God, King and Country: The Depiction of
National Identity in Danish Historical Novels
for Children

A N N A K A R L S K O V S K Y G G E B J E R G

This article charts the depiction of national identity in the historical novel for children. The
introduction defines the historical novel in general (with a review of theories by Georg Lukács
and Hayden White), and then reflects upon the function of this genre in children’s literature
(drawing on studies by John Stephens, Åsfrid Svensen and Anna Adamik Jáscó). To cast light
on the structure and development of national identity there is an analysis of two Danish historical
novels for children: Marius Dahlsgaard’s Thorkilds Træl [Thorkild’s slave] (1932) and
Lars-Henrik Olsen’s Sagaen om Svend Pindehugger [The saga of Svend Pindehugger]
(1993). These books deal with the same historical event – the conquest of Estonia in the
thirteenth-century – and both novels are based on a national historical legend about the Danish
flag. The article argues that the historical novel for children has moved away from purely heroic
images and eulogies of king and nation, but is still rooted in national history and incorporates a
strong emphasis on power relations fought out in wars.

Key words: Denmark, Estonia, historical fiction, national identity, Dahlsgaard, Olsen.

The historical novel is an established and respected genre in children’s literature,
and one with strong institutional endorsement. In Denmark, historical novels
for children are taught in schools, and books in this genre have been awarded
several prizes. Well-known contemporary Danish authors of historical novels,
such as Gerd Rindel, Lars-Henrik Olsen and Martin Petersen, have all received
the Danish Ministry of Culture’s annual Children’s Literature Prize. Being part
of a more or less official national curriculum, historical novels for children have
been highly influential in children’s and young adults’ understanding of history
and national identity. According to Benedict Anderson’s well-known definition,
the concept of nation is an imagined community: ‘the members of even the
smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or
even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’
(15). In children’s literature research, national identity has been defined, by
Margaret Meek, as ‘a stylistic way of identifying differences between “us” and
“others,” chiefly in terms of origins, optings and associations’ (ix). The historical
novel for children not only incorporates representations of national identity

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but can also be said to be responsible for creating such images. This article is
intended to contribute to broader discussions in children’s literature studies of
such constructions and changing images.

1

I shall present, in outline, a general definition of the historical novel and

an overview of theoretical discussion of this genre, and shall go on to offer some
reflections on the function of the historical novel within children’s literature. I
have chosen to analyse two Danish novels in order to cast light on the structure
and development of national identity. They are Marius Dahlsgaard’s Thorkild’s
Træl [Thorkild’s slave] (1932) and Lars-Henrik Olsen’s Sagaen om Svend Pindehugger
[The saga of Svend Woodcutter] (1993). These books are chosen because they
deal with the same historical event: the conquest of Estonia in the thirteenth
century. Both novels are based on a national historical legend: the emergence
of a nation as a result of Valdemar II’s military expedition, the Christianisation
of Denmark and the story of the nation’s flag, the Dannebrog. I suggest that
the historical novel for children has moved away from purely heroic images and
eulogies of king and nation, but is still rooted in national history. Although there
has been a shift in the view of the specific historical period and a change from a
political to a social focus, even today there remains a strong emphasis on power
relations established as a result of war.

T H E H I S T O R I C A L N O V E L

The historical novel for children shares a number of basic features with any
historical novel. The peculiarity of the genre is that it brings to the fore two
conflicting discourses, the historical and the fictional, and thus muddies the
waters as far as genre definition is concerned. The writing invites a historically
referential reading and yet it functions on fictional premises, with no obligation
to refer to any reality beyond literature. This paradoxical ambivalence is the
cornerstone of the genre. The entwining of the two discourses is a result of
history merging with the novel, which emerged during the late eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century Romantic period in Europe, when interest in the past
reached its zenith. History was explained as a coherent narrative, and this form
of historical narrative-cum-interpretation spread to the novel, which became
one of the nineteenth century’s favourite genres.

2

Romantic authors of historical

novels, for example the Danish B. S. Ingemann (1789–1862), were aware that
it was difficult to separate what was told from how it was told: history and
narrative were two sides of the same coin. (Ingemann’s own novels became
highly influential on historical novels for children, and discussion will return
to him later.) The philosopher G. W. F. Hegel pointed out in his Lectures on the
Philosophy of World History (1830) that the German word ‘Geschichte’ in itself was
an ambiguous term, meaning both mode and content of presentation: ‘In our
language, the word “history” combines both objective and subjective meanings,
for it denotes the historia rerum gestarum as well as the res gestae themselves, the
historical narrative and the actual happenings, deeds, and events – which in the
stricter sense, are quite distinct from one another’ (Hegel 135).

G O D , K I N G A N D C O U N T RY

29

Georg Lukács’

1

The Historical Novel (1937) has been commonly regarded

as pivotal when discussing the theory of historical novels. For Lukács, although
the historical novel is fiction, it should be committed to historical accuracy and
its aim should be authenticity. Such thinking has also coloured analyses and
assessments of the historical novel for children. Lukács proclaimed Walter Scott’s
Waverley (1814) to be the first real historical novel. Focusing on a period in which
Scotland loses its independence to England, with this novel Scott introduces
a model for the portrayal of historical upheavals: relating the story through
the eyes of one individual. The hero, Waverley, is a neutral figure in whom
historical conflicts meet, and through him we see how history impacts on the
individual. As Lukács notes, ‘so-called historical novels’ were also written in the
seventeenth century, but these were only outwardly historical novels inasmuch as
history functioned merely as a frame around dramas tied to the contemporary
world of the writer (Lukács 15). These novels deployed history as a backdrop,
with characters from the writer’s own time dressed in period costume: ‘What
is lacking in the so-called historical novel before Sir Walter Scott is precisely the
specifically historical, that is, the derivation of the individuality of characters from
the historical peculiarity of their age’ (15).

For Lukács, the depiction of specific ways of thinking is as important as

physical time markers such as events, objects and symbols, and he prioritises
the description of everyday people in the historical novel. He praises Scott for
having a ‘deep understanding for the peculiarity of different historical periods’
and an ability to ‘combine historical grandeur with genuine human qualities’
(Lukács 47). From my point of view, Lukács’ credibility criterion – consistency
between historical events and human psychology – seems reasonable at face
value; however, the problem is that it is hard to verify. The historical novel is
always written at some remove from historical events. The dramatisation of any
individual’s thoughts and actions at a moment in history is and will always be an
illusion. One might ask, somewhat provocatively, whether all historical novels are
not in some sense merely costume novels.

As a result of ‘the linguistic turn’ in historical research, the dramatisation

of history has been viewed with new interest. In Metahistory (1973), Hayden
White made the point that all accounts of history are just that: accounts or
representations, but not ‘the truth’. By definition, the writing of history is a
construct, and one of White’s points is that writers of histories borrow features
from fiction. White’s views have contributed to an acceptance among academics
that history writing and historical fiction constitute a continuum. There has been
a new focus on the narrative and the linguistic devices it employs. Interest in
such devices and dramatisation is evident in both historiographical and literary
research. The main focus is on the style of narration and how the past is
represented.

Children’s literature researchers John Stephens (1992) and Åsfrid Svensen

(1999) have explained how children’s authors of historical novels use special
point-of-view techniques to link the past and the present, and how the belief
in a common human and ahistorical ethic dominates a considerable number

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A N N A K A R L S K O V S K Y G G E B J E R G

of these novels. The genre often carries an assumption that there are trans-
historical values such as love, honour and loyalty. The authors have a tendency
to project their own time’s (humanistic) values onto the past, which of course
is a problematical issue. Svensen, in her analyses of modern children’s writing
in Scandinavia, has shown how writers try to create authenticity by using
old words as well as references to rituals and customs of the time, while –
generally speaking – creating a view of the past as somewhere where people were
frightened, starving and frozen (Svensen 202).

N AT I O N A L I D E N T I T Y I N T H E H I S T O R I C A L N O V E L

The emergence of the historical novel coincides with the creation of nation states
in Europe. The genre is, so to speak, born with a vested interest in creating a
nation’s history in order to create a common identity. Even though today very
few historical novels for children are unequivocally patriotic in intent, patriotism
can still be said to be one of the genre’s didactic aims, in that a large arsenal
of stories helps to create a common historical consciousness within a delimited
national, linguistic or cultural community.

3

According to Anna Adamik Jáscó it is

essential for historical fiction that the idea of ‘us and others’ is established (34). In
Danish children’s novels, a national core fable is created about the original Danes,
their victories and defeats. It is difficult to prove whether this overwhelmingly
national focus is also true of other nation and language communities, but it can be
demonstrated that every language area has its own genre-specific canon.

4

There

are few books of this type which cross borders: historical novels for children are
seldom translated and seldom achieve widespread popularity in countries other
than their country of origin. A possible consequence of this is that readers of the
genre miss out on a rich diversity of stories, and an international perspective of
the way in which history is construed is completely lost.

In the first half of the nineteenth century Danish literature discovered its

own Walter Scott in B. S. Ingemann, who wrote four historical novels about the
birth of the Danish nation, including Valdemar Seier [Valdemar Victory] (1826).
Ingemann’s novels were not intended to be children’s literature, but they enjoyed
huge popularity as family reading in the nineteenth century. At the beginning
of the twentieth century, they were published in adapted and abridged versions
for children, and were reprinted right up to the 1980s. Valdemar Seier centres on
Valdemar II, the Danish king who was nicknamed ‘Sejr’ [Victory] because of his
crusades and conquests in thirteenth-century Estonia, and the novel describes the
backdrop to Valdemar’s wars. It is also a psychological portrait of the king, and
the consequences of his actions are described from a number of different points of
view; there is a definite link between the larger and the smaller story – the country
and the individual are in step. We follow a boy who becomes an attendant to the
king, and see events unfold through the young queen’s eyes. Valdemar Seier thus
satisfies Lukács’ demands with respect to the historical novel, and at the same
time is typical of early historical novels, in that it focuses on a famous person and
his role in history.

G O D , K I N G A N D C O U N T RY

31

In Denmark the first historical novels written and published explicitly for

children came out at the beginning of the twentieth century. The development
of the genre is closely tied to the teaching of history in schools, and writers were
frequently teachers who had employed the narrative in lessons with success. One
such schoolteacher/writer was Marius Dahlsgaard (1879–1941). His forty-one
books were published in the period from 1915 until 1943 (the last was published
posthumously). Like many of his predecessors, Dahlsgaard chose national events
as the historical frame for most of his novels (Weinreich 388–9). One of his
many children’s novels, Thorkild’s Træl is ‘A story from the days of the Estonian
campaign’, as it is sub-titled. Dahlsgaard must have known about Ingemann’s
Valdemar Seier, and in that light Thorkild’s Træl may be seen as an attempt to write a
supplement to or a revised version of Ingemann’s novel. Ingemann’s protagonist
is the king, while Dahlsgaard focuses on a young Dane of humbler origins.
Whereas Ingemann in his wide-ranging novel portrayed the historical period and
the political conflicts from several different angles, Dahlsgaard prioritised his own
picture of a typical Danish naval hero.

T H E D I C H O T O M Y O F F R I E N D A N D F O E

Marius Dahlsgaard’s Thorkild’s Træl is a relatively short novel (95 pages) about the
23-year-old Thorkild, who is in charge of a boat heading for Estonia. This has
been despatched at the orders of the king with a band of strong men on board;
they act as though they are merchants, but in reality they are soldiers ready to
join up with Valdemar Victory’s army. On their way to Estonia, Thorkild and his
men save an Estonian boy, Saka, from drowning. He becomes Thorkild’s slave,
but Thorkild treats him more like a son; Saka repays Thorkild by saving his life
twice in the battles against the Estonians.

Dahlsgaard presents the Danes as heroes. They are tall, muscular and blond,

and they wear shining chain-mail and steel helmets. Thorkild, in particular, is an
extraordinarily strong and talented leader, and despite his youth he has a natural
authority which enables him to deal with warfare and also tackle complicated
personal relations, such as the upbringing of Saka. By contrast, the army of
Estonians are ‘a horde of savages wrapped in cow skins with horns on’ (82). One
Estonian army commander is described as ‘a stocky man with huge shoulders,
twisted features and a large billowing beard as black as a raven’s feathers’ (84).
When the Estonians attack, Thorkild can see the enemy’s ‘great yellow and white
canine teeth gleaming in a frothing mouth’ (84).

5

The Danes (and their allies) are

Christian while the Estonians are heathens (no further details are given). Saka,
the boy, is the exception among the Estonians, but Saka comes to feel more and
more Danish as time goes on and in the end asks for permission to carry the
Christian cross. The Danish victory is described as a miracle: a group of Maltese
knights bearing a flag come to the rescue of the hard-pressed Danes:

All eyes are on them. – They seem bewitched by this banner. They have never seen
the like of it before. It is blood-red with a luminous cross. It is the magnificent
standard of the Maltese knights. It seems like a miracle! – Everyone retreats in their

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path! – The Estonians seem to be blinded by the sight. They turn and run. – Endless
cheering breaks out among the Danes. – Now they can do anything. With a flag
like that victory has to follow. – They seem to be filled with an awesome power – a
strength they cannot comprehend! (84)

6

In this passage Dahlgaard’s omniscient narrator delivers his version of the

legend of the Danish flag that fell from heaven on 15 June 1219 at the battle of
Lyndanise in Estonia. This legend was first mentioned in the Danish chronicles
of the 1520s, but was celebrated with full pomp in the nineteenth century. Today,
15 June is called Valdemar’s Day and is still the national flag day. Thorkild’s Træl
is strongly nationalistic and gives a black-and-white picture of friend and foe.
There is no ambivalence regarding the narrator’s sympathies. We are inside the
minds of Thorkild and some of his companions, but we hear nothing about the
enemies’ motives. The novel is historical in the sense that it is about past events
and it depicts the past through the perspective of a fictional character. However,
the novel also employs some features from the fairy-tale genre and Thorkild’s
experiences are reminiscent of a fairy-tale hero: in Estonia he has to overcome
several tests and once this is done he is honoured by the king and wins the hand
in marriage of a Swedish earl’s daughter.

With this novel Marius Dahlsgaard achieved what he set out to do, which

was ‘to impart knowledge about our seafarers and their contribution to Danish
history so that the nation – and especially its young people – can learn to respect
and honour them’ (quoted from Winther 33).

7

The ideological standpoint in

Dahlsgaard’s writing is unmistakable and his history teaching mission is linked
to a project for national revival, and therefore the dichotomy of friend and foe
is of great importance. The message in the novel fits in with the time of its
publication in the 1930s, a time of intensifying nationalism, not only in Denmark,
but throughout Europe.

I N D I V I D U A L I T Y A N D J U S T I C E

The 1980s and the 1990s are the heyday of historical novels for children in
Denmark, producing a number of children’s novels which, though set in the
distant past, can be read as allegories with social interaction as the focal point.
These deal with ways of living and social relationships and have so-called
ordinary children in the main roles. This period also saw the publication of
several novels based on Valdemar II’s reign and the legend of the Danish flag, the
best known of which is Lars-Henrik Olsen’s trilogy: Sagaen om Svend Pindehugger.
Svend, the protagonist, tends cattle in a village on the island of Sealand. He is an
orphan and lives on his own in spite of being no more than a boy. He is included
in the local community, but at the same time he is outside the social hierarchy,
as he is neither a slave nor a member of a larger family. In the village Svend
makes friends with the others who live outside the community. He finds a father
figure in the outlaw living alone in the forest, who follows the old religion, that
is, Nordic mythology. Svend falls in love with the slave Nena and becomes good
friends with her mother, Aja.

G O D , K I N G A N D C O U N T RY

33

In the first volume of the trilogy, Svend develops his sense of justice. His

frustration at the prevailing social order grows when he witnesses Nena being
raped by the son of the village chief. He sees how animals and humans are
maltreated in the name of God and he cannot do anything because he does
not own anything. Svend decides to join King Valdemar’s army and go on the
expedition to Estonia in the hope that he can move up in society and return to
buy Aja and Nena’s freedom. When, however, he arrives in Estonia he witnesses
the Danes pillaging and tyrannising the local population. Svend takes part in a
raid on a village which is burnt to the ground, and he watches the mass rape of
a young girl who was unable to escape because she was carrying a small baby in
her arms. His decision is made; he flees from his friends and finds refuge in the
forest.

Later he comes across a secluded Estonian settlement and is slowly

integrated. They need a man like Svend, who can hunt animals and help cultivate
the soil. Svend earns the villagers’ respect when he kills a bear, thereby saving the
life of a young boy. Then he falls in love with a young girl who was already
promised to another, thus creating a love triangle and making life in the village
difficult. He fathers a child with his Estonian girlfriend, then returns home to
Lillerød to buy Nena and Aja out of slavery; both have suffered cruelly during
his absence. Together with Nena he founds a small new society inspired by the
outlaw’s ‘ecological’ lifestyle, in which respect for nature has higher priority than
religious dogma.

Sagaen om Svend Pindehugger can be read as a classic bildungsroman in which

the protagonist goes on a journey to find his identity. The expedition to Estonia
and life in a foreign land are a parallel to the inner journey Svend undertakes.
As Svend matures physically and intellectually, he becomes able to kill bears
and look the village chief in the eye. According to Daniel P. Woolsey, such
focus on a male protagonist’s identity, and especially his mature masculinity, is a
particularly contemporary phenomenon in the historical novel for children (123).
Here, Svend establishes his own set of values, a mixture of nature worship and
Christianity; when Svend returns home, he has more doubts about the legitimacy
of Christianity than he had before.

The historical backdrop to the plot is Valdemar Victory’s campaign in

Estonia in 1219, the Christianisation of this country and the resulting conflict
between the Swedish and the Norwegian kings. Doubts are raised about the
religious conversion of the Estonians and the motives behind it. The process of
Christianisation is heavy-handed and brings with it not only violence, but the
destruction of whole communities. It is motivated by struggles for power between
the various Christian army leaders rather than firm beliefs. Thirteenth-century
society is presented as largely controlled by a hierarchical structure. Women,
children, the sick and slaves are treated extremely badly, despite Christian
slogans about self-sacrifice and charity. The relationship between the sexes is very
traditional: women look after children and cook, while the men hunt and work
the land. Men use physical strength to dominate women and children, and many
women suffer as a result of men drinking themselves senseless. Both men and

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women are sexually enterprising and there is no shortage of affairs outside fixed
relationships. The conquest of Estonia is a cruel business and the Danish army
behaves in a way which is neither heroic nor noble.

As I have pointed out, the protagonist is an outsider in his community and

may be said to be the reader’s agent in an alien universe. The values he develops
are those of modern day thinking, with the rights of the individual set above
those of the community. The most important causes he fights for are individual
freedom for Nena, Aja and himself. He is also a great advocate of a modern
(romantic) concept of love in which falling in love plays a vital role; Svend has
a new girlfriend everywhere he settles and in that way practises a kind of serial
monogamy, which may perhaps be seen as typical of the writer’s time. Svend
is a critical and independent-thinking young man, and an engaging figure for
reader identification. The inscribed child reader’s position is therefore not far
from Svend’s own. In comparison with the critical portrait of a hierarchical
and violent society, the utopian ending of Sagaen om Svend Pindehugger seems
naïve. Life in nature is presented without any further reflection. According to
Helene Høyrup, this kind of utopianism is typical of early modernism in Danish
children’s literature (137), and Olsen may have been inspired by Cecil Bødker’s
Silas og den sorte hoppe [Silas and the black mare] (1967), an allegorical novel with
both magic elements and historical references.

D I F F E R E N T V I E W S O F H I S T O RY

The historical novel for children exhibits a clear line of development from
Thorkild’s Træl to Sagaen om Svend Pindehugger. Thorkild’s Træl borrows features from
the fairy tale and hagiography while Svend Pindehugger alludes to the saga (as in
the title), the bildungsroman and, in the end, also the adventure story with utopian
elements. The masculine ideal that comes with Svend and his passage into the
world could be reminiscent of a saga, but his journey is primarily a modern
maturation process towards a better understanding of the world and himself.
Unlike protagonists in a saga, Svend develops in the course of his journey and
the writer describes in great detail his psychological make-up and the state of his
mind.

Sagaen om Svend Pindehugger avoids the clearly defined national stereotypes of

Thorkild’s Træl. Danes are no longer, by definition, courageous warriors fighting
for a just cause. On the contrary, doubts are raised because of the invasion
and the moral scruples of the Danish army commanders. The friend-or-foe
dichotomy does not coincide with national identity: Svend meets good and bad
people among both Danes and Estonians. The focus shifts from a national to an
individual mission, and Svend’s main aim on his journey is to realise his own
ambitions. His antagonists are the fixed social order, the power-hungry army
commanders and religion. Where Marius Dahlsgaard is absolutely unequivocal
in his homage to God, King and Country, Lars-Henrik Olsen is sceptical with
regard to these three concepts. He questions the legitimacy of using faith as an
argument for extending a country’s territories. Notably, Olsen starts his story

G O D , K I N G A N D C O U N T RY

35

with a national legend, that of the Danish flag, the Dannebrog, and before the
action begins he quotes the national-romantic poet, Peter Faber: ‘Om Dannebrog
jeg véd, / det faldt fra Himlen ned. (Peter Faber, 1848)’ – literally the rhyme
means: About the Dannebrog I know/ it fell down from heaven (Olsen 5). Olsen’s
fascination with the legend transmits itself to the reader, but it is a fascination with
the compelling story (the story of the flag) rather than a celebration of nationalism
(the story of a people united under the flag).

Lars-Henrik Olsen shifts the focus from national heroes to so-called

ordinary people and their lives. He devotes considerable space, for example, to
methods of hunting and cultivation, and indeed a large part of his writing is about
details of flora and fauna. In Marius Dahlsgaard’s writing the main characters
fight for family and honour while those that populate Lars-Henrik Olsen’s novel
eat, drink, make love, fight, give birth and die. Both writers seem to imply,
however, that there are trans-historical concepts and values. For Dahlsgaard it
is pride and loyalty to family and country. For Olsen it is love, respect for the
individual and justice. There is no reflection on the transience of the essence
or value of the extolled concepts in either Thorkild’s Træl or Sagaen om Svend
Pindehugger.

However, the two novels can be read as an expression of how values and

views of history can change radically over a relatively short time. Between 1932,
when Thorkild’s Træl appeared, and 1993, when Lars-Henrik Olsen’s trilogy was
first published, World War II and the youth revolt of 1968 left their marks; and
there were major changes in the way we see war, royalty, love and gender, and,
of course, changes within modes of children’s literature. From this perspective,
these historical novels say considerably more about the times in which they were
published than about the historical period they portray. To borrow Benedict
Anderson’s terms, the imagined community is no longer consistent with tall
blonde Christian soldiers unified by the flag. The contemporary vision of the
nation is a self-selecting community in the natural world, where the inhabitants
are individuals with psychological development to accomplish.

N O T E S

Throughout the article, all translations of titles and quotations from Danish are mine; the
original text of quotations is given, for reference, in the notes.

1. See, for example, the diverse and wide-ranging discussions in the essay collections edited by

Ann Lawson Lucas (1997 and 2003), and by Fiona Collins and Judith Graham (2001), or in
Kim Wilson’s recent article, ‘ “Are They Telling Us the Truth?”’ (2007).

2. For further discussion, see Ole Birklund Andersen, Den faktiske sandheds poesi: Studier i

historieromanen i første halvdel af det 19. århundrede [The poetry of factual truth: studies in the
historical novel from the first half of the nineteenth century] (34).

3. See particularly Wilson, “Are They Telling Us the Truth?”’.
4. See, for example, the arguments of Stephens (Language and Ideology), and Glasenapp (“‘Was

ist Historie?”’).

5. In Dahlsgaard’s text, these quotations are as follows: ‘en Flok vilde Skikkelser, hyllede i

Kohuder med Hornene paa’ (82); ‘en lavstammet, uhyre bredskuldret Mand med fordrejede

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Træk og et stort bølgende Skæg, der er sort som Ravnens Fjer’ (84); ‘store, hvidgule
Hjørnetænder lyse i den fraadende Mund’ (84).

6. ‘Alles Øjne rettes mod dem. – De bliver som fortryllede af dette Banner. Dets lige har de

aldrig set. Det er blodrødt med et lysende Kors. Det er Johanitterriddernes skønne Stander.

Det synes et Under! – Alt viger for dem! – Det er, som om Esterne blændes af Synet. De

viger og flygter. – En endeløs Jubel bryder ud mellem Danskerne. – Nu kan de alt. Under en
saadan Fane maa Sejren følge. – Det er som fyldes de af en forunderlig Kraft – en styrke, de
ikke fatter!’ (Dahlsgaard 84).

7. ‘at sprede kendskab om vor sømandsstand og dens indsats i dansk historie, saa nationen –

og da navnlig dens ungdom – kan lære at agte og ære den’ (Winther 33)

W O R K S C I T E D

Andersen, Ole Birklund. Den faktiske sandheds poesi: Studier i historieromanen i første halvdel af det 19.

århundrede. Århus: Århus Universitetsforlag, 1996.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.

London: Verso, 1983.

Bødker, Cecil. Silas og den sorte hoppe. Copenhagen: Borgen, 1967.
Collins, Fiona M. and Judith Graham, eds. Historical Fiction for Children: Capturing the Past.

London: David Fulton, 2001.

Dahlsgaard, Marius. Thorkilds Træl. Steen Hasselbalchs Forlag, 1932.
Glasenapp, Gabriele von. “‘Was ist Historie? Mit Historie will man was.” Geschichts-

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Anna Karlskov Skyggebjerg is an Associate Professor at the Centre for
Children’s Literature at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. She holds a Ph.D.
in Genre Theory and Children’s Literature, and her research interests include
text analysis, intertextuality in children’s literature, fantasy and historical novels.
Her recent publications (in Danish and English) include: Den fantastiske fortælling
i dansk børnelitteratur [The fantastic tale in Danish children’s literature] (2005),
and ‘Writers in Dialogue: Hans Christian Andersen’s The Travelling Companion
(1835) and Bent Haller’s Me and the Devil. A Story of a Fairy Tale (2002)’ in Children’s
Literature Global and Local (2005), eds. Emer O’Sullivan, Kimberley Reynolds and
Rolf Romøren.

DOI: 10.3366/E1755619808000082