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ESSAY REVIEW A M Allchin, N F S Grundtvig, An Introduction to his Life and Work. [London, DLT, by arrangement with Aarhus University Press 1997], £ 19.95. 338pp. ISBN 0 232 52260X ALAN LUFF A conversation with a Danish Christian does not have to go on for long without there being a mention of the name of Grundtvig. He was a colossus, and not only because he was a big fish in a small pool. In any waters he would be big, as the increasing attention being given to him outside Denmark is making clear. It is however because he wrote in the language of a small country that he is too little known. What comparisons would one make? He is a Charles Wesley for his hymns, but even those of us most interested in hymns know only a few, in what have been till now not very distinguished translations; a Lancelot Andrewes for scholarship; a Newman for the brilliance and subtlety of his thought, although my glimpses of him show a wider and more all embracing imagination at work within and behind the thought; an F D Maurice for his concern for social issues, but in his case he sat in the legislature and inspired an educational movement that has lasted till today. A M Allchin, best known to us as one of those who have been interpreting Ann Griffiths to the world beyond Wales, has been working on Grundtvig for forty years. The work has now come to fruition in a handsome volume of over 300 large pages, produced in Denmark. There can be few Grundtvig experts in Wales and I certainly am not one: what I shall attempt is to give some flavour of the greatness of this towering figure assuming that most of my readers will know as little about him as I did before reading this book. Some idea of his long life is essential. HIS LIFE Nicolai Grundtvig was born in 1783, the last child of elderly parents, his father being a country parson of the old school. Part of his education was in a domestic setting, the rest, in his late teens, in the Cathedral School in Aarhus and