The Northern Front Imagined: Defending Denmark in Emil Bønnelycke's Spartanerne (1919)

Abstract

In late October 1919 the Danish author Emil Bønnelycke published a highly ambitious war novel, Spartanerne (The Spartans), in which he merged the war experiences of a Spartan soldier of the Antique world, a soldier fighting in the trenches of the First World War, and that of a young Danish recruit being trained for war. The three different war experiences mirror each other in this modernist novel that makes use of chronological jump cutting à la D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) and imagines Denmark being drawn into the world war that had ended scarcely a year before the time of the novel's publication.