For centuries Norwegian literary culture – schooling, home devotion, printing and popular literacy – relied on Danish versions of ‘the little Bible’. The question then arises: how did the colonial (or postcolonial) circumstances of language affect the advancement of the catechism? And, vice versa, how did the Danish catechism influence linguistic relations in the northern province of the kingdom? As is well known, Luther’s Bible (1534) helped shape High German, and the King James Bible (1611) might be said to have played a similar role for English. In Denmark–Norway the Bible does not seem to have been household reading among laypeople at all before the nineteenth century. They had to make do with the catechism and the pericopes, bound as an appendix to the hymnal.
In Norway a late version of Old Norse, Middle Norwegian, was still used in writing until the sixteenth century, although modern Danish had steadily gained ground for quite some time. Historians generally place the epochal divide between Old Norse and modern Norwegian in 1523 (the disintegration of the all-Scandinavian Kalmar Union) or 1536–7 (the Danish Reformation).
1 A. Nesse (ed.), Norsk språkhistorie, vol. 4, Tidslinjer (Oslo, 2018), pp. 359–61. However, the widespread idea that the decline in written Norwegian started with the transfer of national sovereignty in 1536 seems untenable. The use of written Danish in commerce and state administration was well established long before that.
2 I. Berg, ‘Reformasjonen og norsk språkhistorie’, Teologisk tidsskrift, 7 (2018), 167–76.Spoken Norwegian differed distinctly from spoken Danish. It differed internally, too, having developed into a number of dialects, some, in the inland mountainous areas, quite unlike Danish, others, in the southern coastal districts, more easily understandable by Danes and vice versa
. According to the authoritative
Norsk språkhistorie (The History of the Norwegian Language, 2018), the period of Danish rule (1536–1814) is when the distance between writing and speech in most instances was probably the greatest in Norway. This means that Norwegian children had to cope with ‘half-foreign’ Danish catechisms from 1537 until the beginning of the twentieth century.
3 The separation of written Norwegian from written Danish dates from 1907, when the King’s Cabinet implemented the first national spelling reform (for Bokmål) as an Order in Council (kongelig resolusjon). See G.-R. Rambø, ‘Det selvstendige Norge (1905–1945)’, in A. Nesse (ed.), Norsk språkhistorie, vol. 4, Tidslinjer (Oslo, 2018), pp. 531–4. In theory they may have understood most of what they read (or heard recited) but in practice the output must have been sparse. The complications involved in reading, understanding and memorising religious dogmatics in a foreign language mark the history of the Norwegian catechism from beginning to end.
How do we know that comprehension was a problem? At least five factors deserve mentioning in this respect. (1) Visitation reports all testify to an alarming
unwillingness among children and parents to commit to the catechism classes throughout the period. When examined, some might be able to recite what they had learnt by heart. The great majority, however, simply failed to show up for classes. It seems highly unlikely that more than a tiny minority acquired a proper understanding of the Lutheran dogmas.
4 See e.g. A. V. Heffermehl’s account of Bishop Erik Bredal’s visitations to Helgeland (Northern Norway) in 1659 and 1664 (Folkeundervisningen i Norge indtil omkring Aar 1700), pp. 148–55. (2) Establishing board schools in 1739 was primarily an attempt to bolster the
understanding of the catechism. According to the official instruction, each schoolmaster was expected to ‘teach his pupils Dr Luther’s
Small Catechism so that they first understand the meaning of every single paragraph and subsequently memorise it word for word, by rote.’
5 Instruction For Degne, Klokkere Og Skoleholdere paa Landet i Norge, 23.01.1739 (Instruction for Deans, Sextons and Schoolmasters in the Norwegian countryside), Section 10. Moreover, (3) the exposition-type catechism, like Pontoppidan’s, was generally too difficult to grasp. All pastors had to recognise that. Consequently, all revisions of Pontoppidan were abridgements. The number of questions and answers was reduced from 759 to 139 in the period between 1771 and 1891. Learning by rote, not comprehension could be sustained more easily that way. (4) Testimonies from the children themselves are hard to find, especially from the first centuries. However, there are some, especially numerous from the 1960s, when senior citizens were asked to reminisce about their childhoods some sixty to seventy years earlier, around the turn of the twentieth century. What they remembered was essentially learning by rote and punishment, not mind-altering comprehension or spiritual experiences.
6 Two book series entitled I manns minne (In Living Memory) and I nær fortid (In the Near Past) were published on the initiative of the National Association for Public Health (Nasjonalforeningen for folkehelsen) in 1967–75 and 1982–7, respectively. Lastly, (5) it is worth noting that the first attempts to translate the
Small Catechism into Ivar Aasen’s revolutionary norm for written ‘new’ Norwegian in the 1860s and 1870s were motivated by the translators’ wish for the text, at long last, to be
understood by Norwegian children.
7 Cf. the prefaces to O. J. Høyem’s Barn-lærddomen eller den little katekjesen hans Morten Luther (Nidaros, 1973) and S. Aarrestad’s Kakjesboki eller Barnalærdomen vaar (Stavanger, 1877). Liberation from Danish rule in 1814, which also entailed liberation from absolutist theocracy, not only made the need for a national language more strongly felt, it also supposedly opened the way for Lutheran Christianity.
A comparable, only much harsher, discrepancy must have been felt by Sami children who, for a period of about a hundred years (approx. 1850–1962), were compelled to learn and be schooled in Norwegian. At the time the use of Sami in schools was, with few exceptions, banned. Germanic Norwegian and Finno-Permian Sami are not related, which means that the essential understanding of Sami children during these years was that of the supreme authority of the Danish (or Dano-Norwegian) language to which they had to resign themselves. Written testimonies of frustrated Norwegian pastors are not hard to find. Johan Fritzner, for example, who served as a pastor in Vadsø in Northern Norway between 1838 and 1845 (and who was later to become a famous lexicographer), clearly states that the Sami children did not understand anything at all of what they had been able to memorise.
8 H. Dahl, Språkpolitikk og skolestell i Finnmark 1814–1905 (Oslo, 1957), p. 23.In terms of language, the history of the catechism in Norway has a double conclusion. On the one hand, a severe lack of understanding among its learners can be shown, most probably due to the considerable distance between written Danish and the dialects of Norwegian children. On the other hand, Danish read by Norwegians became some sort of a hybrid, a prestigious ‘recital language’ too distant from everyday dialects to have any lasting effect on modern Norwegian usage.
9 The hybrid was later (derogatorily) termed klokkerdansk (‘sexton’s Danish’), cf. A. Torp, ‘Talemål i Noreg på 1800-talet’, in A. Nesse (ed.), Norsk språkhistorie, vol. 4, p. 436.