Background
Thorkild Strange Bjørnvig was born on February 2, 1918, in Århus, Denmark. He is the son of Adda Thomine Hammel Jensen and Theodor Frese Pedersen Bjørnvig.
1947
Nordre Ringgade 1, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
Bjørnvig received his doctor of philosophy degree at the University of Aarhus.
Thorkild Strange Bjørnvig was born on February 2, 1918, in Århus, Denmark. He is the son of Adda Thomine Hammel Jensen and Theodor Frese Pedersen Bjørnvig.
Bjørnvig studied literature at the University of Aarhus and his prize-winning master's degree thesis in 1947 was about Rainer Maria Rilke, whose works he later translated into Danish.
In his native Denmark, Thorkild Bjørnvig has been one of the most prominent cultural figures of the twentieth-century era and is widely respected for his poetry, essays, literary critique, translations, and memoirs. In 1948 Bjørnvig and Ole Wivel cofounded Herética (1948-50), a periodical that became a forum for a diverse group of young Danish poets, dubbed “modernists.” Despite its short life span, Herética was tremendously important for Danish postwar literature. Bjørnvig has written extensively on other authors, among them the Danish author Martin A. Hansen and the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and he has translated the works of other authors. However, he has also gained respect and admiration as a poet in his own right.
Bjørnvig's poetic debut came in 1947 with Stjcernen Bag Gavlen. In 1998 was published a compilation of fifteen collections of poems written over a forty-six-year period. From the 1970s onward, Bjørnvig has written environmental poetry and essays, and his works have been translated into English, German, Swedish, Norwegian, and Italian. In his verse, the poet explores language itself and implicitly the human condition. The fragmentation, alienation, and sense of chaos and apathy that characterize modern life, must be confronted and expressed in order to get beyond it. Bjørnvig focuses on this inherent contradiction in his debut work, Stjcernen Bag Gavlen. Bjørnvig's later works, after Ravnen, are closer to the epic language of prose. Over the years, there has been a shift away from introvert introspection toward a focus on communal and societal issues. But there has remained one consistent theme: Nature and the Cosmos - and man’s inharmonious relationship with these forces.
In his poems, Bjørnvig combines cosmic and nature imagery-including the four elements of fire, water, air, and earth - with ancient mythology from all over the world, in particular, Egypt, Greece, and Norway. In The World Tree: Poems, the tree refers to Yggdrasil (Odin’s gallows), in Nordic myth the wellspring of life and knowledge; a mighty ash whose crown encompasses all of the earth. In Ragnarok (the end of the world as prophesied by Vplven), Yggdrasil is destroyed. In Scandinavian Studies reviewer Timothy R. Thangherlini read Bjørnvig's application of this Nordic myth to the present world as an attempt to convey the implications of the possibility for environmental and mass destruction that man has created. Drawing on his vast knowledge of history and mythology, Bjørnvig has interpreted modem, man-made phenomena such as pollution and nuclear destruction in ways that show mythology as an appropriate tool and framework for describing the present, and which place these ignored and isolated modern phenomena in a broader perspective. His environmental poetry puts complacency and ignorance in the hot seat, presenting the coming Ragnarok for all of us to see and consequently act upon.
Bjørnvig has published five volumes of memoirs; the first, about his friendship with Blixen, was titled Pagten. Mit Venskab med Karen Blixen and was translated in 1983 as The Pact: My Friendship with Isak Dinesen. The two writers met in the winter of 1948, when she was sixty-four and he was thirty-two - the same year Bjørnvig cofounded Heretica with Ole Wivel. For Bjørnvig it was a productive time, but not so for Blixen, who had fallen incurably sick and was feeling unappreciated as an artist. They had a platonic love relationship for six years, until 1954 when Bjørnvig fell in love with another woman. The memoir is called The Pact because Bjørnvig and Blixen made an agreement: Blixen would be his muse, nurture his career, help him write well, and “harden” him, and in return, Bjørnvig would follow her recommendations and remain loyal to her. Reviewing The Pact for Nation, Judith Thurman commented that Danish reviewers found parts of it “embarrassing” when it was published, because of its shocking rawness. According to Thurman, Bjørnvig describes himself as an insecure, immature young intellectual who readily takes on a submissive role when he is with Blixen.
Blixen reacted with intense jealousy when Bjørnvig began to see another woman, commenting on his choice that “She has no more soul than a green pea.” Thurman compared Bjørnvig's memoir of his relationship with Blixen to Blixen’s own Echoes, in which she explores the danger of meddling with another person’s fate. The relationship to Bjørnvig is, in her tale, treated in mythical form, the domination and submission parts played out by a great diva and a young peasant boy. Following their friendship, the two Danish writers kept a distant wary friendship, Blixen urging Bjørnvig to write about their relationship, but not to publish it until after her death. Bjørnvig waited twenty years before writing his memoir and version of the affair; Blixen died in 1962.
Several critics, including Rossel and Scandinavian Studies reviewer Timothy R. Tangherlini, continue to view Bjørnvig as a lyricist of great depth and merit. “Bjørnvig's dry wit as well as his extraordinary descriptive abilities emerge in many of these poems and contribute to the portrait of a master lyricist presented in this collection”, Tangherlini commented, while Rossel concluded his review in World Literature Today by calling Bjørnvig “a great European poet, one who has succeeded in capturing whatever there is to say about life, art, death, and eternity, crystallized in poems of impeccable, indeed timeless quality.”
Thorkild was a member of Danish Academy since 1960.
Quotes from others about the person
“Bjørnvig's oeuvre may be envisaged as a life frieze, where the poet himself plans and creates. Incorporating work upon work in the pictorial sequence with an immanent logic, he transgresses or counteracts the flickering and fragmented forms of modernistic experience, and creates coherence.” - Marianne Barlyng
“Bjørnvig's modernism is based on a humanistic attitude that involves an uncompromising and undaunted exploration of the human conflict.” - Charlotte Schiander Gray
Thorkild married Grete Damgaard Pedersen in 1946. Later he Married Birgit Hornum Bjørnvig in 1970. He had three children.