Adam Oehlenschläger

Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850) was a Danish poet and dramatist, born in Copenhagen. His poem "The Golden Horns" (1802) and the collection Poems of 1803 opened the Romantic movement in Danish literature, and he went on to write verse tragedies such as Hakon Jarl and Axel and Valborg, and the oriental drama Aladdin. In 1810 he became professor of aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen, and in 1829 the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér crowned him in Lund cathedral as the laureate of the North.

Much of his work draws on Norse myth and saga. Nordens Guder (1819) is a cycle of poems on the Norse gods, here in William Edward Frye's English version, The Gods of the North (1845), which follows Thor and the trickster Lok through thirty cantos. He wrote also in German, and he is remembered in Denmark as the author of the national song 'There is a lovely land'.