Essays on Scandinavian Literature | Page 2

characteristics. Having the man,
we are able to trace the germs of his being in the past of his race and his
country; but, with all our science we have not yet acquired the
ingenuity to predict the man--to deduce him a priori from the tangle of
determining causes which enveloped his birth. It seems beautifully
appropriate in the Elder Edda that the god-descended hero Helge the
Völsung should be born amid gloom and terror in a storm which shakes
the house, while the Norns--the goddesses of fate--proclaim in the
tempest his tempestuous career. Equally satisfactory it appears to have
the modern champion of Norway--the typical modern Norseman--born
on the bleak and wild Dovre Mountain,[1] where there is winter eight
months of the year and cold weather during the remaining four. The
parish of Kvikne, in Oesterdalen, where his father, the Reverend Peder
Björnson, held a living, had a bad reputation on account of the unruly
ferocity and brutal violence of the inhabitants. One of the Reverend
Peder Björnson's recent predecessors never went into his pulpit,
unarmed; and another fled for his life. The peasants were not slow in
intimating to the new pastor that they meant to have him mind his own
business and conform to the manners and customs of the parish; but
there they reckoned without their host. The reverend gentleman made
short work of the opposition. He enforced the new law of compulsory
education without heeding its unpopularity; and when the champion
fighter of the valley came as the peasants' spokesman to take him to
task in summary fashion, he found himself, before he was aware of it,
at the bottom of the stairs, where he picked himself up wonderingly and
promptly took to his heels.
[1] December 8, 1832.

During the winter the snow reached up to the second-story windows of
the parsonage; and the servants had to tunnel their way to the
storehouse and the stables. The cold was so intense that the little
Björnstjerne thought twice before touching a door knob, as his fingers
were liable to stick to the metal. When he was six years old, however,
his father was transferred to Romsdal, which is, indeed, a wild and
grandly picturesque region; but far less desolate than Dovre. "It lies,"
says Björnson, "broad--bosomed between two confluent fjords, with a
green mountain above, cataracts and homesteads on the opposite shore,
waving meadows and activity in the bottom of the valley; and all the
way out toward the ocean, mountains with headland upon headland
running out into the fjord and a large farm upon each."
The feeling of terror, the crushing sense of guilt which Björnson has so
strikingly portrayed in the first chapters of "In God's Way," were
familiar to his own childhood. In every life, as in every race, the God of
fear precedes the God of love. And in Northern Norway, where nature
seems so tremendous and man so insignificant, no boy escapes these
phantoms of dread which clutch him with icy fingers. But as a
counterbalancing force in the young Björnson, we have his confidence
in the strength and good sense of his gigantic father, who could thrash
the strongest champion in the parish. He used to stand in the evening on
the beach "and gaze at the play of the sunshine upon fjord and
mountain, until he wept, as if he had done something wrong. Now he
would suddenly stop in this or that valley, while running on skees, and
stand spell-bound by its beauty and a longing which he could not
comprehend, but which was so great that in the midst of the highest joy
he was keenly conscious of a sense of confinement and sorrow."[2]
"We catch a glimpse in these childish memories," says Mr. Nordahl
Rolfsen, "of the remarkable character, we are about to depict: Being the
son of a giant, he is ever ready to strike out with a heavy hand, when he
thinks that anyone is encroaching upon what he deems the right. But
this same pugnacious man, whom it is so hard to overcome, can be
overwhelmed by an emotion and surrender himself to it with his whole
being."
[2] Nordahl Rolfsen: Norske Digtere, pp. 450, 451.

At the age of twelve Björnson was sent to the Latin school at Molde,
where, however, his progress was not encouraging. He was one of
those thoroughly healthy and headstrong boys who are the despair of
ambitious mothers, and whom fathers (when the futility of educational
chastisement has been finally proved) are apt to regard with a resigned
and half-humorous regret. His dislike of books was instinctive, hearty,
and uncompromising. His strong, half-savage boy-nature could brook
no restraints, and looked longingly homeward to the wide mountain
plains, the foaming rivers where the trout leaped in the summer night,