The African colonial state was founded on militarism, a feature carried forward by the postcolonial state. The threat of coercion and use of overt violence mediated (and continues to mediate) relations between rulers and the ruled. Almost without exception, the implantation of the European colonial state in the African continent was underpinned by external interests rather than the aspirations and desires of the colonised peoples. Colonialism was a project disguised as civilisational but which in reality sought to meet the material and imperial interests of European colonial powers and their citizens. This meant that the threat and use of force was crucial, indeed necessary, in pursuing colonial interests in the continent. The forcible manner of foisting colonial authority on the colonised peoples necessitated the deployment of coercion, often blunt, brutal, and to chilling effect.

To exert control and achieve effective occupation of the colonised peoples necessitated the exercise of brute force because it was impossible to secure hegemony without coercion. While the ruling classes in the West established political control through ‘hegemony’, in the sense suggested by Antonio Gramsci – that is, dominance through consent; by contrast, colonial conquest and colonial rule in much of the Global South was non-hegemonic. It was fundamentally coercive and anchored on, and sustained largely through, the might of force. That is, the colonial state did not assimilate civil society in the manner that the European state did. This had grave implications for state-society relations.

The military machinery was the fulcrum of the African colonial state. This was because European colonial administrators had to deal with often inhospitable and relentlessly restive colonial subjects. Thus, the military was set up as a tool of internal coercion and control, not as a force against external aggression and provision of national security. This meant that the military, not so much the police, performed law and order tasks. Mahmood Mamdani summarised the crux of the problem as the ‘native question’ – the dilemma of successfully imposing alien rule by a tiny minority of foreigners on a majority of rebellious natives. In dealing with the native question, colonial authorities adopted two overlapping strategies.

As is apparent from his sister Elizabeth's descriptions of their youth, Nietzsche's propensity for playing games, especially those animating the Crimean War, became an essential element of his language from the beginning to the end of his career. As in the case of his extensive early poetry and prose, Nietzsche's dramas and fragments of dramas are not well known. I have therefore included overviews of the dramatic action in these literary works. The analyses and accompanying interpretations should expand our knowledge of Nietzsche's Gesamtwerk while creating possibilities for future research.

Der Geprüfte (The Tested One, 1856; NA I/1, 105–9)

Nietzsche co-authored this playlet with his friend Wilhelm Pinder. They first performed the piece in the Pinder house. It consists of six short parts. The themes the playlet calls up—compassion, hospitality, and honor—are familiar from Nietzsche's prose and poetry. As the drama begins, Jupiter, in disguise and returning from a battle, seeks rest. The mortal Sirenius, not recognizing Jupiter, invites him to warm himself by his fire and gives him food. When he learns that his guest is Jupiter, Sirenius is shocked; he falls to his knees and begs Zeus to have mercy on him for not having been more hospitable to his visitor upon his arrival. Jupiter, however, has Sirenius stand up, assures him of a reward, and points him to the sea. In a meeting of the gods, Apollo asks how “the test” went. Jupiter responds that Sirenius treated him very hospitably and generously. He is to receive a reward for his act of kindness. Jupiter's wife, Juno, will present the gracious host, Sirenius, with a golden neckband. A chorus of water nymphs beckons Sirenius to follow them into the light blue sea. Because he is such a noble person, they wish to tend to his needs. He is to be rewarded with immortality. But Sirenius is cautious. He hesitates to plunge into the ocean with them, for “Es schauert mich wenn ich in die Tiefe sehe” (NA I/1, 106; I shudder when I look into the deep). Sirenius thinks that if he should leap into the depths, it will be like falling into his grave (“Ich spring da in mein Grab”; ibid.).

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Just before Zayas places Lisis in the narrator's chair to tell the last tale and close her collection, she comments, in Boyer's translation, “In this sad age, there is no real pleasure; we’re coming closer and closer to the end, like the person who travels and journeys day after day and ends up back where he began his journey” [En esta penosa edad, no le hay [gusto] cumplido, porque nos vamos acercando más al fin, como el que camina, que andando un día una jornada, y otro día otra, viene a llegar al lugar adonde enderezó su viaje]. Much as I wish that were what Zayas wrote, it is not. In the Spanish original, her traveler walks the distance he can cover one day after another to reach his destination, not to go back to where he started. I like Boyer's translation because it seems to me that all the stories in the Desengaños are essentially variations on the first one. Zayas gave a title only to the first desengaño, “Her Lover's Slave,” as if all the others are also “Her Lover's Slave,” stories of women enslaved or killed by their lovers. Moreover, looking at the two volumes together, many of the tales are variants of Jacinta's experience in N. 1, of the eventual failure of love and refuge in a convent, sheltered among other women from the dangerous love of men. As Boyer translates Zayas's comment, she would be directing us back to the start of her work, which could very well be her prologue to the Novelas, in which she defends the worth and rights of women.

Her opening salvo in that prologue is a challenge:

This chapter traces Charlemagne’s impact on the native literary tradition in Scandinavia. It discusses the extent to which the historical king and literary figure of Charlemagne, as represented in continental sources, has been adapted into literary works in the North. We study the degree of acculturation that has taken place in these adaptations and which functional role the inclusion of the historical character Charlemagne plays when he appears in medieval Scandinavian literature. Instead of focusing on works that are specifically devoted to the figure of Charlemagne, most importantly Karlamagnús saga (discussed in other chapters in the present volume), we will take a look at the use of the historical figure as woven into the Nordic literary tradition across various genres. For this reason, we divided this study into two main parts. In the first part, Jon Paul Heyne will focus on the impact of Charlemagne on the kings’ sagas, the royal histories of Norway. In the second part, Claudia Bornholdt will look at references to Charlemagne in the riddarasögur, that is, romances that were adapted from continental sources as well as some later indigenous Icelandic romances, ballads, and rímur.

A survey of the extant scholarship on Charlemagne in the North results in very few studies that go beyond discussions of the transmission and contents of Karlamagnús saga and the adaptations of the legend of Roland in the North. This chapter attempts to close this gap at least somewhat by surveying a significant corpus of indigenous Scandinavian literature. We present and discuss direct and indirect allusions to Charlemagne from the period of the rise of literary production in Scandinavia up to the later Middle Ages, covering the royal histories, the first translations of continental courtly romances, and later indigenous literary compositions in both prose and verse.

Part I

In this first section, we will examine Charlemagne, or the Norse-Icelandic perception of Charlemagne, as depicted in the royal histories of Norway (c. 1130–1230). We have a handful of references to Charlemagne in the kings’ sagas, which have been noted and discussed previously in scholarship concerned with the transmission of texts from the continent to Norway and Iceland. There is a noticeable consensus among scholars that Charlemagne’s ‘popularity’ was widespread in the North.

This is the first extensive English-language study of the literary writings by the early Friedrich Nietzsche, “early” meaning up through the publication of his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music in January 1872. The purpose of this study is to provide scholars and general readers with background information on those works along with English translations and interpretations of them, with the hope of making the works more accessible and opening up new facets of them. The introduction contains an overview of the life and work of the early Nietzsche. Almost all of the poetry, prose, and dramas I discuss are translated here for the first time. Most of the pieces discussed here were written between 1854 and 1864, that is, from the time Nietzsche lived in Naumburg to the time he graduated from the Schulpforta Gymnasium. Even though some of the drafts and completed works in the literary estate were school assignments, they reflect the boy's creativity and, at times, extraordinary insight. Nietzsche embedded his own poems in several of his major writings; he also assembled small collections of poetry throughout his career. In short, poetic creativity underlies and even drives much of Nietzsche's work from the beginning to the end of his career (see, for example, Dionysus-Dithyramben, 1888). The creative energy the early Nietzsche exhibits in his literary writings also drove the writing of his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. I offer a reading of that seminal essay in the light of his activities as a creative writer. My approach is primarily chronological, topical, and thematic.

Since there are a number of problems associated with Nietzsche's literary estate, scholars have tended to avoid it. I am aware of the problems and have attempted to overcome them in the course of my study. Since the literary estate contains numerous orthographical and grammatical errors that are Nietzsche's own, I leave them as they appear in the historical-critical edition of his works. I have also retained the angle brackets (“<” and “>”) used in the German historical-critical edition to denote where letters have been corrected and supplied by the editors. However, I have corrected a number of those errors when the script appears to be confusing.

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