Resumen
Resumen de Niels Lyhne
Para quién es
For readers who love finely observed novels about inner life, love and lost belief, and anyone who recognises the gap between daydreams and life.
De qué trata este libro
Niels Lyhne is a Danish novel by Jens Peter Jacobsen, published in 1880. Jacobsen was a trained botanist who wrote slowly and with great care, and this was his second and last novel. It follows one man from a Jutland childhood to the edge of middle age. The man is Niels, a boy who grows up on dreams and who has to find out what his dreams are worth.
The book was written in the years when Danish writers were leaving the old romantic faith behind. Jacobsen had translated Darwin into Danish, and he looked at the human heart with the same patience he gave to plants. He asks what happens to a person who is raised to expect a heroic life, and who also loses the belief in God that his age took for granted.
You get the whole shape of that life here. You meet Niels at home, at school, in Copenhagen and in love, and you see why the book is about more than one man. It is about a way of feeling that many readers still recognise. Let us begin in a quiet house in Jutland, where a boy's mind is first filled with pictures of what he will become.
En este resumen
- 1A boy raised on his mother's dreamsFree
- 2A tutor teaches him envy and ambition
- 3Copenhagen and the friendship with Erik
- 4The loss of God and a hard decision
- 5Fennimore arrives, and a friend becomes a rival
- 6Love that does not match the dream
- 7The theme of the dreamer against the world
- 8Unbelief without comfort as a test of courage
- 9How Jacobsen tells it: nature, mood and precision
Idea clave 1 de 9
A boy raised on his mother's dreams
The novel opens in Jutland, the flat western part of Denmark, at a manor home that sits among heath and fields. Niels is the only child of Bartholine and her husband, Mr. Lyhne. The two parents are very unlike each other, and the boy will carry both of them inside him all his life. Jacobsen believes that a person is made early.
Bartholine is a romantic woman who reads poetry and longs for a larger life than the one she has. She is also devout in a warm and dreamy way. She fills her son with stories and fine feelings, and she is sure that he is meant for something great. Her love is sincere, but it feeds him pictures rather than facts.
Mr. Lyhne is a gentle, withdrawn man who loves his land and has no wish to push his son anywhere. He lives by a calmer reason than his wife does. He has little to say about God, and he lets the question lie. The boy notices the difference between the two without understanding it.
So Niels grows up between a mother who shows him heaven and a father who shows him the earth. He prefers heaven. In his games he is always the hero, the poet or the saviour, and he sees himself in the glow of a future that has not yet been asked to prove itself. Jacobsen is kind to the boy, but he is not blind to what this habit will cost.
This first part matters because it sets the main pattern of the book. Niels does not lack feeling or talent. He lacks the habit of looking at what is actually in front of him. Every later chapter tests that habit, and each time life answers in its own plain way.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Who’s who
- Niels Lyhne
- Niels is an imaginative young man whose mother's romantic hopes shape his expectations of life.
- Bartholine Lyhne
- Bartholine is Niels's devout, poetry-loving mother, who encourages her son to dream of greatness.
- Mr. Lyhne
- Mr. Lyhne is Niels's gentle father, whose calm reason contrasts with his wife's romantic feelings.
- Bigum
- Bigum is Niels's bitter tutor, whose frustrated ambitions influence his teaching and his pupil's self-image.
- Erik Refstrup
- Erik is Niels's confident painter friend, whose ease with life attracts his admiration and envy.
- Fennimore
- Fennimore is a restless young woman whose desire for a fuller life draws both Erik and Niels.
- Hjerrild
- Hjerrild is an older freethinker whose convictions challenge the religious beliefs Niels inherited from his mother.
- Gerda
- Gerda is a gentle young woman who offers Niels a quieter happiness than his romantic imaginings.
About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 72,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 4 h 50 min
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 11 other languages
Questions about Niels Lyhne
What is Niels Lyhne about?
It follows a Danish dreamer from his Jutland childhood through study, friendship and love, and shows how his romantic expectations meet real life. It is also about the loss of religious faith and the effort to live honestly without it.
Is Niels Lyhne a true story?
No, it is a novel, though Jacobsen drew on his own world. He was a Danish botanist and freethinker, and he gave Niels some of his own doubts. It was published in 1880 and is set in nineteenth century Denmark.
Why is Niels Lyhne called a novel about atheism?
Niels gives up the faith of his childhood and chooses to live as an unbeliever. The book asks what that choice costs and requires in daily life, and it did much to make the novel important to freethinking readers.
Is Niels Lyhne hard to read?
No. The story is easy to follow, because it simply goes through one man's life, from a Jutland childhood to Copenhagen and love. The narrator stays close to Niels and gently shows what he cannot see about himself.
Who influenced by J. P. Jacobsen read Niels Lyhne?
Many writers admired it, and Rainer Maria Rilke was among its devoted readers. Its close attention to inner feeling helped shape later European psychological fiction, and it remains a central book of Danish literature.