1813–1834
KIRKKEGAARD, Kirkegaard, Kiersgaard, Kjerkegaard, Kirckegaard, Kerke-
gaard, Kierckegaard, Kierkegaard.
The parish registers provide plenty of testimony that the name is a tricky
and a volatile one. It of course has something to do with a churchyard
[Danish:kirkegaard, “churchyard,” usually in the sense of “cemetery”], but
not in the usual sense. The name in fact stems from a couple of farms located
next to the church in the village of Sædding in the middle of the Jutland
heath, about a dozen miles southeast of Ringkøbing. In common parlance
the two farms were termed “churchyards” because of their close proximity
to the church. Michael was born on one of these farms on December 12,
1756, the son of tenant farmer Peder Christensen Kierkegaard, who had
taken his farm’s name as his surname in order to emphasize that this was
where he and his family were from. In the beginning the normal spelling
was simply “Kirkegaard,” but after a time it evolved into “Kierkegaard,”
and this spelling perhaps contains a faint echo of how the name sounded in
the dialect of Jutland.
Michael was the fourth child in a family that fourteen years later finally
came to include nine children. The heath was a stingy provider and poverty
gnawed at the family, so after several difficult years as a shepherd boy,
eleven-year-old Michael left the farm of his forebears. In that district the
west wind forces the trees to lean longingly toward the east, and Michael
followed their lead. Accompanied by a sheep dealer from the town of
Lem, he set out for the Copenhagen of King Christian VII, where his
mother’s brother, Niels Andersen Seding, who had a dry-goods shop in a
cellar on Østergade, took him on as an apprentice. At first Michael served
as an errand boy, then as a shop assistant, and just before Christmas in
1780 he was granted his own business license and could then establish an
independent firm. Merchant Michael Kierkegaard’s selection of wares in-
cluded lisle stockings, woven caps, leather gloves from the Jutland town of
Randers, and various goods from Iceland, all of which he sold on short
road trips to the northern Zealand towns of Hillerød and Elsinore. The
energetic businessman must have learned how to spin gold from these
fuzzy wares because by age twenty-nine he was able, with his business part-
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