Are you allowed to say this?

Are you allowed to say it in a positive way, without being accused of being cultural elite?

The most condescending thing you can say about ordinary people is surely that world literature "isn't for them".

What kind of nonsense is that? Ask the miners in England who pooled their money to set up libraries, with Dickens and Milton, who put on Shakespeare in the village, the weavers in Scotland who read poetry while they were weaving, some of them also became poets themselves.

The miners and the weavers

An incredibly interesting book is "The intellectual life of the British working classes". They write there about weavers in small villages in Scotland who stood reading Milton and Shakespeare over the loom at work, about factory workers who all chipped in money so that one person could sit and read aloud to them while they worked, about miners who got inspired by reading Greek drama and epics, because it made them imagine that the world actually could be completely different. Of course everyone read the Bible back then, and got an incredible vocabulary out of it...

While in Norway in 2025 we still think that high culture is some nonsense for "the elite", and that ordinary people want soccer games and crime novels.

Coded as a right-wing thing

It's confusing to me how much an interest in classical literature, the history of ideas, the idea that there's any value in learning about European history at all, has apparently now been "coded" as a right-wing thing, even far right...

It's definitely true that there are fascists walking around who think that everything beautiful was only made by white men and we have to make Europe Great again etc... But still, it's just too dumb to simply let them define things...

It's not about national romanticism in Norway (even though Peer Gynt is fantastic and can spark fantastic philosophical discussions about what it means to be yourself/enough for yourself etc), bourgeois fantasies or formalin. It's about learning to be a human being in a society, in a world. If we snort at that we rob the students of their world heritage and make our society poorer.

Regards from someone who honestly thinks that all Norwegian students should read the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Metamorphoses, Shakespeare, Holberg... and if that gets too West-centric, feel free to throw in Gilgamesh, Dream of the Red Chamber, Tale of Genji, Mahabharata and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Ingeborg Refling Hagen

Just in the last week I've come across Ingeborg Refling Hagen and the Suttung movement, and had a revelation! I never picked up anything about it while I was growing up here, I guess I came just too late and didn't have parents who were interested in that kind of thing... But then I heard about a Brand seminar, and I was there this weekend with a small group, we read the whole play of Brand out loud (everyone took part) for eight hours (with discussion, but mostly reading)! Fantastic...

We were a group of 9 people who sat from 10 am to 6 pm, only interrupted by a little waffles and soup, while we took turns reading, with short comments and references to other works (Kant, Wergeland, Dante, even Toni Morrison).

And since then I've started reading books etc, and I'm completely in love... The whole concept that lady stood for is very close to what I've been looking for with Bildung, that kids (and adults!) should read good literature. Our local Ingeborg Refling Hagen, who fought her whole life for kids to get the chance to work deeply with great literary works.

Even though I live so close to Tangen it wasn't until 2025 that I learned about her. But now I've been to several readings, and gotten incredibly inspired by her autobiography.

If there's anyone who understood the importance of culture as a bulwark against fascism it has to be her — her book should be required reading for all cultural workers and politicians in Norway!

A lot of this is stuff I've been going around thinking about myself for a long time, but I've felt very lonely (who in Norway in 2025 thinks that it actually matters what kids read, and not just that they read — or even wants ordinary adults who aren't cultural elite to get inspired to "challenge themselves a bit" with what they read)...

Would really like to try to get something like this going in Hamar again. Want to read Wergeland, Dante, Shakespeare etc, and discuss and learn. And encourage grown-ups who weren't "raised on" high culture, that it's fine to start when you're 40! It's not too late!

To one of the people who run Hamar teater · 17 February 2025

But also very sad that it's a bit of "a bygone era". Same feeling as when I look at the TV archive, listen to old radio broadcasts etc and think that I'm glad it's been archived, but sad that so little gets made these days. Anyway, classical literature is timeless and doesn't go away, even if our societies change.

From letters to the culture editor at Morgenbladet (November 2025) and a professor of classics at NTNU (February 2025)

Where I stand

I think that if you were to sum up my pedagogical approach now, at least when it comes to history/literature/social studies etc, it would be a mix of E. D. Hirsch and Ingeborg Refling Hagen — those two very different, one local and one global.

More on this: Adult beginners