Ingeborg Refling Hagen
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Ingeborg Refling Hagen, born December 19. 1895 and died November 30. 1989 was a Norwegian author and teacher.
Ingeborg Refling Hagen was born in Hedmark, Norway, in the parish Tangen besides Mjøsa, as the fourth child of the local miller. Her childhood was enriched by strong folk tradition and story-telling, and also a strong religious consciousness, mostly derived from her mother, who taught in the spirit of Hans Nielsen Hauge.
Her father died early, and the family had to work hard for self-support. Ingeborg herself and her younger sisters were forced into child labour and hard work. The experiences this gave her, later made way for strong socialist sympathies. She were a member of the Norwegian Labour Party for most of her life.
She published her first books in the 1920s, and was soon regarded as a great talent. Her novels at the early stage were dark and expressionistic, based on her native environment, Hedmark. She was the first to make use of the local dialects from this part of Norway.
She made a lyrical breakthrough in 1933, with a book of Immigrant poems, describing the immigrant's longing for home. This book became her greatest success.
During this time, Hagen supported the republicans in the Spanish civil war, and began to warn against the rise of fascism, along with authors like Nordahl Grieg and Arnulf Øverland. Earlier on, she had made a journey to Italy, and experienced a fascist rally, and a public speech given by Mussolini. When she later used this experience in a novel, she was accused of exaggerations, as the Norwegian right-wing press at the time did not understand the actual danger.
Her political attitude led to active resistance during World War II, and she was arrested for opposing the nazi regime late in 1942. She managed to get out of imprisonment by playing mad, and was released in 1944, living in isolation for the rest of the war - none other than her most trusted friends and family knew at the time that she in fact was quite sane.
In 1946 Hagen took part in the conference held by Eleanor Roosevelt, "The world we live in , the world we want", assembling women from all over the world, many of whom had participated in the war resistance.
From 1945 and on, Hagen gradually built her own "post-war resistance", trying to find a way to hinder fascism from rising again in Norway. This became her cultural work for children, called "Suttung", rather a pedagogical principle than a movement. She gradually gathered teenagers and students around her, and read with them, and those that she taught, passed the knowledge on. They read the classics, poets like Henrik Wergeland, Ibsen, Hans E. Kinck, Dante, Victor Hugo, Dickens, Dostoyevsky and others. Further on, she studied Shakespeare and the Greek playwrights as well as Homer, and folk-tales from all over the world.
The movement grew, and established in time a theatre for presentations of plays written by Henrik Wergeland and Hans E. Kinck among others. The theatre proved that Wergeland was in fact playable, and even an exciting and profound playwright.
Hagen tried to give Norwegians a better understanding of Henrik Wergeland, and therefore she established her known "flower feast" on his birthday - a celebration that is still held alive. The value of her work has been important to a number of Norwegian cultural personalities, and even for the younger members of the royal family.
Ingeborg Refling Hagen continued to write poems until she was almost 90 years, and her dark and dramatic side mellowed into a mild summer evening in her late production. She died in her bed in 1989, in fact in the very chamber she was born in.
[edit] Philosophy
Ingeborg Refling Hagen was in many ways a self-taught philosopher, who based her way of thinking on romanticism, Plato and the church fathers. This was strangely blended with a vast knowledge of world literature. She was in a way connected to Jung and his thought of collective unconscious when she fitted together different pieces of literature into a whole. This notion is most clearly perceived in her analysis of the entity she often called The Old One, similar to Jung's archetype "the old man" or philemon. Hagen recognized the figure in several fairy-tales. In her autobiographical works, her fictional "self" learns how to listen to her own "old one", and gaining wisdom from it. She called it "a grey and wide eye inside her mind". In a wider sense, this way of thinking is connected to her respect for old oral traditions handed down. In many of her books, one finds an old storyteller, giving advice, pointing out the way, or setting the plot. This also occurs in her poems.
From childhood she had been somewhat of a visionary, and in her auto-biographical works she describes her visions in many places, often prompted by hard pondering on philosophical problems occurring in literature. She developed a clear feminist statement based on an interpretation of the bible, especially Mother Mary and Eve, whom she often compared as female archetypes. She was, however, known to think of males as weaker in many ways than her own gender, and discussed many times the relationship between man and woman, and the way they treated children. She would often criticize certain types of self-righteous women. Much of her thinking in this respect derived from the fact that she herself had experienced what a defenseless child could suffer under the hands of a mighty farmer's wife. She believed that women often would discriminate pauper's children on behalf of those they themselves had given birth to. This, among other reasons, explains why she never married.
Ingeborg Refling Hagen's basic philosophy and thinking is a strange blend of old christian ideas and socialist thinking. The vision of collecting all myths and stories in one universal system of thoughts was in a way her lifelong project, as she put it: "making an archive for those that are to follow, so that they can work further". This way of thinking may be characteristic for her generation - the thought of a common ground for stories prompted her English contemporary Tolkien in his epic project of a mythology for England.
