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In a letter written by Geijer from Stockholm to his fiancee, then living in the country, dated March 7, 1811, he says: "We have formed a society which meets nearly daily. We talk, smoke, and read together about Gothic Viking deeds. We call each other by Gothic names, and live in the past."
They were soon forgotten, and Ling himself is best known as the inventor of gymnastic exercises on scientific principles, an art now practiced all the world over as "Swedish gymnastics." Geijer, whose Viking gave a pure and true picture of Viking life seen in its own light, was himself disappointed.
Geijer was a romantic by nature, in politics as well as in literature, but he was above all an ardent Scandinavian, opposed to exotics, and passionately devoted to the great traditions of the past, a hero-worshiper, an enthusiast, and a Goth.
They read and analysed and criticized classical Swedish poetry Tegnér and Runeberg and Geijer. Most of the poems chosen for the purpose were historical and took their themes from the old viking days or from the glorious centuries of Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII, when Sweden so nearly rose to be a great power. Keith liked to take certain sonorous passages into his mouth.
But Geijer and Ling alone had followed out the theory in all its consequences. Their heroes were simply Eddic, of their time, in spirit and in thought. Ling's realism went so far that his Northern gods and warriors, "everlastingly killed but to revive again," were deemed "pork-eating and mead-drinking yokels."
The Danish dramatic poet Oelenschlaeger and the Swedish writer Tegner were among the Scandinavian men of letters with whom he made acquaintance during his tour of Sweden and Denmark in 1845. He probably came across the Swedish historian Geijer on the same occasion. Schelling and Alexander von Humboldt, mentioned a little lower down, were also still holding sway at Berlin when he was a student.
Tegnér was, with Geijer and Ling, the first to adopt national subjects, to use the Scandinavian myths and folk-lore in their poetry, in opposition to the classical themes and the Hellenic mythology, until then exclusively in vogue in the poetical field.
He scorned alike the metaphysical subtleties of French philosophy and the moonshine heroics of German romanticism. But he was at one with Geijer and Ling in the desire to make Scandinavian heroes and myths the subjects of poetry. The result of the movement was Frithiof's Saga, by Tegnér, Geiger's Viking, and Ling's heavy epics of Walhalla warriors.
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