On elves and freethinkers: criticism of religion and the emergence of the literary fantastic in Nordic literature

Abstract

In the late 19th century, the relationship between fictional literature and religion was up for debate. On the Nordic literary scene, this debate was triggered by Danish literary critic Georg Brandes in 1871, when he famously announced a turn towards critical realism. Fiction was identified as a possible link between secular and religious representations of reality, and modern literature was supposed to act as a catalyst for the criticism of religion. In the following years, literature became the medium to explore the ‘problem of religion’, the utopia of an atheist society and the mysteries of the human mind. This article traces major theoretical impulses and their literary substantiations from 1870s literary realism to the emergence of the literary fantastic in the 1890s. In the literary fantastic, the criticism of religion became religiously productive. Anticipating the cognitive study of religion, folkloristics explained supernatural concepts as the natural result of ordinary mental mechanisms. This radical naturalism allowed for an inclusion of the supernatural in literary realism. The case study of Haugtussa (1895), a work by the Norwegian author Arne Garborg, shows the lasting re-configuration of the understanding of religion that gave way to a ‘modern religiosity’ based on fiction.