“Danes; variously catalogued”: A Scandinavian Portrait of Ireland

In his critical essays, Joyce remarks upon the assimilation of the Scandinavian invaders within the medieval Irish community, stressing that looking at this ancestral cultural connection is necessary to understand the complexities of the contemporary Irish character entirely. Aside from faith and family in Joyce’s coming-of-age stories, one theme in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Ireland’s invasions, which recur throughout his fiction and non-fiction. This chapter details the Irish writer’s interest in the Danish literary movement, spearheaded by Georg Brandes and, to a lesser extent, Henrik Ibsen, comments on Norwegian theatre and Joyce’s interest in the Dano-Norwegian language. Further, it examines how Danish fiction, focusing on social injustice and autobiographical underpinnings, was a great source of interest to Joyce.