Ove Jørgensen

Ove Jørgensen (5 September 1877 – 31 October 1950) was a Danish scholar of classics, literature and ballet. He is known for formulating Jørgensen's law, which describes the narrative conventions used in Homeric poetry when relating the actions of the gods.

The son of Sophus Mads Jørgensen, a professor of chemistry, Jørgensen was born and lived for most of his life in Copenhagen. He was educated at the prestigious Metropolitanskolen and at the University of Copenhagen, where he began his study of the Homeric poems. In 1904, following academic travels to Berlin, Athens and Constantinople, he published "The Appearances of the Gods in Books 9–12 of the Odyssey", an article in which he outlined the distinctions between how the gods are referred to by mortal characters and by the narrator and gods in the Odyssey. The observation of these distinctions became known as "Jørgensen's law".

Jørgensen gave up classical scholarship in 1905, following a dispute with other academics after he was passed over for an invitation to a newly formed learned society. He had intended to publish a monograph based on his 1904 article, but it never materialised. Instead, he devoted himself to teaching, both at schools and at the University of Copenhagen: among his students were the future poet Johannes Weltzer and Poul Hartling, later prime minister of Denmark. He maintained a lifelong friendship and correspondence with the composer Carl Nielsen and his wife, the sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen.

Jørgensen published on the works of Charles Dickens and was a recognised authority on ballet. His views on the latter were conservative and nationalistic, promoting what he saw as authentic, masculine Danish aesthetics – represented by the ballet master August Bournonville – against modernist, liberalising innovations from Europe and the United States. He wrote critically of the American dancers Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller, but was later an advocate of the Russian choreographer Michel Fokine.

Early life and education
Ove Jørgensen was born in Copenhagen on 5 September 1877. He was the son of Sophus Mads Jørgensen, a professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, and of Jørgensen's wife, Louise Wellmann. He became a student at the prestigious Metropolitanskolen in 1895 and received his Master of Arts degree from the University of Copenhagen in 1902, submitting a thesis in which he argued for the single authorship of the Homeric poems. His university teachers included the historian Johan Ludvig Heiberg and the philologist Anders Bjørn Drachmann.

Classical scholarship
Following his graduation from Copenhagen, Jørgensen travelled to Berlin, where he studied Homeric poetry under the philologists Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Hermann Alexander Diels. Here, he began the process of writing what became his 1904 article on the invocation of the gods in the Odyssey. On leaving Berlin, he travelled to Athens in 1903 alongside his fellow student from Copenhagen, the future archaeologist Frederik Poulsen, where he met the composer Carl Nielsen and his wife Anne Marie. Jørgensen became a lifelong friend of both, and accompanied them to Constantinople: Carl Nielsen mentions him sixty-three times in his diary. Jørgensen subsequently travelled to Rome, where he cultivated an interest in Baroque art.

Jørgensen published an article, "The Appearances of the Gods in Books 9–12 of the Odyssey", in the journal Hermes in 1904. In this article, Jørgensen observed that Homeric characters typically use generic terms, particularly θεός (: 'a god'), δαίμων (a daimon) and Ζεύς (Zeus), to refer to the action of gods, whereas the narrator and the gods themselves always name the specific gods responsible. This principle became known as Jørgensen's law, and the classicist Ruth Scodel described it in 1998 as the "standard analysis of ... the rules that govern human speech about the gods". Jørgensen began work on a book-length treatment of his ideas, but never published it.

In 1904, Jørgensen began to work as a teacher, taking a post at N. Zahle's School in Copenhagen, and another in 1905 at the Østersøgade Gymnasium in the same city. He left academia in 1905, following a dispute with other classical scholars over the founding of the Greek Society for Philhellenes, a learned society founded by intellectuals including Heiberg, Harald Høffding and Georg Brandes. Although most members were qualified as doctors of philosophy, others, including Nielsen, were invited. Jørgensen was not, which he considered a snub, and he refused the offer of Drachmann to introduce him to the society.

Later career
Jørgensen continued to teach the classical languages following his retreat from academic work. Among his students was the future prime minister of Denmark, Poul Hartling, who described Jørgensen as "the best teacher [he] ever had". Jørgensen taught a Greek class at the University of Copenhagen, where Hartling was a theology student between 1932 and 1939. He also taught the future poet Johannes Weltzer, who wrote in 1953 that Jørgensen's classes on Plato's Apologia, a philosophical work portraying the defence of Plato's teacher Socrates against charges of impiety, were "a matter of introducing [his students] into the Socratic way of life", and that Weltzer expected few of those students to have forgotten them.

Jørgensen's father, Sophus, died in 1914. In 1916, working alongside the chemist S. P. L. Sørensen, Jørgensen completed and published Sophus's unfinished manuscript of Development History of the Chemical Concept of Acid until 1830. He maintained his friendship and correspondence with Carl Nielsen, with whom he discussed Shakespeare. In a letter of 1916, Nielsen confided in Jørgensen about his abortive efforts to write an opera based on The Tempest, as well as about the precarious state of his marriage. Jørgensen also corresponded with Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen: in 1922, she wrote to him that she had reconciled with Carl and determined to remain with him.

Jørgensen became an authority on ballet, writing a series of essays from 1905 in which he promoted what he saw as the traditional aesthetics of the Royal Danish Ballet. He asserted the importance of the Danish ballet master August Bournonville while criticising the innovations introduced into European ballet by the dancer Isadora Duncan. Jørgensen called Duncan an "American dilettante", denigrated her as middle-aged and under-educated, and likened her dancing movements to those of a goose. He condemned the Art Nouveau- and symbolism-influenced style of Loïe Fuller, another American who, like Duncan, performed in Denmark in 1905, calling it "quasi-philosophical experiments". In March 1905, he attended a lecture by Vilhelm Wanscher, a philosopher and historian of art: Jørgensen described Wanscher's conception of the aesthetic perception of art as "a mental disorder".

The ballet scholar Karen Vedel has linked Jørgensen's opposition to Duncan, and the liberalising ideas of the Modern Breakthrough he felt she represented, to the ideology of the Danish national conservative movement. In particular, she draws attention to Jørgensen's promotion of what he saw as distinctively "Danish" ballet, and his characterisation of this as masculine and Dionysian, in contrast to his portrayal of Duncan's style as foreign, unartistic and iconoclastic. Jørgensen's nationalistic ideas about ballet softened over time: in 1908, he gave a positive review of a performance of the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova with dancers from the Mariinsky Theatre, while in 1918 he recommended that the Russian choreographer Michel Fokine be hired by the Royal Danish Theatre. In the same year, he defended Fokine against accusations that his artistic style was revolutionary in character and connected with Bolshevism.

Jørgensen's other scholarly interests included the English novelist Charles Dickens: Hartling later wrote that Jørgensen could easily have been a professor of his work. Jørgensen edited a 1930 Danish edition of Dickens's novel Great Expectations, to which he added an introductory essay. The literary scholar Jørgen Erik Nielsen later praised Jørgensen's essay as displaying an extensive knowledge both of Dickens and of related literature and criticism.

Personal life and character
Frederik Poulsen, who knew Jørgensen in Copenhagen and Berlin and accompanied him to Athens, described him as "a quiet, reticent student" and a "remarkable man", whom he compared with Socrates. Hartling described Jørgensen as looking like "what a professor ... should look like according to the clichés: scruffy-stubble full beard, thin-rimmed glasses, knee flaps and button-downs". He portrays Jørgensen's lessons as "steeped in humour", particularly Jørgensen's taste for acerbic, sarcastic comments at the expense of students who arrived late or whom he perceived to be slacking – which sometimes included Hartling.

Jørgensen never married. He died in the Freeport of Copenhagen on 31 October 1950, and was buried in Holmen Cemetery.