shment, Grundtvig wrote two hundred years later: "Kingo's
hymns represent not only the greatest miracle of the 17th century but
such an exceptional phenomenon in the realm of poetry that it is
explainable only by the fates who in their wisdom preserved the seed of
an Easter Lily for a thousand years, and then returned it across the sea
that it might flower in its original soil". Kingo's family on the
paternal side had immigrated to Denmark from that part of Scotland which
once had been settled by the poetic Northern sea rovers, and Grundtvig
thus conceives the poetic genius of Kingo to be a revival of an ancestral
gift, brought about by the return of his family to its original home and
a new infusion of pure Northern blood. The conception, like so much that
Grundtvig wrote is at least ingenious, and it is recommended by the fact
that Kingo's poetry does convey a spirit of robust realism that is far
more characteristic of the age of the Vikings than of his own.

Thomas Kingo, the grandfather of the poet, immigrated from Crail,
Scotland, to Denmark about 1590, and settled at Helsingoer, Sjaelland,
where he worked as a tapestry weaver. He seems to have attained a
position of some prominence, and it is related that King James IV of
Scotland, during a visit to Helsingoer, lodged at his home. His son, Hans
Thomeson Kingo, who was about two years old when the family arrived in
Denmark, does not appear to have prospered as well as his father. He
learned the trade of linen and damask weaving, and established a modest
business of his own at Slangerup, a town in the northern part of Sjaelland
and close to the famous royal castle of Frederiksborg. At the age of
thirty-eight he married a young peasant girl, Karen Soerendatter, and
built a modest but eminently respectable home. In this home, Thomas
Kingo, the future hymnwriter, was born December 15, 1634.

It was an unusually cold and unfriendly world that greeted the advent of
the coming poet. The winter of his birth was long remembered as one of
the hardest ever experienced in Denmark. The country's unsuccessful
participation in the Thirty Year's War had brought on a depression that
threatened its very existence as a nation; and a terrible pestilence
followed by new wars increased and prolonged the general misery, making
the years of Kingo's childhood and youth one of the darkest periods in
Danish history.

But although these conditions brought sorrow and ruin to thousands, even