Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen (29 November 1900 – 24 March 1938) was a Faroese writer. He has a distinct place in Scandinavian literature, as he is the only Faroese writer to achieve international best-seller status. This status derives from his sole (unfinished) novel, Barbara (1939). The novel was translated into five other languages shortly after the first edition in the Danish language.Politiken.dk, Færøsk mesterforfatters breve er en litterær gave (in Danish) It was also adapted as a motion picture directed by Nils Malmros in 1997 (see Barbara).
These facts, together with Jacobsen's essays, a study of the Faroe Islands published in the guise of a travel guide, and a volume of his letters, are sufficient to suggest that had he lived longer, he would have been one of the outstanding literary figures in Scandinavia in the twentieth century. He was one of five Faroese writers, all born between 1900 and 1903, who represented a remarkable blossoming of literature in a country which had no tradition of literature in a modern sense. Jacobsen, together with William Heinesen, Christian Matras, Heðin Brú, and Martin Joensen, created modern Faroese literature, whether writing in Danish, as did Jacobsen and Heinesen, or the Faroese language, as did the others.
Early years Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen was born on 29 November 1900 in Tórshavn. His father, merchant Martin Meinhardt Jacobsen, was of Faroese, Swedish, and Danish descent, and, having been born and spent his childhood in Copenhagen, was mainly Danish speaking. His mother, Maren Frederikke Mikkelsen, was thoroughly Faroese. Their home was thus bilingual, and, according to Heinesen, a distant relative, Jørgen-Frantz spoke Danish to his father and Faroese to his mother and siblings. In general, their extended family was interested in music and theater, and Jørgen-Frantz thus grew up in a highly cultured environment. Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen(Den Store Danske, Gyldendal)
He first went to school in Tórshavn, where he took his middle-school examination. He began attending Sorø Academy in Denmark in 1916. His father died the following year, but Jacobsen continued his studies, passing his final examination and leaving school in 1919. Armed with this degree, he went to the University of Copenhagen to study history and French, but in 1922 he developed tuberculosis, and ill health prevented him from finishing his studies until 1932. After graduation, he worked for two years as a journalist on the newspaper Politiken. He gave up journalism in 1934 in order to write a history of the Greenland monopoly—a work that he never finished, in large part because of continued ill health.
Faroese sympathies In 1927, Jacobsen was asked by representatives of the Faroese Students' Association to write a study of the relationship between the Faroe Islands and Denmark. The result was Danmark og Færøerne (Denmark and the Faroe Islands, 1927) a competent and well-written study that first examines the historical relationship between the two countries and then the cultural awakening of the Faroe Islands, with brief summaries of the works of the main figures concerned, finishing with a review of present-day relations between the two countries. Here, as elsewhere in his writings, he stresses the fact that the Faroese are not Danes, that their cultures and temperaments are quite different. Without being openly anti-Danish, he clearly reveals himself as an ardent Faroese nationalist.
His Faroese sympathies are also evident in his 1936 publication (The Faroes: Nature and People), a warm, fond, and poetical presentation of the Faroe Islands, their scenery, their way of life, their history, their constitution, and their links with Denmark. The final section is a tour of the islands with a brief entry on each of the eighteen inhabited islands. The literary qualities of this book are emphasized in the entry in from 1937, which reads that the volume "" ("is in the form of a thorough guide for travelers, but at the same time written with a love of the material that raises the book above the genre and turns it into the work of a poet").
Newspaper articles In 1943, Christian Matras collected and published a volume of Jacobsen's newspaper articles under the title of Nordiske Kroniker ("Nordic Chronicles"). Originally published between 1925 and 1937, the articles cover a wide range of topics, some of which are related to those in , while others have a wider cultural interest, as for instance the essay on the Faroese dance. The term "Nordic" is to be understood in a wide sense, including not only mainland Scandinavia and Iceland, but also England and the Shetland Islands. In these articles Jacobsen discusses the extinction of the Norn language of the Shetland Islands and examines the nature of Faroese as an independent language, ridiculing the suggestion that it is really only a dialect; in another essay, "" (The Farthest Shore), he produces an outstandingly beautiful and poetical description of the outlying island of Mykines.
Letters
Patrons (Precious Life: Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen Illuminated by his Letters, 1958), edited by Heinesen, is an example of the way in which Jacobsen's close friends and contemporaries ensured his survival as a writer. It consists of letters that Jacobsen wrote to Heinesen between 1921 and his death in 1938. They are accompanied by a succinct commentary by Heinesen sufficient to string them together, but not such as in any way to turn this into a scholarly, academic edition of the letters. It is ultimately a deeply personal and poetical work, but nevertheless a work of vital importance to an understanding of Jacobsen and his sole novel. In his introduction, Heinesen makes it clear that this is only a small selection of letters, which in total fill some 1,500 pages, and that it is, strictly speaking, not an autobiography. There is no attempt to follow Jacobsen's life day by day, but rather to give a series of momentary impressions of his life and opinions both as a young student and as a mature man marked by the tuberculosis that was to lead to his early death. It is not intended to idealize Jacobsen, but to show his incredible optimism and love of the life that he must surely at an early stage have been aware he was to leave before long. In the words of Heinesen in the introduction:
The selection of Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen's letters here presented—mainly in the form of excerpts, though some in extenso—is principally about the letter-writer himself, the significant events in his life, and the mental qualities with which he meets this his fate.
Style In addition, the letters demonstrate Jacobsen's unswerving sense of style, his linguistic inventiveness, and give the reader insight into the background to the novel Barbara and the close relationship between Jacobsen and Heinesen, which a comparison of these letters with Heinesen's own writing suggests had a profound literary as well as personal significance. One is, in fact, at times left with a feeling that these letters contain clues to a literary affinity of a special kind between two friends who had many stylistic traits in common.
Structure The selection opens with the "Nytårsouverture" (New Year's Overture), marking the start of 1921 in a grand, dithyrambic prose poem divided into sections with musical markings: Maestoso, Grave, Andante, and so on, and describing the writer's experience of the Faroe Islands—which are at the center of everything he wrote—at the beginning of 1921. There is then a gap until mid-1922, when there follows, in a completely different vein, a lengthy, humorous account of French student life in Grenoble, in which Jacobsen shows his skill at instant characterization. Yet, even Grenoble is constantly compared with Tórshavn: the sunrise, the grass on the bastion, the mist-covered mountaintops—all of these images give the reader a sense of the author's homesickness. The following section consists of letters written at the end of 1922 and beginning of 1923, by which time Jacobsen had been diagnosed as suffering from tuberculosis. They are as good-humored as the earlier ones and express for the first time Jacobsen's remarkably positive acceptance of what life sent him:
I believe that everyone must rejoice in his destiny, in the fact that he has lived at all and achieved a destiny. Destiny is the only sure asset.
People are born and receive the gift of life. They distribute life and they receive it again in stamped gold, in destiny. Distribute life and you take in fate in exchange. "Only what is lost is owned eternally"--only fates are owned eternally.)
In the letters, momentary impressions are balanced against long, poetic epistles such as a nearly eight-page atmospheric description of the streams around Tórshavn that is more in the nature of an essay than a letter and which was actually dedicated to Heinesen's eldest son. Jacobsen also reflects on the qualities of writers such as Sigrid Undset, whose work gives her a unique position in Scandinavian literature, as Jacobsen notes, "" (which otherwise, excellent as it might be, is mostly written for a narrow public . . .).
Content Inevitably, in the letters Jacobsen becomes increasingly concerned with his lengthy stays in the hospital, his operations, and his sickness, but he writes with humor and without a trace of self-pity. His love of life and his acceptance of his own fate dominate all. It was in the midst of his sickness that he wrote his novel, Barbara, while suffering from the fickleness of his lover, Estrid Bannister, and the collection provides a letter-by-letter account of the writing of the novel, ending in his last letter with the statement that three chapters still wait to be written. Of the intended contents of those chapters, he gives no hint, though he does state clearly that the novel is based on "the great human theme of Vanity"—and later develops this theme irrespective of the novel:
Life in its grandiose and paradoxical manifoldness is so capricious that one does well to ask oneself if one should take it entirely seriously! . . . My own way of realizing myself is also paradoxical in nature. For at the same time as I love life and almost every day--even now--enjoy its many-colored droplets, I nevertheless fold my hands and happily sigh: What is it at best.
Later Jacobsen writes:
It is precisely the enormous tension between sorrow and joy that makes life great. . . . I have had my greatest moments when the sparks have flown between sorrow and joy. And death is fundamentally the brilliant relief to life. . . . Life is great and demonic, worthy of being loved and obeyed. And the greatest thing in life is again resignation.
The novel Barbara These themes are fundamental to the novel Barbara. It is, however, worth noting that Jacobsen at one time considered giving the novel the title "Far, verden, Far Vel!" (Farewell, World, Farewell), the first line of the great Danish Baroque poet Thomas Kingo's poem on vanity that forms the central theme of the episode in the church in the novel.
Overarching theme Vanity in all its senses is the essence of Barbara: the vanity that comes with office, power, or beauty; and the vanity of action, the questioning of whether there is a meaning in life, or whether all action is not in vain, with everything the result of fate. There is also the examination of total infatuation on the part of the principal male character, Pastor Poul, alongside the beautiful, fascinating, and mercurial Barbara, whose feelings for Poul are genuine, but who cannot resist the charms of other men, insisting all the time that her feelings for Poul are unchanged.
Plot