Tine

In 1864 Prussia and Austria went to war with Denmark over Schleswig, and Herman Bang's family fled their home on the island of Als. Bang was six years old. Twenty-five years later he wrote Tine, a novel of that winter on Als.

Tine Bølling is the daughter of the parish clerk, and she adores the family at the Forester's lodge, above all the Forester's wife. When war comes, the wife leaves for Copenhagen with her son, and Tine stays behind to keep house for the Forester. The Danish army abandons the Dannevirke and falls back to the earthworks at Dybbøl, across the sound from the island. Officers are quartered at the lodge, the guns can be heard day and night, and in the weeks of the Danish defeat Tine and the Forester become lovers.

Tine was last translated into English in 1984, and that edition has long been out of print. This new translation is complete. It was made from the Danish first edition of 1889 and includes the preface Bang addressed to his mother.

About the author

Herman Bang (1857-1912) was one of the most important Danish writers of his generation. His first novel, Hopeless Generations, was confiscated as indecent in 1880, and his later novels, among them Katinka and Ida Brandt, were widely read in Scandinavia and Germany. He died in Ogden, Utah, in 1912, in the middle of a lecture tour of America.