Paulus Svendsen

Paulus Svendsen (17 April 1904 – 1989) was a Norwegian historian of literature and ideas. He is mainly remembered for his studies of individual thinkers in the Western tradition.

He was born in the West-Norwegian city of Egersund, the son of Oscar Svendsen (1876–1967), a Methodist priest, and his wife, Dagmar Marie Steffensen (born 1882). He started studying in 1923, and graduated with a cand.philol. degree seven years later. During the Second World War, in 1940, he defended a thesis titled Gullalderdrøm og utviklingstro, which earned him a dr.philos. degree in the subsequent year. Having taught Norwegian at universities in Berlin, Trondheim and Oslo, he was hired as a senior lecturer in comparative literature at the University of Oslo in 1946. He was appointed professor of European literature three years later at the same university. From 1960 to 1974 he held a professorship in the history of ideas. Interested in the weltanschaaungen of Western thinkers, he wrote biographies on Erasmus Roterodamus, Søren Kierkegaard, Maurits Hansen and Conrad Nicolai Schwach and was one of the editors of the biographical dictionary Norsk biografisk leksikon.