There is a revealing moment in Henrik Pontoppidan’s novella The Rearguard in which Jørgen Hallager, a Danish social realist painter temporarily living in Rome with his new wife, Ursula Branth, writes home to his comrades of his impressions of the city.
“I swear,” he laments, “you can walk through a hundred galleries down here without seeing a single reference to ordinary life and the struggles of the common people.” Then comes the hedged corrective: “Only a few of the very oldest Christian painters, albeit in their stilted depiction of Christ’s persecution, have expressed a genuine indignation at the evisceration of truth and justice here on earth.”
Hallager is a committed revolutionary, and his insight offers a window onto the perpetual power of the crucifixion as a sociopolitical image: a man silenced in death by the machinations of empire. It also illustrates the distance between what the translator, Paul Larkin, calls in his afterword the “demagoguery” and “monomania” of Hallager’s politics and the Christian vision of a social contract as drafted in the Beatitudes and ratified on the cross.
Pontoppidan was born in Denmark in 1857 to a family of Lutheran vicars, so it is no surprise that his work would probe the relationship between the spiritual and material. He received the Nobel Prize in 1917, yet he remains less well known in the United States than Thomas Mann and other European writers who praised him during his lifetime.
The Rearguard is paired here with another novella in Larkin’s translation, The White Bear, published by the thoughtfully curated New York Review Books Classics series. The two novellas work in conversation with each other. Both feature burly, uncouth protagonists who endure episodes of childhood trauma and develop a fiercely independent way of engaging with the world.
For Thorkild Müller of The White Bear, this trauma takes the form of the early death of his father and the condescending attitudes of his surviving family. “The perennial calm he displayed in the face of all his humiliations was more in the nature of an innate grimace, behind which he had hidden since childhood,” Pontoppidan plangently writes. “A screen for the sorrow and shame of being born such a wretched and useless human being.”
There is one way for Müller to improve his lot in the small provincial town where he is raised. By a government decree, theology students who commit to later serving as priests for “an unspecified period of time” in the Danish colony of Greenland can receive an annual stipend to fund their studies. It is a “charitable provision,” but one that scares off many would-be applicants with its open-ended return date.
With options limited, Müller enrolls in the seminary program. He is a desultory student who “scarcely open[s] a book” and strays into the lecture hall but a handful of times. When he is brought before the faculty for his final examination, he attempts to sabotage the assessment—and with it the prospect of a mission to Greenland—by refusing to answer any of the questions. The government ministry intervenes, however, and forces the faculty to send him “to the most northerly priestly vocation that existed anywhere in the whole world.”
The image of Müller silent before this tribunal recalls Christ’s reticence before Pilate, a comparison that grows more pronounced as we proceed through the novella and watch him transform into a true pastor. The turning point comes after he endures his first winter in the northern reaches’ “desolate crucible of stone.” He tries to study texts on evangelization in the log cabin that serves as his rectory but finds the words don’t land; he turns his attention to the outdoors, to the rocks and ice and fauna, and spends a summer in the mountains above the fjords with an Inuit elder, Ephraim, and his family.
Though we don’t witness this episode, Pontoppidan narrates it after the fact. We learn how Müller “was a man born anew…a rejuvenated soul” upon his return from the wilderness, where he has immersed himself in the rituals and subsistence practices of his circle of adopted kin. It is a relationship that changes him physically (“his eyes had come alive and his cheeks were flushed with color”) but also spiritually and emotionally.
Pontoppidan here has given us a sketch of the “inculturation” of faith that Pope Francis repeatedly called for, and that his successor, Pope Leo XIV, exemplified during his time in Peru. By accompanying his flock to the furthest reaches of their territory, the marginal lands of an already marginalized group, Müller wins not only respect but initiation into the community: “[O]nce these indigenous people fully realized the true cut of their new priest, it was not long before they regarded him as one of their own.” This “ministry of presence” inverts the typical path of evangelization: “Rather than converting and edifying heathens, they had converted him.”
The rest of the novella moves rather crisply. Müller marries Ephraim’s daughter, Seqineq, and enters a period of gratitude and happiness so encompassing that time seems suspended: “The days and weeks passed. Years vanished and he would not know exactly how many, if asked.” Yet beneath this, barely detectable even to himself, hums a longing for his homeland that takes Seqineq’s sudden death for him to act upon. He petitions the Danish government for return. The request is granted, and the priest, coarsened by years of Arctic living, resumes his role as a shepherd “with the smell of the sheep” in the parish of Søby and Sorvad:
Pastor Müller’s parishioners had come to love him dearly. For, once their initial fright had passed, they saw that, behind his outlandish appearance and startling way of being in the world, here was a man who understood them in a way that they were not usually understood by priests—a man who was clearly no stranger to any of the problems and feelings they themselves experienced, and to whom they could turn with their own travails—be they petty worries or great sorrows.
His popularity threatens the local clerical class, led by one conniving deacon with “a face that smacked of a flat, newly licked greasy plate” who covets Müller’s post as a steppingstone to the episcopate. When the priest introduces a new initiative that is a bit too progressive for his parishioners, the bishops move in to oust him, leading to a dramatic conclusion that gives Müller the final word.
Read in tandem with The White Bear, The Rearguard’s focus on class politics and the lyrical versus the didactic purposes of art stand out in even sharper relief. One could imagine the two stories taking place at the same time on different continents, their main characters grappling with the advent of modernity in different ways.
In The Rearguard, this involves Hallager’s distrust of the past, his break from the “blind idolatry” of artistic beauty and belief in “the revenge of calm, cool reality” where society is rebuilt without obfuscating myths. His convictions might be the mirror image of that of a Christian. Yet in the novella’s final pages, when he finds himself adrift after his hoped-for revolutionary movement fails to come to pass, a neighbor makes an unintentionally perceptive observation: “A body would nearly think you had studied for the priesthood.”
This article appears in April 2026.
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