Modern Works
Poul Anderson's fantasy novel Three Hearts and Three Lions (ISBN 0-671-72186-0) (1961) draws upon these legends and also alters them. Its protagonist Holger Carlsen (a Danish resistance fighter) is transported to a fantasy alternate history where the Matter of France is historical. He eventually learns that he is Ogier the Dane, sent to our universe to remove him from the conflict between humans and Faerie in that one. At the book's end he returns to our world in time to cover Niels Bohr's escape to Sweden and prevent the Gestapo from capturing him - thus facilitating Bohr's part in the Manhattan Project and effectively fulfilling the prophecy that Ogier would return at the time of France and Denmark's grave need.
In his recent (2010, Harvill Secker) novel I Curse the River of Time (translated into English by Charlotte Barslund, with the author), award-winning Norwegian novelist Per Petterson describes a small ferry sailing between Norway and Denmark with the name Holger Danske; one of the main characters - a dying Danish woman going home - feels accepted and understood by its crew. She has lost a son some years ago. The ferry's name may or may not be relevant to the story, which has many interwoven strands.
Read more about this topic: Ogier The Dane
Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or works:
“A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)