"Ikke annet våpen enn ord og tanke" ─ Peder W. Cappelens schauspiel Lòke

Samenvatting

The writer Peder W. Cappelen (1931-1992), although one of the most prolific Norwegian playwrights of the 1960s to 1980s, is little known abroad and has also received little attention from Norwegian literary historians. One of the reasons may be that he was considered an apolitical poet in an era that had once again taken up the banner of putting problems up for debate and taking a political standpoint, and that as a playwright he mainly took up material from folk poetry or medieval literature. Using the example of his 1972 myth drama Lòke, I would like to show that, on the contrary, Cappellen very clearly takes up contemporary political and social issues in this play. The fact that the play was not more successful is rather due to the new realism of Norwegian literature in the 1970s. With his myth drama and especially with the constellation of characters in it, which assigns Lòke the role of a mediator, Cappelen proved to be ahead of his time, because in the 1980s there are a number of myth adaptations that make use of Loki's potential to overcome dualisms such as that between gods and giants.