1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lund, Troels Frederik

LUND, TROELS FREDERIK (1840–  ), Danish historian, was born in Copenhagen on the 5th of September 1840. He entered the university of Copenhagen in 1858. About the age of thirty he took a post which brought before his notice the treasures of the archives of Denmark. His first important work, Historiske Skitser, did not appear until 1876, but after that time his activity was stupendous. In 1879 was published the first volume of his Danmarks og Norges Historie i Slutningen af det xvi. Aarhundrede, a history of daily life in Denmark and Norway at the close of the 16th century. Troels Lund was the pioneer of the remarkable generation of young historians who came forward in northern Europe about 1880, and he remained the most original and conspicuous of them. Saying very little about kings, armies and governments, he concentrates his attention on the life, death, employments, pleasures and prejudices of the ordinary men and women of the age with which he deals, using to illustrate his theme a vast body of documents previously neglected by the official historian. Lund was appointed historiographer-royal to the king of Denmark and comptroller of the Order of the Dannebrog. There was probably no living man to whom the destruction of the archives, when Christiansborg Castle was accidentally burned in 1884, was so acute a matter of distress. But his favourite and peculiar province, the MSS. of the 16th century, was happily not involved in that calamity.