At last Søren Kierkegaard is beginning to get the attentive reading he deserves. Hegel and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have all had their day, but Kierkegaard has always rolled along as a kind of fifth wheel. It was suspected that he was as great as the others, but no-one could quite say why. That was partly because he existed, for decades, only in the hasty and sometimes impressionistic translations of the Rev. Walter Lowrie, who began to translate him in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. These translations were indeed ‘works of love’. Lowrie’s translation of The Concept of Dread, for example, was completed ‘in a month of thirty-one days, working twelve hours a day’. In the 1980’s however, the Princeton edition called Kierkegaard’s Writings, edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong began to appear, and these are scrupulously academic translations, with a plethora of learned notes. The edition is complete now—the last of the 26 volumes appeared in 1998.

In all this, the Danes themselves played little part. For them, Spren Kierkegaard was an irritation almost too great to borne while alive, and a bore to talk about ever since. The Danes could never understand why, from the 1950’s on, there was a steady stream of scholars and philosophers, coming to Copenhagen, nosing around the second-hand bookshops in the hope of finding first editions of Spren Kierkegaard. Only in the 1990’s did the penny finally drop. A huge grant was made in 1993 by the Danish National Research Foundation, to the tune of 27,500,000 Danish kroner, and a Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre was set up at the University of Copenhagen, under the direction of a handful of Danish scholars, with the aim of setting up and publishing a critical edition of his complete works. Thus, only 138 years late, the Danes took official cognisance of their greatest literary son. The edition, in 55 volumes, with an electronic version to follow, is about to roll off the press. The first five volumes of text and commentary were available as of 10 October 1998.