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tebetalende, stemmeberettigede gårdbrukere. ish but in Latin. There is a close connection Det jeg imidlertid savner i denne oppsumme- between Sweden’s short but intense period as ringen er en diskusjon av makt som et motiv a Great Power and Swedish Neo-Latin litera- for en integrering. Hvem innordnet seg etter ture, which often aimed at praising the sover- hvem, og hvem presset seg frem på bekost- eign. Even if the chain of causes and events in ning av hvem. For å komme tilbake til en egen the gradual disappearance of Latin as a living kjepphest – hvem ble dannet av hvem til et po- means of expression has never been thoroughly litisk individ? explored, it is clear that there was by the end Trond Bjerkås sin avhandling er et viktig of the Great Power period also an end of the bidrag, og kan sees i sammenheng med den et- popularity of propaganda literature written in ter hvert store forskningsproduksjonen på fol- Latin. When ideas and ideals changed, Swedish kelig offentlig deltakelse i dens mange former i Latin literature was regarded as obsolete, still perioden rundt 1814, som belyser denne delen later it became literally incomprehensible, and av norsk historie. Den føyer seg også fint inn authors who had expressed themselves mainly i en nordisk forskningstradisjon, hvor vekten in Latin gradually sunk into oblivion. One har vært i Sverige. Han utfordrer også hege- example of such an author was Magnus Rön- monimodellen som har dominert synet på ene- now. It was not until the end of the twentieth voldsstaten under 1700-tallet, men er kanskje century, with the wave of scholars interested mer nyansert enn andre har vært den senere in Neo-Latin, that these forgotten authors tiden. Han viser i sin avhandling viktigheten slowly started to emerge into the light again. av at den normative makten må sees i sammen- There is still much to be done in this field, and heng med den normative praksisen – og vice Elena Dahlberg’s doctoral thesis on Magnus versa – for å få forståelse for maktens forut- Rönnow is a very welcome contribution. setninger og bruk. Who was Magnus Rönnow? He was the son of a clergyman in Åhus in Scania, born in Marthe Hommerstad 1665, died in 1735. Thanks to generous royal grants (his father seems to have done Charles XI a favour), he got a very thorough education and could make extensive travels to Germany Elena Dahlberg, The Voice of a Waning Empire: Se- and the Netherlands. Rönnow became a re- lected Latin Poetry of Magnus Rönnow from the Great nowned Hebraist and obtained the position as Northern War. Edited, with Introduction, Translation royal translator, Translator regni. He later worked and Commentary, by Elena Dahlberg, Acta Univer- as a secretary of protocols in Charles XII’s sitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Latina Upsaliensia chancellery in Lund, but saw himself forced 34 (Uppsala: Department of Linguistics and to leave the post, probably because of low or Philology, 2014). 385 pp. non-existent wages. Disappointed and disillu- sioned, shortly after the death of Charles XII What do we mean by “Swedish literature”? he left Sweden for England, where he spent Do we mean literature written in Swedish the rest of his life. Rönnow was held in great or literature written by Swedes? The answer esteem as a Latin poet by his contemporar- that we give to that question has a huge im- ies, and as late as in 1768 Samuel Älf, a keen pact on the extent of our national literature, collector of Swedish Latin poetry, planned to since a considerable part of the literature writ- make an edition of his works (see Dahlberg ten by Swedes was, as late as the middle of 2014 p. 25). Times had changed, however, and the eighteenth century, written not in Swed- general interest in Swedish Latin poetry was DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7557/4.4161 133 Sjuttonhundratal | 2017 waning and Rönnow’s poems, as we can see, Dahlberg’s thesis is the first extensive study had to wait until 2014 to be made available to and modern edition of Rönnow’s work. Here, a greater public. as elsewhere in the thesis, Dahlberg shows that Elena Dahlberg’s doctoral thesis consists she is well read in the relevant secondary lit- of two major and almost equally long parts. erature. The first one is a detailed introduction to Mag- Dahlberg has found some 190 poems nus Rönnow and his works and to Neo-Latin that can be attributed to Rönnow (in some poetry of the times of the Great Northern War cases, the attribution to Rönnow is not ab- in general. In the second part, Dahlberg gives solutely clear). Out of these, 170 (printed us editions of 11 of Rönnow’s poems (he and unprinted) make up part of Samuel Älf’s wrote around 190) together with translations collection, today kept at the Linköping Di- into English and detailed commentaries on the ocesan Library. Älf had originally planned to content of each poem. The book also contains edit not only Rönnow’s oeuvre, but also works indices. Dahlberg writes in her “Aim” that her by many other today forgotten Swedish Latin purpose, apart from offering a critical edition poets. Dahlberg provides no list of the titles of 11 of Rönnow’s poems, is to “give a pic- of all of Rönnow’s 190 poems in her thesis ture of Rönnow’s poetry in a broad compara- (as she could, perhaps, have done), but she tive perspective” (Dahlberg 2014 p. 17). Let gives a brief overview of their major themes. us state already here that Dahlberg fulfils every As the time of the Great Nordic War seems to promise given in the “Aim” and more than that. have been Rönnow’s most prolific period, it is Dahlberg’s thesis is a very thorough study, and quite natural that Dahlberg, aiming at giving her extensive reading in Swedish, Danish and a representative selection, has chosen the 11 Russian Neo-Latin literature makes it possible poems in her edition from this period. On pp. for her to put Rönnow’s poetry in its proper 30–34 in her thesis, she offers a very useful context in a way that very few, if any, other table of the 11 poems, showing for each one scholars could have done. As in every schol- of them the title, year of composition, metre, arly work, there are a (very) few things that number of verses, libraries and archives where could have been handled differently (and we it can be found and attribution. It would, will look at them briefly further on), but these however, have been very helpful if this table are only details. The thesis as a whole is solid, had also contained information on where the learned and in many ways groundbreaking. poems (i.e. the poems that do not only exist But let us go back to the beginning of the in manuscript) were printed. Generally speak- thesis. Dahlberg gives a description of Rön- ing, one could have wished for more practical now’s life (the description is short, since the information on the printing: who the print- sources are few) and the very little scholarly ers were, who financed the printing etc., and research that has been done on him before. also on how Rönnow’s and his contemporary After Samuel Älf’s aborted editorial project, colleagues’ poetry was financed and how the Rönnow seems to have been entirely forgotten poems spread. The lack of information is, until Kurt Johannesson mentioned him in his however, most certainly due to the fact that we I polstjärnans tecken: Studier i svensk barock (1968), simply cannot know. where he referred to him as the most outstand- The following sections, which treat the ing poet of his time (Dahlberg 2014 p. 25). historical background of the poems and the Although Rönnow has not been absent from role of the Latin propaganda literature during the general surveys of Swedish Neo-Latin the Great Nordic War, are doubtlessly some literature that have been written since then, of the most interesting and important in the 134 book. Dahlberg stresses the importance of the uses numerous examples not only from Rön- often overlooked Latin literature within the now but also from his contemporaries. The national literatures during this period. Divid- lack of secondary literature makes it crucial to ing the Latin propaganda literature into offi- go directly to the sources, and that is exactly cial polemical documents and occasional lit- what Dahlberg does. erature (fictive letters, allegories and orations In the excellent section on princely vir- and poems), she emphasizes the connection tues, Dahlberg’s text causes a small confusion between the occasional literature, often eulo- concerning the use of the word “Reformed”. gizing the sovereign, and the times of autoc- Dahlberg compares Humanist mirrors of racy. A modern scholar may sometimes wonder princes (for example Erasmus’ Institutio prin- if these glorifying and stylistically very com- cipis Christiani) with what she calls “Reformed” plicated poems actually had any readers even in ones. The context makes it more likely that she the seventeenth century. Dahlberg shows that rather means “Protestant”. they certainly had and that these poems played Moving on to Rönnow’s poetical models, a most important role in the political debate Dahlberg claims (successfully, as I think) that of the time. Rönnow’s poem Hercules Genuinus his chief model among the Classical poets was (no. 7 in Dahlberg’s edition) made the Dan- Horace. The list of lines borrowed directly ish authorities so enraged that it was used as from Horace (p.

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