ABSTRACT
Certainly every more experienced reader of Kierkegaard’s works will admit that this ingenious author’s intellectual horizon was very broad. And certainly every reader of Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks has had the sense that the fireworks of his immediate genius are founded on continual reading which constantly appropriates new material. Kierkegaard was certainly a well-read man. Also, even if in the course of his life he seems more and more to emphasize the idea, “to will only one thing,” his wide reading and often surprising book purchases testify to an enduring interest in the most diverse literature. Even so, most people will still probably be surprised that Kierkegaard also made a detailed study of something as exotic as the troubadour poetry of provençal France. To be sure, Georg Lukács found a striking similarity between Kierkegaard and the troubadours, which we will return to, but already the grandiose perspective in Lukács, where the courtly knight, so to speak, moves into the heart of Kierkegaard’s production, testifies that he did not have in mind the young Kierkegaard’s troubadour excerpt. With this excerpt, we find ourselves, at least at our point of departure, at the periphery of Kierkegaard’s youthful studies, or to begin the matter as prosaically as possible: the troubadour excerpt could be a pure and simple writing exercise motivated by the old, well-known school rule qui scribit, bis legit, that is, he who copies something by writing it down, profits from it just as much as someone who reads the text twice.
