Romantikkens

Romantikkens is the Danish term for Romanticism, a broad European movement in arts and thought that flourished roughly from the 1790s to the 1850s. It arose as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and Neoclassicism, emphasizing emotion, imagination, nature, individual experience, and a sense of the extraordinary.

In the Nordic and wider European context, Romanticism fostered interest in folk culture, national history, landscapes, and the sublime. In Denmark and its neighboring regions it contributed to national and cultural self-awareness and helped shape a cultural program often described as national romanticism, which fed into the broader currents of the Danish Golden Age and later national identity projects.

In literature, Romanticism produced lyric poetry, ballads, and early novels that celebrated heroism, the remote past, the supernatural, and intense personal feeling. In music, composers sought expressive breadth, mood, and nature-inspired atmospheres. In the visual arts, landscape painting and evocative depictions of nature and rural life became prominent. Across fields, Romanticism valued originality, the importance of the imagination, and a sense of individual genius.

Notable Danish figures associated with Romantic ideals include poets and dramatists such as Adam Oehlenschläger, whose work helped define Danish romantic literature, while the broader European milieu featured writers and artists like Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Caspar David Friedrich. The movement contributed to changes in education, cultural institutions, and conceptions of national culture, influencing later artistic currents and the development of Scandinavian artistic identities.