Et melopoetisk greb på Grundtvigsalmen

Abstract

A Melopoetic Approach to Grundtvig’s HymnsThe church hymns written by N.F.S. Grundtvig are simultaneously poems,theological statements and music, but they have predominantly beenthe subjects of theological research and, to a lesser extent, literary research.Musicological research has avoided literary critique of the texts of hymnsand, as a result, has nearly reduced itself to a theological-literary subdiscipline.Hymn scholarship maintains an underlying logocentricsm, whichfollows conceptions of the text as the actual hymn and the melody as itssubsidiary facilitator. These conceptions are implicit in the use of the genitivein the phrase “Grundtvig’s church hymns.” However, this perspectivecan be defended neither on the basis of Grundtvig’s own hymnologicalpoetics or through contemporary aesthetic theories about how significationis produced in medially mixed utterances, like the church hymn.In this article the author seeks to question the place of church hymns inhierarchies of word-music by shifting focus from the issue of “to whatdegree does this particular melody redeem Grundtvig’s text” to “what significanceis produced from the merging of words and melody in the hymnduring its situational utterance”.