Peter Frederik Suhm

Peter Frederik Suhm (18 October 1728 – 7 September 1798), was a Danish historian. Biography Suhm studied at the University of Copenhagen from 1746 to 1751, and one of his teachers was Ludvig Holberg. In 1749 he translated a comedy of Plautus and a French theatrical piece. In 1751 he traveled to Trondheim together with the Danish historian Gerhard Schøning, with whom he continued to collaborate over the following years. Together they produced (Improvements to the old Danish-Norwegian History) in 1757. In Trondheim he married Karen Angell (1732–1788) 19 April 1752. She was the daughter and only inheritor of a wealthy Norwegian merchant Lorents Angell who had died the previous year. Karen Angells mother accepted the connection on the condition that they stayed in Trondheim for the remainder of her life. Suhm accepted, and stayed on in Trondheim, with a short interval in Copenhagen in 1755, for the next nine years, where she died and Suhm and his wife moved back to Copenhagen. The inherited wealth allowed Suhm a life devoted to the sciences and his book collection. Schöning and Suhm, together with Johan Ernst Gunnerus, founded the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters in 1760 under the name (the Trondheim Society). From 1761 it published academic papers in a series titled Skrifter. It was the northernmost scientific society in the world.