As through a glass - Hans Egede's reception during the course of 300 years

At his death on 5th November 1758 the "Apostle of Greenland" Hans Egede was a highly respected man both in Greenland and in his Danish-Norwegian homeland. The scepticism with which his Greenland project had been greeted in the 1730s had disappeared. During the folowing decades his star continued to rise. He was mentioned at lenght in Ove Malling's widely read Great and good deeds of Danes, Norwegians and Holsteinians from 1777 (eng. 1822), and several engravings of his portrait were printed. "Hans Egede nursing smallpox victims" - a scene from the smallpox epidemic in Godthåb in 1733 by the engraver Johann Friedrich Clemens after a drawing by Erik Pauelsen - hung in thousands of homes and during the years around 1800 was one of the most widely circulated and beloved pictures in the twin kingdoms of Denmark and Norway.

The dissolution of the union between Denmark and Norway at the Peace of Kiel in January 1814 had a detrimental effect on Hans Egede's position in Denmark and Norway. The Norwegians were highly angered at having to hand over Greenland to Denmark, and for a long time they would have nothing to do with Hans Egede, who - though born in Norway - was regarded as Danish. It was not until after 1945, when the Norwegians, grateful for all the help given to them by the Danes during the war finally became reconciled with Denmark, that Hans Egede once again became accepted. Among the larger memorials erected after World War II is Nicolai Schiøll's youthful statue of the Greenland missionary in the centre of Oslo (1965) and Axel Revold's monumental decoration of the church in Hans Egede's birthplace, Harstad, in the north of Norway (1958).

In Denmark, where the loss of Norway 1814 was deeply regretted, the Danes were very reticent about clinging to former Norwegian countrymen such as Hans Egede. It was only towards the end of the nineteenht century that their reservations began to fade one by one. The finally revised definition af the Danish-Norwegian eighteenth-century patriot as a national Danish prelate came in 1913 with the setting up of a statue of him among other Danish church fathers at The Marble Church in Copenhagen.

The only place in the old Danish-Norwegian kingdom where Hans Egede's reception has not been marked by violent ruptures is Greenland. Here the missionary has been celebrated as a national father-figure with legendary accounts and idealized descriptions of his activities amongst the Greenlanders, accompanied from the middle of the nineteenth century by a deluge of pictures. Among the Greenlandic artists who have asserted themselves in this connection, the most important during the nineteenth century were Aron of Kangeq and Lars Møller, editor of the first Greenlandic newspaper Atuagagdliutit, and during the twentieth century Hans Lynge, Jens Rosing and Lauritz jessen.

The article finally mentions the criticism of Hans Egede that has been raised in Greenland by intellectuals and young artists such as David Gabrielsen, Tikikili Pjettursson and Bent Søholm as well as by the currently very active street artist "Nuumigoq," whose red and green stencils portraying Hans Egede, sometimes with the word UNDSKYLD (SORRY) in the margin, appear in the streets of Nuuk.