The Daily Valdemar No. 61: May 13
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| Valdemar Andersen, cover of the novel Bræen (The Glacier) by Johannes V. Jensen, Gyldendal 1911. |
The author Johannes V. Jensen placed man - as in man - at the centre of all things courageous. He who stayed in the north and created civilization as we know it, when the ice age set in and the weaklings fled south. A new Adam discovering, taming and fathering the world around him. Not a storyline for the 21st century. There is a reason why his readers will emphasise the poetic density of his prose.
Johannes V. Jensen and Valdemar Andersen were friends, but that is as far as we can speak of any semblance between the two. Valdemar had no anthropocentric outlook and he did not even hint at human existence when drawing the cover of Bræen (The Glacier). One cannot but wonder how he got the approval to do so from the author and we may have a hint at what took place from a letter in which he mentions that he is on his way to Johannes V. Jensen's to pick up an image of a mammoth. The dust cover to this book depicts a mammoth and so this may have been his way of engaging the author using him as an authority on prehistoric animals. The author apparently felt to have been given his due and Valdemar created his preferred angle for the cover. Diplomacy at its most quiet and efficient.
Valdemar places the grandeur in a world of ice with the polar bear. It is the one to whom movement belongs going forward. Its paw is the frame through which we see its realm and in which it is roaring to a degree that the gilt Nordic Lights seem to pulsate from it.
