Missionsblad for Børn features various types of texts, ranging from songs and letters to brief biographies such as the eulogy of David Brainerd who missioned in North America and, not least, stories from missionary stations around the world. All are edifying and relate to missionary life and work, and several are, to use Billington’s words, ‘morbidly pious’.
1 Billington, ‘The Religious Periodical and Newspaper Press, 1770–1870’, p. 121. In this, they are representative of the many texts about dead and dying children in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century children’s literature. As Merethe Roos has pointed out in her discussion of dead and dying children in one of the first Dano-Norwegian children’s periodicals, these texts take on various forms, appearing as ‘stories from the sick bed, death notices, obituaries, or didactic texts aimed at children’.
2 M. Roos, ‘Children, Dying, and Death: Views from an Eighteenth-Century Periodical for Children’, in R. Aasgard et al. (eds), Nordic Childhoods 1700–1960: From Folk Beliefs to Pippi Longstocking (New York, London, 2018), pp. 241–53, at p. 242. What they have in common is that they depict idealised deaths, where the dying child is noble and at peace with God, honourable and strong until the very end.
Several of the stories in
Missionsblad for Børn, however, are morbid in ways that do not so much idealise children’s deaths and prepare them for their heavenly journey as insist on the importance of and need for missionary work. In one story the little Indian boy Orta tells ‘with his own words’ of how his father and oldest brother disappear during a storm, never to be seen again, whereas his mother and his baby brother soon after are snatched and eaten by a tiger.
3 ‘med hans egne Ord’: (Missionsblad for Børn, February 1847, p. 23). Orta and his elder brother survive and are sent to a children’s home, but the brother dies three months later and leaves Orta as the only surviving member of the family. It is a story about suffering, but with a hopeful message, ending with a reflection on Orta’s joy over living with the missionaries, but also on how he at times is struck by sadness over the fact that his family never got to know Christ.
The text entitled ‘Børnene i Hedningeland’ (The Children in the Heathen Lands) narrates the deaths of numerous children, giving detailed and gruesome descriptions of a child having been buried alive, of the killing of female babies and of a Rajah’s beheading of his 11-year-old daughter, of child offerings and cholera and of the rescue of an eight-day-old infant who had been abandoned by his ‘unnatural mother’.
4 ‘unaturlige Moder’ (Missionsblad for Børn, July 1847, p. 79). The piece paints a sinister and morbid picture of the lives of the heathen children, underlining the importance of and need for the missionaries’ work, not least emphasised by the fact that the surviving children are raised by missionary families or in children’s homes run by the local missions. The text ‘Den døende Hottentotdreng’ (The Dying Hottentot Boy), too, is representative of the deathbed story but has been adapted to a missionary setting. It tells of ten-year-old Frederik Roode in Pacaltsdorp in what is now South Africa. Realising that he will not recover from an inflammatory infection, the boy summons Mr Anderson of the London Missionary Society, who is stationed in Pacaltsdorp, to bid him farewell before he dies blissfully.
The Frederik Roode story furthermore exemplifies how materials in early printed children’s literature in general and in this magazine in particular circulated through import and translation. Not surprisingly, the story as it appears in
Missionsblad for Børn seems to be a direct translation from ‘Der sterbende Hottentottenknabe’ in Barth’s
Missionsblatt für Kinder of February 1842. Looking at the English missionary children’s magazines, which Barth mentions explicitly as models, the story seems to have been first published in the British
Missionary Magazine in September 1836 under the title ‘The Dying Hottentot Boy’.
5 It appears in the Ohio-based Gambier Observer on 16 November 1836 and in the London-based The Missionary Register in February 1837, with minor variations and entitled ‘Frederick Roode, A Hottentot Youth’. Likewise, the accompanying woodcut with the scene where Frederik lays his head on Mr Anderson’s knee first appears in the
Missionary Magazine, then in
Missionsblatt für Kinder, and finally in
Missionsblad for Børn.
Whereas the texts in this publication are generally translated more or less verbatim from the German, the text on Greenlandic children has been adapted so that it relates the narrated events to Norwegian children and to missionary work in Norway, and in Stavanger specifically. After a letter written by Josva in Lichtenau (today’s Alluitsoq) to a group of German children, editor Johnsen inserts a note on how children in Stavanger have also sent gifts and letters to the children of Greenland and how they too have received letters of thanks in return.
Missionsblad for Børn renders one of these letters, written by 13-year-old Christian on behalf of the children in Nyhernhut (New Herrnhut, today’s Nuuk) to ‘[y]ou, who live over there in Europe and have written to us, you, who are in the land called Norway, we here answer your writing and greet you all’.
6 ‘I, som bo derover i Europa og have skrevet os til, I, som ere i det Land, som kaldes Norge, vi besvare herved eders Skrivelse og hilse eder alle’: (‘Børnene i Grønland’, Missionsblad for Børn, March 1847, p. 32). The letter is dated 7 April 1845. In this way, Johnsen brings the translated piece about Greenland closer to home; to the children in Stavanger and to Norwegian readers at the same time as he promotes the work in Norwegian foreign missions. This is, however, the only example of such adaptation and domestication in
Missionsblad for Børn.