like Mohn and children of immigrants like Thora Hille and Anna Hanson, Longfellow was a point of entry into American culture. For Herbert Skinner, Longfellow was a point of entry into Norwegian culture.
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Longfellow spent several months in Sweden in 1835, studying the language and sharpening his appreciation of the land and its culture. This was his only visit to Scandinavia, but it had a lasting influence on his work, leading to, among other things, a translation from Swedish of passages from Esaias Tegnér’s Frithjof’s Saga and Tegnér’s Nattvardsbarnen (“The Children of the Lord’s Supper”), and “The Saga of King Olaf” in Tales of a Wayside Inn. The influence of Sweden was absorbed into Longfellow’s poetry. There are, for instance, striking similarities between Tegnér’s Frithiof’s Saga and Evangeline, which is composed in dactylic hexameters, a meter unusual for English-language poetry that Longfellow first used in his translation of Tegnér’s Nattvardsbarnen. Interest in Scandinavia, in the words of Longfellow scholar Andrew Hilen, “runs like a bright thread through Longfellow's life.”
Longfellow’s popularity was undoubtedly an important factor in making the American public aware of Scandinavia and its literature. At the same time, Longfellow’s poetry was popular among Swedish immigrants to the United States, if the number of translations of his poems appearing in Swedish language newspapers is any indication. There was clearly a special relationship between Longfellow and Swedish immigrants. When Longfellow died in 1882, the Swedish-language newspaper Svenska folkets tidning in Minneapolis eulogized: “Hardly any American poet has acquired such a worldwide reputation as his, and for us Swedes he has a special interest because of the peculiar fondness with which he embraced our country’s language and literature.”
In 1879, Swedes in Minneapolis began to campaign for the creation of a Scandinavian library, which they would eventually get with the opening of the Southside Branch library in 1890. In making the case for such a library in a city that had one of the largest populations of Swedes in the world, the newspaper Minnesota Stats Tidning invoked Longfellow:
Americans need not fear that the formation of such a library will in any way diminish the affection of the Scandinavians for the language and literature of this country. The exact opposite is likely to be the case: perhaps your American brethren will support you in this enterprise. They are unfamiliar with the authors who are most valued in the motherland, but they already know that our most distinguished living poet, Longfellow, has produced a number of beautiful translations from Swedish poets.
In Longfellow Redux, Christopher Irmscher writes about the rise of “Saxonism” in mid-19th century America, and “the worry that the health of America might be contaminated by an invasion of books in translation flaunting their cultural otherness.” Longfellow, of course, was aware of this concern, and even puts it into the mouth of the Theologian, in Tales of a Wayside Inn, who repeatedly asserts that “what is native still is best.” But Longfellow himself, as “our most distingushed poet,” sanctioned Swedish literature with his translations. He provided a bridge that made possible the meeting of cultures, that allowed native-born American and Swedish immigrant to meet on common ground.
Another Swedish-language newspaper in Minneapolis, Svenska Amerikanska Posten, wrote in 1894: “Longfellow belonged as a citizen to the United States, but as a poet he belongs to the whole civilized world, for his masterly poems have been translated into several foreign languages.” A large part of Longfellow’s appeal for Swedish immigrants lies in the fact that he both translated from their language and was translated into their language. There’s a reciprocity between Swedish and English, a kind of linguistic application of the Golden Rule. The Posten’s tribute to Longfellow ends, appropriatedly, with a translation into Swedish of his poem “The Arrow and the Song.” The poet launches his arrow and sings his song into the air, not knowing where either will land. Later, he finds the arrow lodged in an oak and the song “in the heart of a friend.” In this case, the unforeseen friend is the reader of a Swedish immigrant newspaper in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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Hjalmar Edgren was a serial immigrant. He emigrated from Sweden to the United States four times: in 1862, to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War; in 1870, to attend Cornell University; in 1884, to teach languages at the University of Nebraska; and in 1896, when he returned to the University of Nebraska as the dean of the new graduate school. His adult life was divided almost evenly between Sweden and the United States. Edgren was an extreme example of the “twoness,” the sense of dual identities and of belonging to two different places, that many immigrants experienced. As a Swedish colleague said of him, “he belonged to both Sweden and America and united warm love for the land of his birth with ardent devotion to the great nation on the other side of the Atlantic.”
When he emigrated the second time, in 1870, he observed his fellow immigrants of various nationalities about the ship, and asked himself: “What is the vital force in the American Republic that enables it every week to receive thousands of Europe’s most neglected and oppressed children and then refashions them in a generation into successful and intelligent citizens who live in a nation governed by the people?” During his years in the United States, Edgren came to admire what he saw as America’s commitment to social equality and its freedom from the class distinctions that raised barriers between people in Sweden. In America, he said, “equality is the whole spirit of the people.”
Edgren became a linguist who, during two of his sojourns in the United States, taught modern languages, Sanskrit, and comparative philology at the University of Nebraska. He was also a poet and translator, and in 1884 he published a book of original poetry and translations of American and English poets, including Longfellow. One reviewer wrote of Edgren’s poems: “They perhaps are most beautiful when they are seen as visions in a foreign land and colored by a longing for home. Then Värmland looms up for the poet. He hears the rustle in the fir trees so clearly that he must describe it in a poem.” One poem, “Mitt hemland” (“My Homeland”) begins:
Hvad är för makt, som tänder denna längtan
Till dig, mitt dyra fosterland,
Som ökar pulsens slag, hvar gång med trängtan
Min tanke ilar mot din strand?
What is this power that ignites longing
For you, my dear motherland,
That grows stronger with every heartbeat
Each time my thoughts fly to your shore?
The poem vocalizes what has been called “the heartrending inner split and dualism in the Swedish American immigrant,” the sense of living in one country but still holding another country in his heart, an unreachable part of himself.
In 1875, Edgren published a Swedish translation of Longfellow’s Evangeline, which Longfellow himself praised as “very faithful and well-versified.” The translation was one of several publications, including a larger selection of translations of Longfellow published in 1892, with which Edgren sought to familiarize Swedes with the literature of the United States. Edgren’s translations also appeared in Swedish language newspapers in the United States in the late 19th century, and when Edgren died in 1903, Svenska folkets tidning in Minneapolis praised the translator as “a link between Sweden and America.”
One of Edgren’s scholarly publications in English was an article on “The Antecedents of Longfellow’s ‘King Robert of Sicily,’” a tale told by the Sicilian in Tales of a Wayside Inn. In the story, as told in Longfellow’s poem, the proud King Robert, hearing the Magnificat chanted in church, asks the meaning of the words deposuit potentes de sede—“he deposed the powerful from their throne”—and boasts that no power in heaven or earth can take his throne from him. He then falls asleep in the church, and when he wakes the next morning he finds himself dressed in rags. He returns to his castle to find that an angel has assumed his form and taken the throne. The angel makes the real king his jester, and for years the king is debased and ridiculed until he internalizes an attitude of humility and reverence, at which point the angel restores him to his throne. It’s a story about dual identities, about the lessons learned from experiencing the world as someone else.
Edgren begins his article by asserting that even the most original-seeming works of literature are “the result of a long antecedent growth of tangled history and legend.” All stories come from somewhere else, and take on new forms as they move through time and from one place to another. Edgren traces the story of King Robert back to an ancient Sanskrit source: the story of a wizard who teaches a king a spell for transferring his soul into the body of someone who had just died. When the king, eager to regain his youth, uses the spell to transfer his soul into the body of a young man who has just died, the magician transfers his own soul into the king’s body and takes his place on the throne. A kind of translation. From this ancient Sanskrit source, Edgren traces the story westward to Persia, Palestine, Byzantium, France, Germany, England, Scandinavia, and finally to America in Longfellow’s version of the tale. The original tale of the transmigration of souls is itself reincarnated into a new language and culture with each new retelling. The story is itself an immigrant that becomes naturalized in each new setting.
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