Vilhelm Grønbech

Vilhelm Peter Grønbech (14 June 1873 – 21 April 1948) was a Danish cultural historian. He was professor of the history of religion at the University of Copenhagen and also had a great influence on Danish intellectual life, especially during and after World War II.

Grønbech was born in Allinge, on Bornholm. His family moved to Copenhagen and beginning in 1890 he studied philology at the University of Copenhagen (Danish with Latin and English as secondary subjects), while working at the Royal Library and as a schoolteacher. In 1902 he received his doctorate for a study of the historical phonetics of Turkish, after which he began teaching at the university, first as a docent and then from 1908 to 1911 as a lecturer in English literature, while also working as a church organist. He published a book of poems and a study of the dialect of Bukhara. In 1909 the first volume of his work on Germanic paganism, Vor Folkeætt i Oldtiden (English title The Culture of the Teutons) was published, and in 1911 he became a docent in the history of religion. After the appearance of the remaining three volumes of Vor Folkeætt i Oldtiden in 1912 and of a related essay, "Religionsskiftet i Norden" on the conversion of Scandinavia (1913), the University of Leipzig sought in 1914 to award him a professorship and in 1915 he was appointed professor of the history of religion at Copenhagen, a position which he held until 1943. Early in his career he also taught at the state college of education and from 1918 to 1920 headed the Danish Society for Psychic Research.

During the German occupation of Denmark in World War II, Grønbech's lectures drew large audiences, and after the war he founded the periodical Frie Ord with the theologian Hal Koch. It ran from 1946 to 1948, with Grønbech the primary contributor, and was rapidly successful, with 6,000 subscribers within a few months of its founding. Several of his articles published there were republished in posthumous collections; a 1943 lecture series at Borup's College in Copenhagen was published from shorthand transcriptions as Lyset fra Akropolis (The Light from the Acropolis, 1950).

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