Early Plays | Page 2

he wrote to his friend
Ole Schulerud in January, 1850, that he was working on a play about
Olaf Trygvesson, an historical novel, and a longer poem. He had begun
_The Warrior's Barrow_ while he was still at Grimstad, but this early
version, called The Normans, he revised on reaching Christiania. In
style and manner and even in subject-matter the play echoes
Oehlenschlaeger. Ibsen's vikings are, however, of a fiercer type than
Oehlenschlaeger's, and this treatment of viking character was one of the
things the critics, bred to Oehlenschlaeger's romantic conception of
more civilized vikings, found fault with in Ibsen's play. The sketch
fared better than _Catiline_: it was thrice presented on the stage in
Christiania and was on the whole favorably reviewed. When Ibsen
became associated with the Bergen theater he undertook another
revision of the play, and in this version the play was presented on the
stage in 1854 and 1856. The final version was published in the
Bergenske Blad in 1854, but no copy of this issue has survived; the
play remained inaccessible to the public until 1902, when it was
included in a supplementary volume (Volume X) to Ibsen's collected

works. The earlier version remained in manuscript form until it was
printed in 1917 in Scandinavian Studies and Notes (Vol. IV, pp.
309-337).
Olaf Liljekrans, which was presented on the Bergen stage in 1857,
marks the end of Ibsen's early romantic interest. The original idea for
this play, which he had begun in 1850, he found in the folk-tale "The
Grouse in Justedal," about a girl who alone had survived the Black
Death in an isolated village. Ibsen had with many others become
interested in popular folk-tales and ballads. It was from Faye's
_Norwegian Folk-Tales_ (1844) that he took the story of "The Grouse
in Justedal." His interest was so great that he even turned collector.
Twice during this period he petitioned for and received small university
grants to enable him to travel and "collect songs and legends still
current among the people." Of the seventy or eighty "hitherto
unpublished legends" which he collected on the first of these trips only
a few have ever appeared in print; the results of his second trip are
unknown. Ibsen had great faith in the availability of this medieval
material for dramatic purposes; he even wrote an essay, "The Heroic
Ballad and Its Significance for Artistic Poetry," urging its superior
claims in contrast to that of the saga material, to which he was himself
shortly to turn. The original play based on "The Grouse in Justedal"
was left unfinished. After the completion of _Lady Inger of Östråt_ and
The Feast at Solhoug he came back to it, and taking a suggestion from
the ballad in Landstad's collection (1852-3) he recast the whole play,
substituted the ballad meter for the iambic pentameters, and called the
new version Olaf Liljekrans. Olaf Liljekrans indicates clearly a decline
in Ibsen's interest in pure romance. It is much more satirical than The
Feast at Solhoug, and marks a step in the direction of those superb
masterpieces of satire and romance, Brand and Peer Gynt. The play
was twice presented on the stage in Bergen with considerable success,
but the critics treated it harshly.
The relationship of the revised versions to the original versions of
Ibsen's early plays is interesting, and might, if satisfactorily elucidated,
throw considerable light on the development of his genius. It is evident
that he was in this early period experimenting in metrical forms. He

employed blank verse in Catiline, in the original version of The Grouse
in Justedal, and even as late as 1853 in the revision of _The Warrior's
Barrow_. There can be no question but that he was here following the
Ochlenschlaeger tradition. Unrhymed pentameter, however, did not
seem to satisfy him. He could with difficulty keep from falling into
rhyme in Catiline, and in the early version of _The Warrior's Barrow_
he used rhymed pentameters. After the revision of this play he threw
aside blank verse altogether. "Iambic pentameter," he says in the essay
on the heroic ballad, "is by no means the most suitable form for the
treatment of ancient Scandinavian material; this form of verse is
altogether foreign to our national meters, and it is surely through a
national form that the national material can find its fullest expression."
The folk-tale and the ballad gave him the suggestion he needed. In The
Feast at Solhoug and the final version of Olaf Liljekrans he employed
the ballad meter, and this form became the basis for the verse in all his
later metrical plays.
Six years intervened between The Grouse in Justedal and Olaf
Liljekrans, and the revision in this case amounted almost to the writing
of a new play. Fredrik Paasche in his study (Olaf Liljekrans, Christiania,
1909)