Frederik Paludan-Müller is positioned between the periods of Romanticism and Naturalism at the crossroad of mid-nineteenth-century Danish literature. Keenly aware of the ongoing social and ideological changes of his time, he sharply satirized and criticized the shallow idealism and occasional sentimentality of the last offshoots of the Romantic movement as well as the smoldering materialism and atheism of the second half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, as Paludan-Müller became polemically involved in the questions of the day, he raised himself above his own time through the universality of the problems he discussed and the artistic value of his writing.

Many of Paludan-Müller's fellow writers in Denmark and abroad were vacillating between contrasting traditional and modern views, often in a dialectical process that led them to a certain degree of philosophical relativism. Some had even begun to question Christian dogmas...