the portrait of the artist Thorkild Drehling, Ring considered it a betrayal of trust and broke off the friendship. Den gamle Adam (1894, "The Old Adam") deals with both men's fear of women and of sexuality as a whole. Ørneflugt (1899, "Eagles flight") is a direct commentary on Hans Christian Andersens The Ugly Duckling with the opposite morale. An eagle brought up in a barnyard grows fat and eventually dies crashlanding into a dungpile - the morale being that you may very well have been born in an eagle's egg but that won't matter if you're brought up in a barnyard. "Borgmester Hoeck og Hustru" (1905, Engl. transl. Burgomaster Hoeck and His Wife, 1999) portrays a tragic marriage dominated by the husband's jealousy and dislike of his wife's joy in life. A central theme in most of these tales is the difficulties of handling the new tolerance, open-mindedness and democratisation which are introduced by both the transition of society and by literature. Another theme is the conflict between the introverted and closed male nature and the vitality of the woman. Behind all this lies the classic naturalist theme of heritage and milieu against which man has to rebel without quite denying their existence. In his later works he sometimes seems to become a mixture of a castigator of society and a prophet of doom. Between 1933 and 1943 Pontoppidan wrote two different versions of his Memoirs, in which he tried to define his own view of his personal development. Though handicapped by blindness and deafness in later life, he continued to take an interest in politics and cultural life until his final years. Literary and cultural influence As a stylist Pontoppidan has been described a born naturalist. His language looks plain, simple and easy but is often loaded with symbols and secret hints, hidden irony and “objective” descriptions. He often revised previous works, simplifying them but also changing their plot or sharpening their attitude. In spite of being well known as a man of positions and attitudes Pontoppidan remains one of the most discussed modern Danish writers. This is partly because of his personal character. Pontoppidan was a man of many paradoxes: a clear liberal in his time, but a stern patriot, an anti-clerical puritan, a disillusioned fighting nature, collaborating with socialists but always from an independent and individualist position. But it is also partly due to his style which