Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754) is an outstanding example of European culture in the eighteenth century. He was the most brilliant son born during the four centuries when Denmark and Norway constituted a twin kingdom, from 1387 to 1814. 

His birthplace was Bergen, the Norwegian town most receptive to influence from abroad, and his professional life was spent in the capital of the dual kingdom, Copenhagen. Through his travels in Europe the young Holberg became personally acquainted with great and small nations; as a writer he introduced artistic and scholarly genres to Denmark-Norway and thus became the founder of two nations’ modern literature. But the movement took the opposite direction as well. 

Ludvig Holberg made his entrance into the world on 3 December 1684. His father was a dynamic personality. Seemingly of modest rural origins, he worked his way up from the ranks to become a lieutenant colonel, which then automatically conferred noble status. As a young officer he was in the service of the Venetian state, after which he travelled in Italy and was enrolled at the university of Siena. His wife came from a wealthy ec-clesiastical family, her maternal grandfather was the bishop of Bergen. The lieutenant colonel died as early as 1686, his wife in 1695. 

Ludvig Holberg, born in 1684, with the roots in the SVANE Family through the family's grand old Lady Marine Svane, whose mother was Marine Svanedatter - daughter of Hans Svaning, like his cousin Johan Ludvig Heiberg - another influential figure in Danish literature. Below is shown his relation to the Family.

 

Ludvig Holberg attended Bergen Grammar School, where the headmaster of the day was a knowledgeable and energetic humanist. The thorough training in Latin enabled Holberg to know by heart almost all of Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses for the rest of his life. 

 In May 1702 most of Bergen was destroyed by fire, and soon afterwards the head-master sent the senior form to Copenhagen, where Holberg graduated and matriculated at the university in July 1702. Here, barely two years later, in March -April 1704, he passed both the preliminary examination in philosophy and the final theo-logical examination. He was then only nineteen years old. 

The problem was what to do next. The law decreed that he could not apply for a living before he reached the age of twenty-five - and he felt no call to the priesthood. So he took a post as house tutor to the deputy bishop of Bergen, Niels Smith. Holberg was allowed to read the deputy bishop’s journal describing his travels in Germany, Italy, France and Holland, and he was seized with an irrepressible urge to go abroad himself. He sold a small plot of land he had inherited and set out for Holland.

Bergen had 15,000 inhabitants, Copen-hagen 70,000, but Amsterdam 200,000! The twenty-year-old was confronted with a metro-polis that had scant respect for a poor academic and Holberg’s appearance was particularly youthful. A Dutch priest asked him when he had run away from school. This an-noyed the young scholar so much that he let fly an avalanche of Latin over the unprepared cleric so that he capitulated and said: But of course you are a theologian, my good Sir, I congratulate you! Holberg was troubled with fever and went to Aachen to try the thermal baths and get to know Germany. But after three weeks in Aachen he had run out of money and in dire straits tried to leave his hotel without paying; but the proprietor stopped him and made him pay. Long afterwards Holberg recalls in his autobiography, Time after time I dreamed that this innkeeper seized me by the collar and dragged me back to the inn. He borrowed money and, in order to escape the ridicule of the family in Bergen, went to Kristiansand, where he spent the winter of 1705-06. 

Holberg never married; as professor author and landowner he made a great deal of money, and at an early date he resolved that his fortune should benefit the community. In 1747 he complied with a request that he should bequeath his landed estates to the foundation of Sorø Academy for the Nobility, an institute of higher education in modern studies such as international law, economics and modern languages. In return the estates were to constitute the barony of Holberg. As the Academy’s plans could not await the death of the testator, Holberg relinquished the income from the barony from 1751 and on