![]() ![]() He travelled in many European countries, communicated actively especially with the UK academy, and held visiting lectures regularly. Hirn was also a member of the board of directors for Otava, one of the largest book publishers in Finland at the time, and served in different positions in national art and theatre administration. He was a lifelong friend with Magnus Enckell who became one of the key Finnish ‘Golden Era’ painters. Sillanpää who later received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1939. He was exchanging letters with well-known Finnish authors such as Volter Kilpi, V.A. As documented by Rantavaara ( 1979), Hirn was an active operative in Finnish cultural life also outside the academic circles. Yrjö Hirn was well-connected within the Finnish academy and cultural circles, but also internationally in Europe. It is during this period that Hirn ventured into play studies with his 1916 book Barnlek (translated also into Finnish, French, and Italian). Johnson och James Boswell ( 1922), Beaumarchais ( 1931), and Lärt folk och landstrykare i det finska Finlands kulturliv ( 1939). In this period his keyworks are perhaps Dr. Essay became his favoured genre of writing, being a good fit to his research approach and purposes. Hirn was a versatile scholar and able to cover large topics elegantly. In his later career he published widely on numerous topics relating to cultural history, literature, and theatre studies. He held the professorship in University of Helsinki for almost three decades and supervised many scholars that developed and reshaped the field of aesthetics in Finland in the following decades. Without a doubt he was the most important, and pretty much the only internationally recognized Finnish scholar of aesthetics in the first decades of the twentieth century (Haapala, 2002). During his early career he concentrated on aesthetics, and in this field The Origins of Art: A psychological & sociological inquiry (1900), Det heliga skrinet ( 1909, published in 1912 in English as The Sacred Shrine), and Det estetiska lifvet (1913) are regarded as his main contributions. He spoke good Finnish but everything he published in Finnish was first checked up by a native speaker (Riikonen, 2003). Hirn published most of his works either in his mother’s tongue Swedish, or in English. Hirn worked at his alma mater, the Imperial Alexander University in Finland, which was renamed University of Helsinki after Finland gained independence, in different roles and finally, since 1910 as professor of aesthetics and the literature of modern nations. Sociologist, social anthropologist, and pioneer of ethnographic field studies Edvard Westermarck was his teacher and mentor. Hirn received a bourgeois upbringing in the town of Porvoo before moving to the capital Helsinki where he, like his father before him, became a Doctor of Philosophy in 1897. Yrjö Georg Hirn (1870-1952) was a notable Finnish humanist and cultural personality. In this article we provide an introduction to Hirn’s biography and his thinking, review the key elements of Barnlek, and discuss the implications of his thinking today. While his works have been widely translated, many of them are not available in English. Today Hirn is an example of a scholar of play whose work is mostly ignored in the anglophone world. ![]() He also presents a severe criticism of pedagogical play and theorizes play as a container or an archive of earlier culture.Ī century ago, Hirn was a well-connected and widely travelled scholar, whose works were known. In this book Hirn describes, documents, and analyses numerous patterns of play – some of which are very marginal today. 7–8) 1In 1916, Yrjö Hirn, a professor of aesthetics and the literature of modern nations, published an engrossing book on play, Barnlek. It is hardly possible today to write a complete history of civilization without allocating its own chapter to toys and unless learned researchers have yet to appreciate these childish things, it is probably just because toys lack that valued tediousness which more than anything attracts the knights of mournful countenance prowling the grounds of science. ![]()
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