Ove Jørgensen

Ove Jørgensen (; 5 September 1877 – 31 October 1950) was a Danish scholar of classics, literature and ballet. He formulated Jørgensen's law, which describes the narrative conventions used in Homeric poetry when relating the actions of the gods.

The son of Sophus Mads Jørgensen, a professor of chemistry, Jørgensen was born and lived for most of his life in Copenhagen. He was educated at the prestigious and at the University of Copenhagen, where he began his study of the Homeric poems. In 1904, following academic travels to Berlin, Athens, Italy and Constantinople, he published "The Appearances of the Gods in Books 912 of the ''Odyssey''", an article in which he outlined the distinctions in the poem between how the actions of deities are described by mortal characters and by the narrator and gods. The principles he set out became known as "Jørgensen's law".

Jørgensen gave up professional classical scholarship in 1905, following a dispute with other academics after he was not invited to join a newly formed learned society. He had intended to publish a monograph based on his 1904 article, but it never materialised. Instead, he devoted himself to teaching, both at schools and at the University of Copenhagen: among his students were the future poet Johannes Weltzer and Poul Hartling, later Prime Minister of Denmark. He maintained a lifelong friendship and correspondence with the composer Carl Nielsen and his wife, the sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen.

Jørgensen published on the works of Charles Dickens, identified artworks for the National Gallery of Denmark, and was a recognised authority on ballet. His views on the latter were conservative and nationalistic, promoting what he saw as authentic, masculine Danish aesthetics – represented by the ballet master August Bournonville – against modernist, liberalising innovations from Europe and the United States. He wrote critically of the American dancers Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller, but was later an advocate of the Russian choreographer Michel Fokine.

Early life and education

Ove Jørgensen was born in Copenhagen on 5 September 1877. He was the son of Sophus Mads Jørgensen, a professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, and his wife, Louise (). In a 1950 obituary, Peter P. Rohde described Jørgensen's upbringing as a "strict school", and wrote that his father had intended him for an academic career. Jørgensen became a student at the prestigious in 1895. In the same year, he made his first visit to Berlin, where he visited the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum: his student and biographer Thure Hastrup credits this experience with beginning his "love affair" with art. In 1898, Jørgensen visited Verona, Venice and Siena with his brother Einar, where he studied renaissance art, particularly the works of Lorenzo Lotto and Antonio da Correggio.

Jørgensen received his Master of Arts degree from Copenhagen in 1902, submitting a thesis in which he argued for the single authorship of the Homeric poems, based on Book 13 of the ''Odyssey.'' His university teachers included the historian Johan Ludvig Heiberg and the philologist . The classical scholar Jørgen Mejer considers Jørgensen among the best classicists to have studied under them.

Classical scholarship

Following his graduation from Copenhagen, Jørgensen travelled to Berlin, where he spent the 19021903 academic year studying Homeric poetry under the philologists Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Hermann Alexander Diels. In a letter of November 1902 to Heiberg, Jørgensen called himself "Wilamowitz-intoxicated", having "almost daily" studied his writings over several years, though later that month he described one of Wilamowitz's seminars as "a complete farce" and an exercise in " throwing a discus in isown glass house". In Berlin, he began the process of writing what became his 1904 article on the invocation of the gods in the ''Odyssey''.

Jørgensen travelled to Athens in the spring of 1903, funded by a government stipendium of 450 kroner (equivalent to kr., or $, in ), with his fellow Copenhagen student, the future archaeologist . There he met the painter Marie Henriques and was a neighbour of the composer Carl Nielsen and his wife, the sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen. He became a lifelong friend of the couple, and accompanied them on a sightseeing tour to Constantinople in May 1903: Carl Nielsen mentions him sixty-three times in his diary. Jørgensen's visits to classical sites included a visit to Troy guided by its excavator, Wilhelm Dörpfeld, and with Dörpfeld to the island of Leukas, which the latter believed to be the location of Homer's Ithaca. In June 1903, Jørgensen and Nielsen travelled to Italy, visiting the sites of Magna Graecia, including Paestum and Pompeii, where Jørgensen attended eleven lectures from the site's excavator, August Mau. Jørgensen, Nielsen and Carl-Nielsen subsequently travelled to Rome, where Jørgensen cultivated an interest in Baroque art.

Jørgensen published "The Appearances of the Gods in Books 912 of the ''Odyssey''", written in German, in the journal ''Hermes'' in 1904. In this article, Jørgensen observed that Homeric characters typically use generic terms, particularly (, 'a god'), () and (), to refer to the actions of gods, whereas the narrator and the gods themselves always name the specific gods responsible. This principle became known as Jørgensen's law, and the classicist Ruth Scodel described it in 1998 as the "standard analysis of ... the rules that govern human speech about the gods". It was particularly influential upon Martin P. Nilsson, who later published extensively on Greek religion. Jørgensen began work on a book-length treatment of his ideas, and wrote to Heiberg in February 1904 that he was working on an application of his work to the ''Iliad,'' but never published either. Later scholars nuanced the definition of Jørgensen's law: for instance, George Miller Calhoun observed in 1940 that the law does not apply to minor gods, nor when characters relate stories at second hand, nor when the deity involved is considered obvious because they are closely associated with the type of event that occurred.

In 1904, Jørgensen began to work as a teacher, taking a post at N. Zahle's School (a girls' school founded and led by Natalie Zahle) in Copenhagen at the instigation of Drachmann, for whom he had worked as a teaching assistant in October–November 1898. He took another in 1905 at the in the same city. He rejected professional academia in 1905, following a dispute with other classical scholars over the founding of the Greek Society for Philhellenes, a Danish learned society founded by intellectuals including Heiberg, Harald Høffding and Georg Brandes in February of that year. Although most members were qualified as doctors of philosophy, others – including Nielsen – were invited. Jørgensen was not invited, which he considered a snub, and he refused the offer of Drachmann to introduce him to the society.

Later career

Jørgensen continued to teach and publish upon the classical languages following his retreat from academic work. Among his students was the future Prime Minister of Denmark, Poul Hartling, who described Jørgensen as "the best teacher eever had". Jørgensen taught an elementary Greek class for students of theology at the University of Copenhagen from 1915; Hartling studied there between 1932 and 1939. Jørgensen also taught the future poet Johannes Weltzer. Weltzer wrote in 1953 that Jørgensen's classes on Plato's ''Apologia'', a philosophical work portraying the defence of Plato's teacher Socrates against charges of impiety, were "a matter of introducing is studentsinto the Socratic way of life", and that he expected that few of those students would have forgotten them. Jørgensen maintained his friendship and correspondence with Carl Nielsen, with whom he discussed Shakespeare. In a letter of 1916, Nielsen confided in him about his abortive efforts to write an opera based on ''The Tempest'', as well as about the precarious state of his marriage. Jørgensen also corresponded with Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen: in 1922, she wrote to him that she had reconciled with Carl and determined to remain with him.

In March 1905, Jørgensen wrote to Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen that, following a period of "mental depression" caused by the affair with the Greek Society, he was working on "a little article" about ballet. He became an authority on the subject, writing a series of essays in which he promoted what he saw as the traditional aesthetics of the Royal Danish Ballet. He asserted the importance of the Danish ballet master August Bournonville while criticising the innovations introduced into European dance by Isadora Duncan. Jørgensen called Duncan an "American dilettante", denigrated her as middle-aged and under-educated, and likened her dancing movements to those of a goose. He condemned the Art Nouveau- and symbolism-influenced style of Loïe Fuller, another American who, like Duncan, performed in Denmark in 1905, calling it "quasi-philosophical experiments". In March of the same year, he had attended a lecture by , a philosopher and historian of art: Jørgensen described Wanscher's conception of the aesthetic perception of art as "a mental disorder".

The ballet scholar Karen Vedel has linked Jørgensen's opposition to Duncan, and the liberalising ideas of the Modern Breakthrough he felt she represented, to the ideology of the Danish national conservative movement. In particular, she draws attention to Jørgensen's promotion of what he saw as distinctively "Danish" ballet, and his characterisation of this as masculine and Dionysian, in contrast to his portrayal of Duncan's style as foreign, unartistic and iconoclastic. In 1905, Jørgensen wrote retrospectively in praise of the reforms introduced by when the latter took over the Royal Danish Ballet in 1894. Beck had insisted that male pupils adopt what he considered a more "manly" style of dance; Jørgensen considered that this reasserted the correct distinction between the "flaming power and appeal of the steel-strong male body" and the "more voluptuous and graceful suppleness of the female". Jørgensen's nationalistic ideas about ballet softened over time: in 1908, he gave a positive review of a performance of the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova with dancers from the Mariinsky Theatre, while in 1918 he recommended that the Russian choreographer Michel Fokine be hired by the Royal Danish Theatre. In the same year, he defended Fokine against accusations that his artistic style was revolutionary in character and connected with Bolshevism.

In 1913, Drachmann wrote to Jørgensen, unsuccessfully trying to persuade him to resume his work on classical scholarship. Jørgensen's father, Sophus, died in 1914. In 1916, alongside the chemist S. P. L. Sørensen, he completed and published Sophus's unfinished manuscript of ''Development History of the Chemical Concept of Acid until 1830''. Jørgensen's other scholarly interests included the English novelist Charles Dickens: Hartling later wrote that Jørgensen could easily have been a professor of his work. Jørgensen edited a 1930 Danish edition of Dickens's novel ''Great Expectations'', to which he added an introductory essay. The literary scholar Jørgen Erik Nielsen later praised the essay as displaying an extensive knowledge both of Dickens and of related literature and criticism. Jørgensen once identified the subject-matter of two history paintings by the sixteenth-century artist Salvator Rosa, held by the National Gallery of Denmark, by reference to an obscure verse of late-antique Latin poetry. Around 1920, he made an identification of a painting of the Virgin Mary, also in the National Gallery, as a work of the Master of Flémalle.

Assessment and personal life

The writer and opera singer has identified Jørgensen, alongside figures such as Wanscher, the writer Sophus Claussen and the pianist , as part of "a new golden age in the Danish spirit". Rohde named him, alongside Frederik Poulsen, as one of Denmark's most distinguished classicists. Poulsen, who knew Jørgensen in Copenhagen and Berlin and accompanied him to Athens, described him as "a quiet, reticent student" and a "remarkable man", whom he compared with Socrates. Vedel has named Jørgensen as an important cultural critic of his period. Quoting the Latin poet Juvenal, Jørgensen wrote in 1938 that all his writings on ballet had stemmed from anger at others' misunderstanding of the art.

Poul Hartling described Jørgensen as looking like "what a professor ... should look like according to the clichés: scruffy-stubble full beard, thin-rimmed glasses, knee flaps and button-downs". He portrayed Jørgensen's lessons as "steeped in humour", particularly Jørgensen's taste for acerbic, sarcastic comments at the expense of students who arrived late or whom he perceived to be slacking – which sometimes included Hartling. His students referred to him by the Latin title of "the " (). Hastrup wrote that Jørgensen had lived his life by the advice given to him by Drachmann, upon his appointment at N. Zahle's School in 1904, to "always give his students the best that he had". In 1914, Jørgensen wrote to Natalie Zahle that teaching had been both the happiest and most successful aspect of his life; in November 1920, he wrote to Marie Henriques that, if he were hit on the head by a roof tile, he would "go to the crematorium an infinitely happy man" on account of his teaching. According to Rohde, he was in the habit of walking from Copenhagen to the resort town of Hornbæk  a distance of around   and back again.

Jørgensen never married. He maintained his respect for his former teacher Wilamowitz until the First World War, writing what Mejer has termed "a virtual eulogy" of him in a Danish newspaper when Wilamowitz lectured at the University of Copenhagen in 1910, though after the war he became, in Mejer's terms, "irreconcilably opposed to things and persons German". Jørgensen died in the Freeport of Copenhagen on 31 October 1950; in his later years, he suffered from ill-health, which prevented him from working, and from financial hardship. He was buried in Copenhagen's Holmen Cemetery. Rohde wrote that he was, by this time, a little-known figure, citing Jørgensen's aversion to publicity and reluctance to put his scholarship into print.

Selected works

As author

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As editor

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Footnotes

Explanatory notes

References

Works cited

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Jorgensen, Ove
1877 births
1950 deaths
Danish classical scholars
Homeric scholars
University of Copenhagen alumni
Ballet critics
Ballet in Denmark
Dance writers