Ivar Andreas Aasen Biography | Poet

Ivar Andreas Aasen (ō′zen), Norwegian poet and philologist, was born in 1813 and died in 1896. He wrote miscellaneous poems and a drama, but he is chiefly known as the originator of the patriotic movement known as the Maulstroev. He endeavoured to give Norway a literary language distinct from the Danish, which has long served as the literary and official language of the country. This he attempted to do mainly by the help of the native dialects, which he studied thoroughly, setting forth their grammar in special works and embodying their vocabulary in his Norsk Ordbog med Dansk Forklaring (Norse Dictionary, with Explanations in Danish, 1873), supplemented by the Norsk Ordbog of Hans Ross (1890-2). Numbers of poems, tales, &c., have been written in the language, of which Aasen was in a sense the inventor.