Meanwhile he worked ceaselessly for the development of his folk and educational ideals. After his conversion, he felt for a time that his new outlook was incompatible with his previous enthusiasm for the heroic life and ideals of the old North, and that he must now devote himself solely to the preaching of the Gospel. But the formerly mentioned decline of all phases of Danish life during the early part of the nineteenth century and the failure of his preaching to evoke any response from an indifferent people caused him to suspect a closer relationship between a people's religious and national or folk-life than he had hitherto recognized. Was not the folk life of a people, after all, the soil in which the Word of God must be sown, and could the Word bear fruit in a soil completely hardened and unprepared to receive it? If it could not, was not a folk awakening a necessary preparation for a Christian?
Under the spur of this question he undertook the translation of the sagas and developed his now widely recognized ideas of folk life and folk education, which later were embodied in the Grundtvigian folk schools. The first of these schools was opened at Rødding, Slesvig in 1844. The war between Denmark and Germany from 1848 to 1850 delayed the establishment of other similar schools. But in 1851, Christian Kold, the man who more than any other realized Grundtvig's idea of a school for life--as the folk schools were frequently called--opened his first school at Ryslinge, Fyn. From there the movement spread rapidly not only to all parts of Denmark but also to Norway, Finland and Sweden. The latter country now has more schools of the Grundtvigian type than Denmark, and Norway and Finland have about have as many.[11]
To extend the influence of the movement lecture societies, reading circles, gymnastic societies, choral groups and the like were organized in almost every parish of Denmark. Thus before Grundtvig died, he had the satisfaction of seeing his work bear fruit in one of the most vital folk and educational movements of Scandinavia, a movement which has made a tremendous imprint upon all phases of life in the Northern countries and which today is spreading to many other parts of the world.