Från Olof August Danielsson och Per Persson till Albert Wifstrand

Svensk klassisk filologi under 80 år

Abstract

This article traces the evolution of classical philology in Sweden from the mid-nineteenth century onward, emphasizing how a once characteristically “late-humanist” approach underwent a sudden reorientation toward historical linguistics. Central to this shift were Swedish scholars trained in Leipzig, notably Olof August Danielsson (who gained renown as an Etruscologist rather than as a Greek philologist) and Per Persson (professor of Latin in Uppsala from 1895), both of whom helped establish a new “grammatical” or “neogrammatical” foundation for Swedish classical studies. Einar Löfstedt, appointed professor of Latin in Lund in 1913, absorbed this linguistic orientation through Danielsson and Persson but in practice often compared ancient linguistic phenomena to living languages rather than, for instance, Sanskrit. Bo Lindberg’s seminal Humanism och vetenskap contextualizes these developments, showing how Sweden’s “linguistic” school was repeatedly criticized for its emphasis on historical grammar at the expense of broader humanistic inquiry. Despite such critiques, the approach left a deep imprint on what came to be known as the “Swedish school” of philology, particularly through its adept linguistic analyses—even if less strictly comparative than in German Indoeuropeanism.
The article then examines the “Swedish school’s” alleged textual conservatism. It highlights how the label “conservative” traditionally arises from a readiness to preserve anomalies in ancient texts (e.g., morphological or syntactic irregularities) rather than normalize them through emendation. Yet the discussion shows that major Swedish philologists, such as Einar Löfstedt and his students, were not categorically opposed to conjectural criticism; rather, they balanced their commitment to identifying authentic anomalies with openness to emending genuine corruptions. The debate between Gösta Thörnell and Bertil Axelson in the mid-1940s illustrates the complexity of this question: although Axelson (and later his student Lennart Håkanson) championed robust conjectural approaches in a rather “English” (Housmanian) way, their work nonetheless continued core principles of the Swedish tradition by closely uniting linguistic and stylistic expertise with textual study.
The final portion of the article focuses on Albert Wifstrand (1901–1964). Despite initially studying with Claes Lindskog in Lund, Wifstrand was effectively mentored by Löfstedt and exemplifies many of the Swedish school’s methodological strengths. His early doctoral work, Studien zur griechischen Anthologie (1926), demonstrated new insights into the arrangement and transmission of epigrams in the Palatine and Planudean Anthologies, establishing that certain segments had been misplaced or reclassified over time. His major masterpiece, Von Kallimachos zu Nonnos (1933), opened – as Paul Maas pointed out – an important field of research on late antique Greek poetry, specifically on metrics, style, and the progressive shift from “ornamental” to context-bound epithets. Among other discoveries, Wifstrand identified how the nominal and descriptive tendencies in Nonnos create a “pictorial” rather than fully “narrative” style, a characteristic feature of late antique ekphrastic writing that has informed subsequent scholarship on the period.
Throughout his career, Wifstrand continued to work intensively on Greek prose from the Imperial and Byzantine periods, publishing significant textual corrections in his Εἰκότα series and preparing notes for a comprehensive treatise on late Greek language and style—a work he never completed but which virtually survives in unpublished materials, especially in his impressive marginalia to the Εἰκότα, which the author of this article is collecting in order to publish them in a separate volume. His legacy, together with that of Löfstedt and their contemporaries, demonstrates that Sweden’s distinct philological tradition—part linguistically rigorous, part stylistically and textually perceptive—has played a pivotal role in shaping modern approaches to ancient texts, influencing both the method and practice of European classical scholarship into the twentieth century and beyond.