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Preface
Fifty years ago I began my graduate studies in order to become a professor of
English. Among the requirements for the masters degree was the necessity of
writing a thesis. I chose as a topic Henrik Ibsen and Nordic Myth. There were
several reasons for choosing that topic. As an undergraduate I had taken a course
with Philip Wheelright based upon his manuscript of The Burning Fountain and
became interested in mythology. I subsequently spent a year at a Danish folk
college, whose headmaster gave daily lectures on the pagan mythology of the
Nordic folk.
Until the 1950s not much research had been done on the relationship between
Ibsen and Nordic myth. In the words of Pavel Frnkl:
From the myth and legend [of his early works] to the domestic
subjects [of his later dramas] Ibsens death imagery is consistently
determined by Nordic mythology and rite. Even where the material is
contemporary and the theme modern, Ibsens dramatic thought
functions myth logically and myth creatively. I cannot see in the great
body of literature on Ibsen, either in Norway or abroad, that there has
ever been pointed out before the deep and radical tension between the
theme of the drama and the dramatists pattern of thought, between a
veiled social motif and a mythological image fantasy (Frnkl 1955,
78).
Ibsens early works, in which he specifically referred to Nordic myth, were not
readily available in English, but I had become fluent in Dano-Norwegian and could
translate the texts. Finally, there was Ibsens own statement that his later plays

could be understood completely only in the light of his earlier work. In the
foreword to his collected works written in 1889 he stated:
Only by understanding and appropriating my entire production as a
coherent and consecutive whole will you receive the intended and
pertinent impression of the single parts. My friendly suggestion to the
reader is therefore, short and sweet, that he not temporarily pass over
anything, but that he appropriate the worksread through them and
live them in his own lifein the same order in which I have composed
them (Duve 1945, 44).
The problem was that I was not yet old enough to have experienced in my own
life the characters and the issues about which Ibsen was writing. Fifty years later I
now have enough experience to understand, at least in part, what Ibsen was saying.
I am not primarily a scholar, nor have I kept up with the contemporary scholarship
regarding Ibsens dramas. I can only speak from my own experience, in the
manner in which I have tried to convey the relevance of literature to our personal
lives during my teaching career, using the insights provided by the psychology of
Carl Jung.

ii

Content
Content............................................................................................................ 1
Myth ................................................................................................................ 3
Nationalism, Romanticism and Folklore (Denmark) ................................... 9
Nationalism: From Feudalism to Constitutional Monarchy ......................... 10
Romanticism: The Inspired Language of the Soul ....................................... 12
Folklore....................................................................................................... 15
The Three Intersect ..................................................................................... 16
Nationalism, Romanticism, and Folklore (Norway) ................................... 21
Nationalism ................................................................................................. 21
Romanticism ............................................................................................... 26
Folkore........................................................................................................ 27
The Three Intersect ..................................................................................... 29
Catiline (1850) ............................................................................................... 35
The Warriors Barrow (1850) and Other Poetry ......................................... 43
St. Johns Eve (1853) .................................................................................... 48
The Master Builder (1892) ............................................................................ 55
Lady Inger of strt (1855) ........................................................................... 68
1

The Feast at Solhaug (1856) ......................................................................... 75

The Vikings at Helgeland (1857)................................................................... 81
Hedda Gabler (1890) ..................................................................................... 87
On the Heroic Ballad (1857) .................................................................... 95
Olaf Liljekrans (1857) ..................................................................................100
Loves Comedy (1862) .................................................................................113
The Pretenders (1863) ..................................................................................121
Brand (1865).................................................................................................127
Peer Gynt (1867)..........................................................................................136
Works Cited .................................................................................................151

Myth
First of all, we must understand what we mean by the use of the word myth.
Our first reaction is to assume that if a story is a myth, it cannot be true. But a
myth does not pretend to be a factual account of an historical event. Its truth lies in
the recesses of the human heart, for the creator of myths apprehends in metaphor
what the logical mind cannot comprehend in logical structures. C. G. Jung, in his
foreward to the fourth Swiss edition of Symbols of Transformation, expresses the
predicament of the man who tries to live without myth:
Hardly had I finished the manuscript when it struck me what it means to
live with a myth, and what is means to live without one. Myth, says a
Church Father, is what is believed always, everywhere, and by
everybody; hence the man who thinks he can live without myth, or
outside it, is an exception. He is like one uprooted, having no true link
either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within
him, or yet with contemporary human society. He does not live in a
house like other men, but lives a life of his own, sunk into a subjective
mania of his own devising, which he believes to be the newly discovered
truth. So I suspected that myth had a meaning which I was sure to
miss if I lived outside it in the haze of my own speculations (DeLaszlo
1959, 44).
If man cannot trust solely in his reason, if he cannot live without myth, what is
the function of myth? Richard Chase gives an historical summary of the various
positions taken by scholars in the past who have written on the subject. The
3

consensus would appear to be that myth is simply primitive philosophy (Chase

1949).
Inherent in this view is the assumption that myth is no longer valid for modern
man; that magic has been replaced by science, mythology by modern philosophy.
But a few philosophers, such as Philip Wheelwright, insist that myth is not simply
a primitive form of philosophy, but a radical mode of thinking which apprehends a
world beyond the grasp of logical thought.
To paraphrase Professor Wheelwrights essay on the Philosophy of the
Threshold he reminds us that Man lives always on the verge, always on the
borderland of a something more. Indeed, the intimation of a something more, a
beyond the horizon, belongs to the very nature of consciousness.

On the

threshold of time we hang always in that moment which lies between what just
was and what is just about to be. On the threshold of the world we stand apart
as being with a body and mind of our own, yet the world is also within us. On the
one hand says Wheelwright, I am part of my world, in so far as I live and breathe
in it, act on and am affected by it. On the other, and in another sense, my world is
a part of mein so far as I know it through the perceptions and ideas which I have
of it. In another dimension, on the threshold of the unseen, man is ever reaching
upward to grasp at Heavens gate while one foot is slipping into the Abyss.
Wheelwright continues:
The Threshold, in each of its three aspects, is a primordial situation from
which no human creature ever entirely withdraws.

But a threshold

implies a mansion beyond, and how can we know that the mansion is
real if we are unable to enter and take up abode in it? The how may be
ultimately unanswerable; but the fact (and this is where I believe we
should firmly start) is that we can and do have direct intuitions of that
beyondintuitions which can err in details but can never be proved to
4

err in the major assurances of a Something More which they yield

(Wheelwright, Philosophy of the Threshold 1953).
While science and philosophy deal with areas of perception in which a precise
and accurate stenolanguage is appropriate and necessary, the intuition of
something more demands a depth language of metaphor for its expression. When
dealing with chairs and atoms and categorical imperatives, it is of primary
importance that we agree precisely on what we mean by the words chair or atom or
categorical imperative. But concerning such vital and complex subjects as the
relationship between a man and a woman as they stand on the threshold of the gulf
between them and peer into the unknown depths of the other, we turn instinctively
to the language of poetry, as stating more accurately the rich meaning of the love
relationship. In such cases we require language which is plurisignative, metaphors
whose meanings cannot simply be broken down into logical statements without
changing entirely the apprehension of reality which the metaphor affords. Take for
example Wheelwrights analysis of Marvells couplet which concluded the second
stanza of To His Coy Mistress:
The graves a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
On the surface the word fine expresses approval of a place so private
(also in the most obvious sense) where lovers might embrace without
interruption, if only they were any longer capable of embracing at all.
But the grave is fine also in marking the finis, the end of all earthly joys,
the end of all embracing. An attentive reader thus gets a preview of the
counteractive idea even before the second line of the couplet makes it
explicit.

And thirdly, fine carries the added meaning of narrow,

constricted: as when we say a fine line. Meanings 2 and 3 of fine stir

up a second meaning of private, from the Latin privates, deprived.
5

Marvell is saying, then, with striking poetical economy, that in one of its
aspects, its privacy, the grave marks an end, in that it deprives lovers of
the joy of mutual embrace; and that the grave is very cramping
(Wheelwright, Philosophy of the Threshold 1953, 112).
According to Chase, Metaphor, the most brilliant and necessary figure, is the
foundation of language. It is the figure which performs the divine, mythological
task: the animation of the inanimate. In early times the metaphor meant exactly
what it said: it was not, in other words, thought to be a metaphor; it was the
language perfectly fused with reality. Myth is basically metaphorical (Chase 1949,
26).
Metaphor speaks of a world beyond the threshold of logical thought. If myth is
metaphor rather than philosophy, then it might better be dealt with, according to
Chase, as literature rather than as primitive attempts at logical reasoning:
The older writers now seem to us to have neglected a simple and
fundamental truth: the word myth means story: a myth is a tale, a
narrative, or a poem; myth is literature and must be considered as an
aesthetic creation of the human imagination. A myth need be no more
philosophical than any other kind of literature. In one sense we may
say that there is no such thing as a myth, but only poetical stories
which are more or less mythical; we may, however, call a story or a
tale which is primarily mythical a myth and we may use story or tale
for a narrative which is not --primarily mythical (Ibid. 73).1
Chase goes on to define for us the distinguishing characteristics of myth as
literature. Myth is literature which suffuses the natural with preternatural efficacy
(mana).

Preternatural meansthat which is magical, the Uncanny, the

Wonderful. The Mysterious, the Powerful, the Terrible, the Dangerous, the
Extraordinary. In short, anything that has mana is preternatural (Ibid. 78).
6

It would be a mistake to assume that all literature which suffuses the natural
with the preternatural is necessarily religious literature, or that only the ancient and
primitive folk are capable of creating myth. The use and creation of myth is of
serious concern to many contemporary writers. Those interested in the future of
serious literature, including some of its first-rate practitioners (such as D. H.
Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats and Joyce), have in our time insisted that literature must be
closely allied with myth. Somehow, it is felt, the creative artist must recapture a
certain magical quality, a richness of imagery, a deeper sense of primeval forces, a
larger order of aesthetic experience (Ibid. 110).
The modern appreciation of the importance of myth is undoubtedly due in large
part to the research and writings of C. G. Jung. As a practicing psychologist, Jung
discovered in his patients, dream fantasies strongly reminiscent of ancient and
primitive mythologies. In his considerable studies on the relationship between
dream and myth, he has come to the conclusion myths are dreamlike structures
and to agree with Rank that myth is the collective dream of the whole people
(DeLaszlo 1959, 28). To account for this recurrence of mythical images in the
dreams of his patients, Jung has postulated the existence of a collective
unconscious within each human psyche whose contents and modes of
behaviorare more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals (Ibid.,
28).2

To the contents of the collective unconscious he has given the name

archetype.
Halfdan Koht relates an incident which shows the degree to which Henrik Ibsen
was himself a devotee of Nordic myth:
It once happened that Welhaven in his lectures on Holberg let fall an
uncomplimentary remark about the poor taste of the mythological
poems of the Danish poet, Paludan-Mller, and said that it was
impossible to continue using the old myths in this way. Ibsen promptly
7

appeared with a rejoinder in The Man, maintaining that mythological

subject matter lent itself well to the poetry of ideas; for in mythology is
revealed the original content of the folk consciousness in a combination
of speculation and history. He believed that in such poetry both the
people and the poet would find themselves (Koht, The Life of Ibsen
1931, 1:72).3
Ibsen early became a thorough student of myth and folklore, so that in 1856
Bjrnson could write that Ibsen knew folk ballads as few others did. Indeed, as
we shall see, much of Ibsens early poetry and drama drew their inspiration
directly from Nordic folk literature.
The study of the role of myth in the dramas of Henrik Ibsen is by no means
irrelevant to the needs of modern man. The research of C. G. Jung has shown us
the extent to which the psyche of each individual human being is affected by
archetypes of the collective unconscious, which may both cause and alleviate
neurotic disturbances in the individual.4 Some of our most successful literary
figures recognize the importance of myth for contemporary literature. One might
learn a great deal from an author such as Ibsen, whose early training in Nordic
folklore, the collective dream of the Nordic folk, prepared him for his later dramas
in which, with deep psychological insight, he revealed the inner struggles of a
Solness, an Ellida Wangel, or a John Gabriel Borkman. In the following chapters
the external factors will be traced which led Ibsen to a study of folklore. Then in
compliance with his own advice, his works will be taken up in the order of their
composition up to and including Peer Gynt.

Nationalism, Romanticism and Folklore (Denmark)

One of the most remarkable facts about Henrik Ibsen is that he had no
predecessor: Norwegian drama before Ibsen was practically non-existent.
According to Koht, Of serious contemporary plays in Norwegian there existed
hardly more than a dozen, and Henrik Wergeland was the only dramatist worth
mentioning. Since the publication of his The Venetians (Venetianerne) in 1845,
not a single new drama had appeared in print (Koht, The Life of Ibsen 1931,
1,50).
It was inevitable that Ibsen should look to the Danish writers as examples until
he had learned his trade well enough to free himself from their influence.

We

must therefore first consider the state of Danish letters during the first half of the
nineteenth century as an indispensable part of the milieu in which he began his
literary career. Since Norway and Denmark were a single nation until the end of
the nineteenth century, they both underwent a series of rapid transitions under the
influence of three distinct but interacting movements: the new spirit of nationalism,
German romanticism, and the rediscovery of folklore.

Nationalism: From Feudalism to Constitutional Monarchy

Born in March of 1828, Ibsen lived at a time when ordinary citizens were
demanding their rights as free and independent human beings. In 1788 the Danish
peasantry had been freed from the bonds of serfdom.5 The system of villages
broke down.

In the words of Bukdahl, Everywhere the old villages were

disintegrating; the inhabitants exchanged their strip holdings, so that each man has
his own land more or less in one lot, and were released from the former cooperating cultivation.

But this process could only take place when it was

accompanied by a moving out from the villages (Bukdahl 1959, 646).

In 1807 Denmark became involved in the Napoleonic wars when the English
bombarded Copenhagen and confiscated her naval power in order to prevent the
Danish fleet from falling into the hands of Napoleon and Emperor Alexander of
Russia. In retaliation Denmark became allied with Napoleon in 1808.
As a result of the heavy debts incurred by the Danes during the remaining years
of the war, state bankruptcy was barely averted in 1813 through a sharp
devaluation of the currency. The chief trading and banking houses were ruined
and acute distress was felt by all the people.
The economic crisis was aggravated by an archaic system of governmental
administration, so that after visiting Denmark in 1820 a Norwegian iron master by
the name of Jacob ll in his Letters to G. P. Blom could write that there was just
as much despondency, dissatisfaction and misery on account of wretched business
conditions and unfortunate governmental measures on the Danish plains as
elsewhere, and it will cause me no surprise to hear that the constitution mania
infects even this quiet and patient people (Hovde 1943, 511).

10

The breakdown of the villages6 which occurred with the freeing of the peasants
created a large class of independent farmers who owned moderately-sized farms
and thrived on the expansion of agricultural markets during the wars. With their
rise in social status these farmers also became an important political factor in the
country, so that as early as 1814 Prince Christian Frederik (later King Christian
VIII) of Denmark could write in his diary: There one can see the results of trade;
the lower classes thereby lose their simplicity and their plainness of thought; they
talk politics; in short, they are no longer peasants (Ibid. 520).
Although life both in the cities and on the farms was changing rapidly, it was
nevertheless not because of direct public pressure that King Frederik VI began to
institute democratic reforms in his government. When in December, 1830, the
king began preparations to establish assemblies of estates,7 he enjoyed so much
respect from his subjects that no one would have suggested to him the need for
constitutional reform. But the king could see that the duchies of Slesvig and
Holstein8 were becoming extremely restive under the example set by revolutionary
France and Belgium. The estates were instituted to encourage participation and
continued interest in the affairs of the Danish government.
With the establishment of the estates, political issues were brought into the
arena of public debate. The liberals, who had until 1830 remained silent, rallied
around the issue of freedom of the press. The controversy which arose stimulated
heavy voting for the first estates, especially among the smaller rural elements. By
1840 a peasant political movement was started, and the stubborn demand of the
peasants for better living conditions and a voice in the government led the king to
begin a study of steps toward constitutional reform.
In 1846 the Slesvig-Holsteiners, in unison with the revolutionary movements in
other German states, were preparing to assert their autonomy from Denmark.
Under popular pressure to unite all Denmark under a democratic constitution, King
11

Frederik VII declared himself a constitutional monarch on March 21, 1848, the day
after Ibsen turned twenty and was just beginning his career as a national poet. The
attempt to retain Slesvig-Holstein within the boundaries of Denmark was only
temporarily successful, for the duchies were lost to Prussia during the disastrous
war of 1864. It was the failure of the Norwegians to come to the aid of their
Danish brethren during this war that determined Ibsen to leave his native land and
to remain in exile for almost thirty years.

Romanticism: The Inspired Language of the Soul

Although the full impact of German romanticism did not reach Denmark until
the turn of the nineteenth century, there were faint glimmerings of what was to
come as early as 1770 in the work of the poet Johannes Ewald. Born in 1743 into
the family of a pietistic minister in Copenhagen, Ewald was sent in his eleventh
year to Slesvig, where he studied under Rector Johan Friedrich Licht. In the
rectors library was a collection of Nordic sagas of the heroes, and it was here that
Ewald first came in contact with the ancient Nordic literature he was to use later in
his poetic works (Engelstoft, Povl and Svend Dahl 1942).
At fifteen he fell in love with Arend, one of those peremptory,
overwhelming, ravishing brunettes whom one cannot gaze upon without a feeling
of awe, and scarcely love without worship (Bukdahl 1959, 662). He ran away to
Magdeburg to gain fame in the Prussian army. When he failed to become a
general at once, he deserted and joined the Austrians.

After being severely

wounded, he was finally ransomed from the army by his family.

Back in Denmark he took a degree in theology at the university, but while he
was passing his finals, Arend married another man, and Ewalds hopes for
happiness were forever crushed. He gave up all thoughts of a career in order to
12

devote himself entirely to poetry. His work was styled after the classics of France
and Rome, in accordance with the accepted literary practices of the day.
At the end of the 1760s he came in contact with the literary circle surrounding
the German poet Friedrich Klopstock. The Danish court under King Frederik V
was entirely Germanic in its interests. The affairs of state were conducted in
German, and the king himself preferred German fashions over the rude native
culture of his own subjects.
In 1751 Klopstock, then the leading poet in Germany, was offered a handsome
pension to take up residence in Copenhagen, which he did for a period of nineteen
years. It was as a result of his personal meeting with Klopstock that Ewalds
interest was awakened to the folk legends of Saxo Grammaticus.9 He broke with
the classical tradition in writing the prose drama Rolf Krage (1770) based on a
subject from the collection of folk legends by Saxo Grammaticus. Ewalds later
work, Baldurs Dd,10 on the theme of the death of the god Baldur, was the
inspiration for the great poetic drama by Adam Oehlenschlger, Baldur hin Gode,
written some thirty-four years later.

Oehlenschlgers drama was in turn the

foundation upon which Ibsen built his play The Warriors Barrow.
Although Johannes Ewald had felt the impact of German culture through the
poet Klopstock, it was not until the fall of 1802 and the lectures of Henrich
Steffens at Blers Kollegium that the full force of romanticism influenced the
spiritual life of Denmark. In that year a transformation took place which was to
usher in what was later to be called the Golden Age of Danish literature.
Henrich Steffens (1773-1845) was born in Berlin of Holsteiners on his fathers
side, while his mother was aunt to the great bishop, N. F. S. Grundtvig (Engelstoft,
Povl and Svend Dahl 1942). Steffens lived his first six years in Germany, then
moved to Norway and finally to Denmark. During his student days his idols were,
among others, Johannes Ewald and Goethe, although his field of study was
13

primarily the natural sciences. In Lavoisiers theory of oxidation he believed that

he had found a constructive principle for all chemistry that suggested a hidden
spiritual unity in natures multifarious processes (Mitchell 1957, 143).
At the close of his student days he returned to Germany, spending a year with
his father in Rendsborg. In 1797 he was made professor at the university in Kiel,
where he immersed himself in the works of Goethe. In Schellings Ideen zu einer
Philosophie der Natur he found the metaphysical principle that Nature is Spirit
visible, and Spirit, Nature invisible, [a principle] which allowed him to sum up the
world of nature and history into a comprehensive view (Ibid.).
From 1798 until 1802 Steffens traveled throughout Germany on a fellowship.
The first year was spent in Jena, where he was a guest of Goethe on several
occasions.

With a background of study and personal friendships within the

German Romantic School, Steffens returned to Denmark in 1802 to give a series of

lectures in which he discussed science, poetry and religion as an organic whole.
Among his listeners were men destined to lead the spiritual life of Denmark during
the coming generations: Oehlenschlger and Grundtvig.
Although much has been written about the impact of Steffens lectures, little is
actually known about their contents. Except for the first nine,11 he spoke without
notes, as if inspired. We can only know what those who heard him apparently
received from his lectures. They [had] apprehended the differences between, in
part, empirical understanding and organic intuition, that sense of infinite cohesion
lying dormant in all things, which is the moving force behind the work of the
researcher and which, when the living, the creative reveals its splendor in a
surpassing form, is called poetry (Engelstoft, Povl and Svend Dahl 1942).
Henrik Ibsen was a poet. His early works were for the most part either poetic
dramas or dramatic poems. He was a romanticist, even in his later prose plays, in

14

the sense that he spoke the intuitive, metaphoric language of the soul.12 But this
aspect of his writing is sometimes lost in translation.

Folklore

The great Danish bishop, N. P. S. Grundtvig (1783-1872) towered over the

spiritual life of his people, effecting profound changes in many areas of Danish
life. Followers of the liberal movement in Danish theology still bear his name,
grundtvigianer.
Bishop N. F. S. Grundtvig was profoundly affected by Steffens lectures in
1802, although his interest in Old Norse literature had been first aroused by
reading P. F. Suhms history of Denmark, as noted in his diary in December 1806
(Mitchell 1957, 128). By 1806 he had written his first article on the Eddas and was
planning a series of poems on Scandinavian mythology.
His major work on mythology, The Mythology of the North, was
published in 1808. Nordens Mytologi is an enthusiastic retelling of the
Norse Mythology with an eye to the dramatic possibilities of the
material. For him the myth was no mere ornamental or poetic device
but a profound symbol through which it was possible to approach
universal truths and to transcend the limitations of logic and uninspired
human thinking. In the myth there was at least a spark of the divine. He
who comprehended the myth therefore saw a facet of the divine. Not a
clear logical structure but a myth was for Grundtvig the supreme
achievement of the creative mind. In the introduction to the second
Nordens Mytologi, which he issued in 1832, Grundtvig explained that, in
contradistinction to many contemporary students of mythology, who
were interpreting the old mythology as symbolical of natural phenomena
15

or physical elements, he took the myth to be symbolical of life. (Mitchell

1957, 129)
Grundtvig also translated Saxo Grammaticus and the Prose Edda of Snorri
Sturluson, an early medieval historian. Incidentally, he also translated Beowulf
into Danish in 1820 and was the first scholar to call attention to the significance of
this poem. His son, Svend Grundtvig, continued his fathers research into folk
literature, producing a monumental five-volume collection of Danish folk ballads
(1853-1883).
Grundtvig also inspired the establishment of the Danish Folk Colleges, a
unique experiment in residential, adult education which still flourishes today. In
contrast with what Grundtvig called the black universities, these colleges have
no academic requirements for entrance, or are there any for the faculty; the
emphasis is placed upon inspired teaching, and in the 1800s the subject matter was
folk literature, especially retelling the stories of the Nordic gods.
In 1956-1957 I attended Lollands Folk College in Denmark.

Headmaster

Bengtsson was of the old school. He gave daily lectures on the Nordic gods. He
said he could tell when a student began to listen with his heart and suddenly realize
the importance of these myths for his personal life.

The Three Intersect

The three great movements of nationalism, romanticism and folklore each

contributed to the concept that a folk or nation has its own unique and
comprehensive soul which binds the people together into a distinct social unit. The
soul of the nation might be called the point at which the three movements intersect.
In the words of B. J. Hovde, Nothing in the realm of literature contributed more
than the folklore movement to the growth of the feeling that the nation is an
16

integral unity, culturally and traditionally as well as politically. The Grimm

brothers first demonstrated how folklore could be interpreted to support the
romanticist thesis of the evolutionary unity of national history. In their hands this
body of popular literature became the spontaneous expression of the common
genius, the collective personality of the nation (Hovde 1943, 460).
The influence of all three movements may be seen in the great works of
literature in Denmark during the period. The stirring events on the political scene
had aroused people to a new sense of national identity. Steffens had taught poets
to look for a Universal Spirit, the Soul of the Nation, behind the confusion of
political events. And Johannes Ewald had pointed to Nordic folklore as the truly
national literature of Denmark. Since he had such a profound effect on the early
works of Henrik Ibsen, we might take into special consideration Adam
Oehlenschlger.
Until 1802 Oehlenschlgers slight poetic production had been mainly
imitative, a synthesis of Johannes Ewald and Jens Baggesen (Mitchell 1957, 106).
Jens Baggesen was a Germanophile who wrote in both Danish and German. His
principal work was Labyrinten (1792-93), a sentimental description of his journey
through Germany into Switzerland. A continuation of The Labyrinth, published
much later, described his visits with such German men of letters as Klopstock,
Wielan, Schiller, and Herder (Ibid. 98). As the leading poet in Denmark during a
period in which anti-Germanism was particularly strong,13 Jens Baggesen was able
to pass on to Oehlenschlger, as his successor,14 the cultural heritage he had
received from Herder and his associates.
It was Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) who had already fused
nationalism, romanticism, and folklore into a new cultural movement for the
German people. Herder saw in folk literature a unique power which was the true
source of all literature and art. In Von deutscher Art und Kunst he wrote:
17

The wilder, i.e. the more living, more freely active a people is, the
wilder, i.e. the more living, more sensuous, freer, fuller of lyrical action
must be its poetry. The further away from artificial, scholastic modes of
thought, speech, and writing a people is, the less its songs will be made
for paper and be dead literature. The essence and purpose of these songs
depends alone on the lyrical, living, as it were dance-like character of
song, on the living presence of the images, on the connection and as it
were dire urgency of the content and feelings, on the symmetry of word,
syllables, yes often even of letters, on the movement of the melody, and
on a hundred other things which belong to the living world and these
national songs. Hence the whole magic power that makes of these
songs the entrancement, the spur, the ever-lasting inheritance of joy of a
people (Kinderman 1953, 253).
This magic power infuses Ibsens early poetic dramas. He was particularly
attracted to the heroic ballad, the songs of the folk, which combined the universal
language of music with the metaphoric language of poetry.
Although Oehlenschlger had imitated Ewald and Baggesen, the new
romanticism apparently did not take on a personal significance for him until his
first meeting with Henrich Steffens in the fall of 1802. They talked together for
sixteen hours, and although the subject of their discussion is not known, the effect
on Oehlenschlger was immediate. The next morning he began his famous epic
poem Guldhornene. [The Golden Horns] (Mitchell 1957, 106). In this poem, he
sounded the call for a return to the ancient Nordic culture as the source for spiritual
strength against the encroaching materialism of the day. The poem was inspired
by an event of national import which had occurred in May of that same year
(1802).

18

In 1639 there had been found near Gallehus in Jutland a golden drinking horn
adorned with illustrations from Nordic legends and mythology. In 1734 a second
horn, matching the first, was found in the same place. These solid gold relics
eventually came into the kings possession and were placed in a royal cabinet,
from which they were stolen in 1802, never to be recovered again.
Oehlenschlger in his poem ascribes the finding of the horns to the will of the gods
of Scandinavian antiquity. The gods describe the Golden Horns as a gift:
For those seldom few
Who understand our gift,
Not bound by earthly chains,
But whose soul rises
To the summit of the Eternal,
Who apprehend the lofty
In the eye of Nature
Who in adoration tremble
Before the radiance of the Godhead,
In the sun, in violets,
In the least, in the greatest,
Who aflame thirst
After the life of Life,
WhoO Great Spirit
Of times gone by
See your spark of Godliness
On the sides of these sacred objects
For them our call to stand fast still sounds (Ibid. 117).
But men have not honored the gods; they have looked on the Golden Horns and
seen only the gold; therefore have the gods taken them away again.
19

The strong, nationalistic temper of the poem, as well as its lyric quality,
appealed immediately to the intelligentsia of Copenhagen. Its appearance at the
head of Oehlenschlgers first volume of poetry (Digte, 1802) marked the
beginning of a new literary movement.
Oehlenschlger drew heavily upon Old Norse literature and mythology in his
poetic works. The Helge trilogy is a series of poetic dramas and interrelated poems
based on material drawn from a Volsung legend as well as Danish folk songs and
Eddic poetry. Gods of the North is a sort of modern Edda, a series of poems in
which Oehlenschlger summarized all of Scandinavian mythology. Hken Jarl is
a poetic drama built upon the struggle between the last great heathen warrior of
Scandinavian legend, Earl Hkon, and the Christian King Olaf. Ibsen dealt with
the same historical period in his play, The Pretenders (1863). And finally, there is
the mythological tragedy Baldur hin Gode, which will be dealt with more
completely when we discuss Ibsens The Warriors Barrow.
Oehlenschlger did not use mythological figures purely for effect. To an
adverse critic of the drama [Baldur hin Gode] Oehlenschlger stated that a
mythological fable was more real to him than an historical deed, since mythology
is based in eternal nature, whereas historical events are of the time past.
Mythology is the product of an entire nations character and way of thinking
and feeling. Here is a key not only to Oehlenschlgers outlook but also to the
emotional and philosophical attitudes of the time (Mitchell 111).
The strong nationalist sentiment which developed among the Danes as they
realized their identity as a nation apart from other nations; the romantic search for
spontaneity and the Universal Spirit behind all physical manifestation, which
expressed itself in the language of the heart, poetry; the fascination with the oral
stories of the folk which revealed their uniqueness as a people: these were the
movements which formed the foundation for Ibsens early dramas.
20

Nationalism, Romanticism, and Folklore (Norway)

Nationalism

Until 1814, Norway had been part of the Danish kingdom, although the ties
between the two lands were loosened after 1808, when an English blockade
severed trade relations between them. The peasantry, while constituting by far the
majority of the population, was largely inarticulate and ignorant of democratic
forms of government.

It was the professional class of doctors, lawyers, and

clergymen trained at the University of Copenhagen who brought the ideals of

liberalism to Norway. They were supported in the demands for representation by
the industrial and commercial classes. When Norway was ceded to Sweden by the
Danish king in the Peace of Kiel (January 14, 1814), the Norwegians called a
constitutional assembly at Eidsvoll on April 10, 1814 to choose a form of
government that could assure, perfectly and forever, the nations freedom and the
needs of the State (Bukdahl 1959, 693).
The determination of the Norwegians to become a democratic nation led to the
creation of the storthing, a body of representatives elected to express the will of the
people before the king. Having been obliged to accept the Swedish Crown Prince
Bernadette (later King Charles XIV) as their king, the Norwegian storthing
21

proceeded to wage a long and successful battle against the attempt on the part of
the king to assert absolute authority over the land. During this period the storthing
was under full control of the upper classes; but in 1833 the agrarians captured the
national assembly by a majority of forty-five to thirty-four, due largely to the
campaign carried on the previous year among the agrarian population by the
Romantic poet Henrik Wergeland.
Wergeland was an impulsive, fantastic son of nature.completely
irresponsible (Jorgenson 1933). As a lover of life and nature, his was a fiery,
undisciplined imagination; he, the champion of the constitution and the peasant. In
1825 he began his studies at the new university in Oslo,15 along with another poet,
Johan Sebastian Welhaven.
Welhaven was just the opposite of Wergeland. Distinguished at the university
as one of the most gifted intellects in Norway, Welhaven had been reared in the
classical tradition by his favorite teacher, Lyder Sagn, who taught him that art is
beauty and beauty is harmony. In Oslo he succeeded in becoming a brilliant
social figure, and an enemy of Wergeland. In August, 1830, the daily newspaper
of the capital, Morgenbladet, published a poem by Welhaven To Henrik
Wergeland, which read in part:
How long will you indulge in senseless raving,
In crazy brandishing of Don Quixotes spear?
See how, for all your airy wings a-waving,
Straight for a bottomless morass you steer.
The sun you seek is wildfire of the bog,
A crawling eft the Pegasus you flog!
Then murmur not that none of us is able
To judge a genius soaring past our sight;
Where is the art in cutting reasons cable
22

To drift about in realms of cloudy night?

Your place assured a thousand votes will fix
The place the Muse reserves forlunatics (Jorgenson 1933, 194).
Henrik Wergeland replied in kind, and the feud which ensued between the two
young students split the student society into two opposing camps. At issue was a
fundamental difference in outlook between two sectors of Norwegian society. On
the one hand were the cultivated aristocrats, paternalistic in their attitude toward
the farmers, advocating contacts with foreign cultures, who rallied around the
classic poet Welhaven.

On the other hand were the superheated patriots,

supporters of the agrarian party, who collected around the inspired Henrik
Wergeland.
The two poets and their followers waged an acrimonious cultural battle for
eight years. The feud simmered down in 1836, but not before the Welhaven group
had demonstrated against a drama by Wergeland, The Campbells, and in the riot
which ensued had been ejected from the auditorium.
The strong sentiments which gave rise to the cultural feud of the 1830s had
their origin in the nationalist fervor which arose after Norways independence from
Denmark. Actually, both Wergeland and Welhaven were deeply interested in the
welfare of the nation, but they differed strongly as to what course the new nation
should follow.
Henrik Ibsen tended to react against the narrow nationalism represented by
Wergeland and to embrace the more international outlook of Welhaven. As early
as 1848 he was deeply moved by the revolutions which were taking place in
foreign countries. Looking back upon his feelings as a twenty-year-old poet in
Grimstad, Ibsen wrote in 1875:
The times were much disturbed. The February revolution, the rising in
Hungary, and elsewhere, the Slesvig Warall this had a strong and
23

ripening effect on my development, immature though it remained both

then and long afterwards. I wrote clangorous poems of encouragement
to the Magyars, adjuring them, for the sake of freedom and humanity,
not to falter in their righteous war against the tyrants; and I composed a
long series of sonnets to King Oscar, mainly, so far as I remember,
urging him to set aside all petty considerations, and march without delay,
at the head of his army, to the assistance of our Danish brothers on the
Slesvig frontier (Ibsen, "Preface" Catiline 1900-1922).
Ibsen became mixed up in practical politics only for a brief period while he was
editor of the periodical The Man in Christiania.

Although this magazine

maintained an editorial policy of strict impartiality, during the first half of 1851
Ibsen also became connected with the publication of the labor unions ArbeiderForeningernes Blad [The Workers Unions Newspaper], whose editor, Theodor
Abildgrd, was a friend of Ibsen. On July 7, 1851, the police raided the newspaper
office, and the editor, along with several others, was arrested. Some of Ibsens
manuscripts were in the office at the time, but the foreman in the printing room
was able to hide them from sight before they came to the attention of the police
(Koht, The Life of Ibsen 1931, 1:66). Such a close call was enough for Ibsen; he
was never again to become involved in politics.
Under the patronage of Ole Bull,16 a national theater was established in Bergen
in 1851, and Henrik Ibsen was named as playwright, director, and general
handyman for the new venture. By accepting the post Ibsen was brought directly
into contact with the latest and, in some ways, the most vigorous manifestations of
the new Norwegian nationalist spirit in the arts. (Downs 1946, 32).

While

Wergeland and Welhaven had laid the foundation for a national poetry, as yet
nothing had been done in the field of drama. As Gerhard Gran tells us, As late as

24

1850 our theater was to all intents and purposes wholly and completely Danish:
Danish pieces, Danish translations, Danish actors, Danish direction (Ibid. 38).
By assuming his duties at Bergen, Ibsen committed himself to the task of
creating a uniquely Norwegian dramatic literature. According to Psche, We have
enough newspaper articles from his hand which bear witness that a fully perfected
theory supported his poetic strivings toward Norwegianism.

The posthumous

works have printed a few of them (Psche, Ibsen og nationalromantiken 1909).

The literary critic Brian Downs has reason to believe that Ibsens sympathies
with Norwegian nationalism became even stronger during his stay in Bergen. St.
Johns Eve, Lady Inger of strt, The Feast at Solhaug, Olaf Liljekrans represent a
genuine effort to fulfill the purpose for which Ibsen had been summoned to
Bergen, the provision of drama satisfactory to Norwegian nationalistic aspirations.
The progressive diminution of elements in them either critical of these aspirations
or foreign to them suggests in Ibsen a growing conviction of their tenability
(Downs 1946, 44).
Certainly, he conceived of himself as a national poet, and as late as November,
1859, Ibsen persuaded Bjrnson, his rival in the production of dramas, to assist
him in the founding of the Norwegian Society for the encouragement of
nationalism in literature and art, especially in dramatic art (Koht, The Life of
Ibsen 1931, 1:151). Bjrnson became the president, but the society grew too large
and too political for Ibsens tastes, and he later withdrew.
On the other hand, Sturtevant marshals convincing arguments to show that
Ibsen was early dissatisfied with national romanticism, and certainly he was quite
critical of the narrow, provincial nationalism of some of his contemporaries (Sankt
357). It would be impossible to say whether at one time Ibsen was ever entirely for
or against Norwegian nationalism. Unlike Bjrnson, he was never willing to
become identified with any one party or movement; indeed, both the liberals and
25

the conservatives claimed him at one time or another (Koht, The Life of Ibsen
1931).

Romanticism

The foundations for the study of Old Norse history and literature were laid in
the eighteenth century by Benjamen Dass (1706-1775). His student, Gerhard
Schning (1722-1780), along with P. F. Suhm (1728-1798) and Bishop Johan
Ernst Gunnerus (1718-1773), formed the Trondheim Academy of Science (later the
Royal Norwegian Academy of Science) in 1760 to encourage the study of
Norwegian history and nature.
Ibsens attitude toward romanticism is probably best stated in his introduction
to the second edition of Lady Inger of strt written in April, 1883. In 1854 I had
written Lady Inger of strt. This was a task which had obliged me to devote
much attention to the literature and history of Norway during the Middle Ages,
especially the latter part of that period. I did my utmost to familiarize myself with
the manners and customs, with the emotions, thoughts, and language, of the men of
those days (Archer, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen: Lady Inger of strt
2011, 189).
His interest in the past was not to romanticize history but to empathize with it.
He characterizes his romanticism as a mood of the moment [which] was more in
harmony with the literary romanticism of the Middle Ages than with the deeds of
the Sagas, with poetical than with prose composition, with the word-melody of the
ballad than with the characterization of the Saga (Ibid. 191).
Ibsen emphatically denies that he was influenced by contemporary romantics
like Wergeland or Oehlenschlger. In writing his introduction he states, My
object has simply been to maintain and prove that the play under consideration,
26

like all my other dramatic works, is an inevitable outcome of the tenor of my life at
a certain period. It had its origin within, and was not the result of any outward
impression or influence (Ibid. 192).

Folkore

The folklore movement in Norway began with the publication in 1833 of a

volume by the Reverend Andreas Faye entitled Norske Sagn [Norwegian
Legends]. In the following year, a gentle, clerically-minded poet and son of a
peasant, Jrgen Moe (1813-1882), began to collect folk tales after having read the
volume of tales by the Grimm brothers. He published in 1840 Samling av Sange,
Folkeviser og Stev i norske Almuedialekter [A Collection of Songs and Folk
Ballads from the Norwegian Country Dialects].
Moe was joined in his efforts by Peter Christian Asbjrnsen (1812-1885), and
together they translated folk fairy tales and poetry from the dialects into standard
Dano-Norwegian, publishing volumes of their monumental Norske Folkeeventyr
[Norwegian Fairy Tales] in 1841, 1842, 1843, and 1844. According to Downs, In
this series of volumes they assembled the current, traditional stories, which they
had had narrated to them on extensive excursions through the Norwegian
countryside (Downs 1946, 36).
The whole was thoroughly revised and a second edition, published in 1851,
which produced a national sensation and awakened the Norwegian folk to their
own indigenous literature.

From 1850 on no author ignored them in the

cultivation of his style and in the portrayal of Norwegian character. In fact no

person can understand the literature of Norway from the middle of the nineteenth
century until the present day without making a thorough study of the fairy tales
collected by Asbjrnsen and Moe (Jorgenson 1933, 217). Asbjrnsen also
27

published his own two-volume collection of Norwegian Fairy Tales and Folk
Legends (1845-48).
After reading the collection published by Jrgen Moe in 1840, a schoolmistress
and daughter of a Telemark pastor, Olea Crooger, began to collect country ballads
from the folk among whom she lived. Moe visited Miss Crooger in 1842 and
urged her to publish, but because of the difficulties in translation, she turned to the
Reverend Magnus Brostrup Landstad for help.

Folkeviser [Folktales] was

published in 1853 under Landstads name. In editing the ballads Landstad brought
the language into as near conformity as possible with the Old Norse in which they
were presumably first sung.17
A word is in order concerning the difficulties which these early collectors of
folklore faced in trying to present their findings to the public. The major difficulty
lay in the decision as to what language should be used:
To attempt a paraphrase into the accepted literary language meant
sacrificing the raciness of the original and even accuracy; if, on the other
hand, stories and verses were set down as nearly as possible in the form
in which they had been communicated, they often would remain
intelligible only in the district in which they had survived, and the
intention of forming, for the benefit of a reading public, a truly national
store-house of traditional literature would be defeated (Downs 1946, 37).
Clearly a new Norwegian language was needed to bridge the gap between the
Dano-Norwegian of the capital and the many dialects of the countryside. A new
landsml [a national standard language based on the spoken, especially rural,
dialects] was adumbrated by J. A. Mielm as early as 1831 in the Almindelig norsk
Mnedsskrift [Ordinary Norwegian Monthly Journal]. But it was a self-educated
farm boy by the name of Ivar sen who became the linguistic scholar capable of

28

writing a Grammar of the Norwegian Folk Language (1848) and a Dictionary of

the Norwegian Folk Language (1850).
Ibsen was against the creation of a new landsml, in spite of the fact that at one
time he thought of using it in the libretto he began to fashion from Olaf Liljekrans.
Kristofer Jansen had a chair thrown at him in Rome by the infuriated poet during
an argument on that philological topic. This sturdy advocate of landsml freely
acknowledges that he saw himself portrayed in Huhu of Peer GyntHuhu being
one of the inmates of the Cairo madhouse to which Peer is likewise consigned, and
his special lunacy consisting in the manufacture of a language from the chatter of
the orangeoutangs of Malabar (Downs 1946, 112).
Between the years 1853 and 1859 L. M Lindemann published in installments
the peasant melodies which he collected. Henrik Ibsen made extensive use of
Asbjrnsen and Moe, as well as Landstand, Lindemann, Faye, and the Danish
paraphrases of the ancient sagas by N. K. Petersen.

The Three Intersect

Caught in the midst of a strong nationalist movement and appointed to the post
of playwright for a specifically Norwegian theater, Ibsen was expected to produce
dramas which were uniquely Norwegian. He had no Norwegian dramatists as
predecessors to whom he could turn for guidance. On the other hand, Denmark
had in Adam Oehlenshlger a first-rate poet whose powerful dramatic verse could
provide excellent instruction for a young playwright, despite Ibsens protestations
that there was no direct influence.
Oehlenschlger was himself searching for the eternal spirit of the Danish folk
in ancient mythology and folklore, a body of literature considered at the time to be
the product of a national consciousness.
29

The romantic school of the early

nineteenth century introduced a good deal of mysticism into the concept of folk
literature. Folk art was considered in a class with language itself as a result of a
non-individual consciousness, the soul of a nation or group.

It keeps the

innermost essence of the national traits and the central mood of the environment.
It is the nebula out of which all other art must come (Jorgenson 1933, 99).
Both Jorgenson and Chase agree that modern scholarship would tend to
discredit the nineteenth-century idea that a folk literature is the product of some
national creative spirit working through the uneducated common folk. For them, it
is most likely the work of a few unknown geniuses and must be considered in a
class with all other works of literature from known authors.
This is to some extent true, and Ibsen himself realized that folklore in its
primordial form must have been created by a few individuals. Nevertheless, the
concept of a national creative spirit is consistent with C. G. Jungs conviction
regarding a collective unconscious. Folklore is more than just an individuals
creation, more even than a product of the times in which it was written. As
Professor Wheelwright warns us:
Although the development of myths, particularly the later development,
may have had a good deal of help from individual poets long since
forgotten, there has been another, more impersonal force at work in the
development of mythic ideas of nature. For in mythic perspective nature
is not only known, it is enacted for in order to know nature truly in a
mythopoeic way one must engage in the gestures and ritual acts which
bring oneself into the desired communion. Mythos, then, is not selfintelligible; it has to be studied in the context of rite and ceremony which
have engendered it or which at any rate have molded its distinctive form
(Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain 1954, 169).

30

The repetitive and ritualistic element which one finds in myth and folklore is
certainly not absent from Ibsens works. Pavel Frnkl points out that in the midst
of an otherwise normal, everyday dialogue, Ibsen will repeat certain key words
(i.e., trolls, castles in the air, etc. in The Master Builder) with ritualistic regularity.
In so doing Ibsen is using word magic to give a numinous quality to his drama:
From time immemorial the function of magicespecially word magic
has been imbued with power.

Fritz Neumann has felt clearly this

nucleus of magic in Baumeister Solness. Skisse zu einer Wesenser

kenntniss Henrik Ibsens, published in Edda 1923. The Swedish
scholar Ivar Lindquist emphasizes in his analytical study of Galara. De
gamla germanska trollsngernas stil underskt i samband med en svensk
runinskrift frn folkevandringtiden (Gteberg 1923) the imperative
character of word magic which remains unchanged throughout centuries.
When these songssays Lindquisthelp to perform secret functions of
a magical nature they exhibit everywhere, both on German as well as
Nordic soil, a certain masterful power in the sound of the words, and
they bring to light a certain stylistic control over the word, so that this
function of conjuring can far surpass the demand for clarity. op.cit.
pp.18-19.
In the same way Hallvard Lie shows in his pioneering Skaldestilstudier (printed by Ml og Minne, Oslo, 1952), although using another
material, this ability of the kennings to effect within a tightly
constructed form a unique, complex impression of power of a
numinous, magical-religious nature.

(Cf. the authors impressive

analysis of five Midgrds-orm kenninger in Ragnarsdrama, p. 51); the

magical is again that which is filled with power and force. The German
scholar

Heinz

Werner

in

Die
31

Ursprnge

der

Lyrik,

Eine

entwicklungspsycheiegische

Untersuchung,

(Leipzig

1923)

calls

attention to magical repetitiondramatic dialogueas an expression of

suggestive and suggestionizing power. The emotional need to repeat
certain words (preferably in rhythmic groups) which we find in primitive
poetry, shares common roots with the power exercised by the trolls
among primitive tribes (Frnkl 1955, 56).
In the folk literature of the Nordic countries the myths are contained in the first
half of The Poetic Edda called The Lays of the Gods (Jorgenson 1933, 14). The
Poetic Edda, like so many other ancient documents, was unknown to European
scholars for several centuries. The northern revival of learning, which occurred
during the seventeenth century, centered around the University of Copenhagen. A
professor there by the name of Ole Worm (also known as Olsus Wormianus) made
a tireless search to recover the ancient Norse documents. In 1643 his friend, the
Bishop of Iceland, Brynjolfur Sveinsson, discovered a manuscript of The Poetic
Edda. This manuscript is dated about 1270, and it is thought that The Poetic Edda
was first committed to writing about the year 1200. Professor Pansche thinks that
The Lays of the Gods were first composed between the years 600 and 900 A.D.
The second half of The Poetic Edda is called The Lays of the Heroes. It dates
from the tenth century and belongs to the second class of folklore, the legends.
According to Jorgenson in the beginning of the thirteenth century The Prose
Edda was written by the historian Snorri Sturluson:18
During these years, howeversometime between 1215 and 1222
[Snorri Sturluson] wrote his first major work, The Prose Edda. We have
already indicated that this is a summing up of the past, a book on poetics,
containing three major divisions: first, a summary of the pagan
mythology from which most of the poetic imagery came, secondly an
account of the poetic language, especially the use of kennings,19 thirdly
32

an enumeration of the kinds of verse used by the skales (Jorgenson 1933,

58).
During this time Sturluson also wrote the Heimskringla [Sagas of the Kings of
Norway], a history based upon skaldic poems and oral traditions and tracing the
royal family from earliest times down to the battle of Re in 1177. And finally there
is the legendary material of the Icelandic Family Sagas which deals with events
and personalities from the tenth century, although they received their final written
form primarily between 1175 and 1250.
Henrik Ibsen showed little interest in the Eddas themselves, and if he used The
Poetic Edda at all, it was only indirectly.20 As he said himself, It was not my aim
to present our mythic world, but simply our life in primitive times (Gosse 1924,
65). The Heimskringla did not at first appeal to him, and it was only later that he
made use of it for source material (Archer, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen
1906-1912, 1,87).

But the Icelandic Family Sagas provided a rich store of

characterization for Ibsens imaginative powers.

The third class of Nordic folklore available to Ibsenthe fairy tale, folk legend
and folk balladwas just then being written down from the oral tradition as it had
been preserved among the peasants of Norway. As a vital and contemporaneous
oral literature, Ibsen discovered this class of folklore to be the most useful for his
purposes.
We know from Ibsens letters that he turned to the Norwegian folk tradition as
early as 1849. In a letter to Ole Schulerud dated January 5, 1850 (Ibsen, Samlede
verker 1928-1957, 15:27), the poet describes the works which he has in progress.
He has completed the first act of a drama about Olaf Trygveson, which was
probably to have been a companion piece to Oehlenschlgers Hken Jarl. He was
revising a one-act play entitled Normannerne [The Normans], describing the
conflict between heathenism and Christianity among the Norman Vikings. He had
33

put into verse a few legends and tales from Telemark set to certain well-known
folk tunes.

Koht thinks Ibsen may have heard these legends from Svein

Mountaineer, a laborer from Telemark employed by the apothecary shop in

Grimstad, and the constant companion of Ibsen during his first years in the tow.
(Koht, The Life of Ibsen 1931, 1:32).
The poem Balminder [Memories of a Ball] had been completed, and his major
work at the time was a national historic novelette called Fangen p Agershuus
[The Prisoner at Agers House].

The latter concerned a certain Christian

Lofthuus, who lived during the latter part of the eighteenth century on the Lofthuus
farm near Lillesand. Ibsen discovered this tale in an old document he had come
upon, and thought it would make a good basis for a story (Ibid. 46). While still a
teenager, Ibsen was already solidly in the stream of Norwegian national
romanticism.

34

Catiline (1850)
Myth is not the product of rational thought, which modern science associates
with the left brain, but rather it is what Headmaster Bengtsson of Lollands Folk
College called picture talk. Today we would call it right brain thinking, the
stories revealed by the subconscious mind. We are most aware of such imagery
when we remember our dreams, or are just about to fall asleep, observing that the
constant flow of words which constitutes our conscious life gives way to pictures.
Our subconscious thinking is not linear, but embraces wholeness, loving the
paradoxes which rational thought abhors. It transcends space and time. In the
words of T. S. Eliot in the beginning of Burnt Norton, the first of his Four
Quartets.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable (Eliot 1943, 3).
Right-brain thinking uses language which Philip Wheelwright called
plurisignative, metaphors whose meanings cannot simply be broken down into
35

logical statements without changing entirely the apprehension of reality which the
metaphor affords. A myth need not be true as in an historical or factual sense. Its
truth lies in its illumination of ourselves as human beings.
In Chapters II and III I have presented the milieu in which Ibsen began his
literary career and named the literary figures of the day who may have had an
influence on his writing, but according to one of his biographers, Edmund Gosse,
the Danes Holberg and Oehlenschlger were the only dramatists Ibsen had read
before Catiline was written (Gosse 1924).21 In any case such influences would not
produce the timelessness of his dramas, particularly his later plays. In order to
account for how he became the father of modern drama, and why his works are
still produced in countries all over the world more than a century after they were
written, we must turn to their mythological character.
Henrik Ibsen began to write his first play, Catiline, at the age of twenty while
still an apothecarys assistant in the little town of Grimstad. It was written, not in
prose, but in the exalted language of poetry. The sources for the play were not
Norwegian, but classical, the story of the legendary Catiline in Sallust and Cicero,
which Ibsen had been reading in preparation for the university entrance
examinations.
The major theme of the play is freedom vs. slavery, both political and
psychological.

Catiline expresses his vision of political freedom in Act II:

Freedom for civilians and the welfare of the state were the purposes for my
struggle (Ibsen, Samlede Vrker 1962, 1,24). Catiline is contrasting himself with
his fellow revolutionaries, who are willing to take up arms against the Roman
Senate, but only in order to have a better life for themselves. Catilines words are
metaphoric, an articulation of the ardent wish of the Norwegian folk for their own
freedom from Denmark, and an expression of Ibsens own nationalistic fervor.

36

Although perhaps few would consider Catiline worthy of production today,

especially in light of its romantic ending, Ibsen himself saw in the play a
foreshadowing of some of the paradoxes which permeated his later work. Much
around which my later writings center, the contradiction between ability and
desire, between will and possibility, the intermingled tragedy and comedy in
humanity and in the individual,appeared already here in vague foreshadowing
(Orbeck 1921, 6).
But Catiline foreshadows much more than certain themes in Ibsens plays. It
also displays his intuitive knowledge of human psychology, particularly the
subconscious life of human beings. To understand this aspect of his writings we
need to turn to the psychology of C. G. Jung.
Ibsen presents a conflict within Catilines soul between the desire for love and
home and his passion for power through warfare. Love and the comforts and
responsibilities of domesticity are associated with his wife, Aurelia. His lust for
power is inflamed by the vestal priestess, Furia.

These two women are the

reflection of what Jung would call the positive and negative aspects of a mans
feminine side.
All human beings are both masculine and feminine, powered by both
progesterone and estrogen hormones. No matter how masculine a man may be in
youth, in old age the estrogen is likely to take over: his breasts become larger, his
emotions stronger, and horror of horrors, he does what no real man allows himself
to do: he weeps. At least that is my experience at the age of 80. Likewise a
woman becomes more masculine, more assertive. A fuzzy mustache appears over
her lips, perhaps a discernible beard on her cheeks. Such a physical fact as our
androgyny was adamantly denied by many of my male students, for they had
assiduously repressed their femininity.

37

Since men cannot look directly into their subconscious minds, their femininity
is perceived primarily by projecting it on to a woman in the outer world. Such a
projection has little in common with what that woman is in her own right as a
person; she becomes an archetype of his subconscious mind.22
An archetype is a structure in the psyches of all human beings, inherited from
generation to generation as physical characteristics are. It appears in dreams as
well as works of art and literature. Jung spent a lifetime studying these structures
as they appeared in primitive and modern cultures as well as in the dreams of his
patients (Jung n.d.).
An example of the archetype of masculinity in a woman is the hero. There are
men who become possessed by the archetype and must play the role of the hero.
Unable to live a life of their own, they become what they perceive a woman wants
them to be.23 Masculine and feminine archetypes both play an important role in
Ibsens dramas.
An archetype is paradoxical. In its positive aspect the feminine becomes the
goddess whom a man must worship and obey. Its negative aspect is the destructive
side of the feminine, the witch or troll woman. In Catiline the positive is Aurelia,
Catilines wife, whose name conjures up an image of Aurora, the dawn, a
metaphor which becomes explicit at the very end of the play when night time gives
way to the rising sun.
The negative is Furia, reminiscent of the Furies in Greek and Roman
mythology, who pursued a man to his death. Catiline says, They say that the
Furies come from the underworld in order to follow us throughout our lifetime
(Ibsen, Samlede Vrker 1962, 1,35).
Aurelia is the fulfillment of a mans dream. She is the faithful wife who
refuses to believe the awful rumors that are circulating about her husband and is

38

willing to sacrifice her life for him. She sees in him the good which others do not
see, the potential which he has not yet realized.
Aurelia loves him as he is, without trying to make him into her hero, or telling
him what he must do. She is thrilled by the thought of moving away from the city
into the countryside, into her childhood home. But when she learns that Catiline
has sold her home to raise money for his military adventures, she does not chastise
him but immediately forgives him.

As a result his wife brings out the true

greatness of his heart. Instead of using the money for himself, Catiline gives it to a
poor man who desperately needs it.
At the beginning of Act II Catiline feels in Aurelias presence he is able to
escape from the debauchery of his youth. Now I am finished with my wild life
(Ibid. 24), he tells her. He even awakens momentarily from his dreams of power
and greatness and can freely choose what his future will be.
In Ibsens experience (as in my own) the magical power of the archetype to
effect a profound change is associated with death and rebirth, a descent into the
grave and escape from it to lead a new life. The archetypal myth of descending
into the grave and reappearing as a different person is a universal story of
transformation.
Among primitive tribes an adolescent boy was taken by the male members of
the tribe out into the forest and buried alive, then resurrected and returned to the
tribe as a man. The death and resurrection of Jesus is another such story of
transformation. Ibsens personal experience is contained in one of his poems:
To Susannah Thoresen (1856)
I dreamed I was laid in a coffin
And lowered into the grave.
There was mould cast upon my last
Earthly resting place.
39

And the priest prayed for the dead

And hymns were sung so sweetly,
Then parted the company so sad
And all was forgotten and closed.

But I lay alone down there

In the grave, a living dead.
I prayed with such burning desire
That my tears flowed (Ibsen, Samlede verker 1928-1957, 14:184)
Ibsen has been buried alive, enveloped in inanimate earth, while life still surges
within. Later in the poem, he is raised to life again by the glowing stream of
music emanating from the woman he loves. For it is selfless love which is
capable of raising the living from the deadif a man is willing to obey the
absolute demands of such a love.
In my own experience such pure love as that offered to Catiline by Aurelia may
well create a paradoxical reaction in the person who is loved. To respond to that
love he must commit himself whole-heartedly to the woman who loves him, but
that requires that he become selfless himself.
The sense of being buried alive is in fact the experience of egotism dying so
that I can be replaced by we. Such egotism is not easily buried.24 Catiline is
unable to escape from his dream of glory as a hero in combat. At the end of the
play his love for Aurelia turns to hatred, and he kills her.
It seems strange, paradoxical, that love can become hatred. Yet it is
understandable enough. A man unable to renounce his egotism is bound to feel
constrained by the needs of a wife and children and to resent such constraint. In

40

the words of Catiline: I hate you! I see your cunning strategy; you will bind me to
the horror of living a half-life (Ibsen, Samlede Vrker 1962, 1,55).
On the other hand Catiline is bewitched by Furia who, unknown to him, is the
sister of a young woman whom he seduced as a young man. As a result of his
violation of her virginity, the sister committed suicide, and Furia has been
transformed into a woman possessed by the necessity of gaining revenge. She has
become an archetype, the goddess Nemesis. In Act II Catiline says:
I gaze upon your eyes;
They flash, like lightning in the gloom of night.
How did you smile! Just so Ive often pictured
Nemesis (Orbeck 1921, 44).
Ibsen intuited at the age of twenty the fact that Furia was a projection of
Catilines own inner femininity. Furia replies to him: I am a picture coming from
your own soul (Ibsen, Samlede Vrker 1962, 1,29).
Furia is entrancing, mysterious,25 possessing a magical power over Catiline.
There is a terribly fascinating attraction in your words (Ibid.), he tells her. Her
power over him makes him do whatever she wants him to do. He has lost his
freedom, and no longer has the ability to choose what his future will be.
What is the nature of this power over him? He has projected on to her an
essential part of his psyche. He is in love, and feels he cannot live without her
without destroying himself. Only by withdrawing the projection would he be able
to regain his freedom to choose.26
On the other hand Furia is just as much entranced by Catiline, for she has
projected on to him her masculinity so that he has become her hero. She cannot
survive unless he attempts to realize his dream of power and glory. To describe
such a situation Ibsen uses a word taken from Norwegian folk tales, trolldom. In
the words of Furia:
41

A secret power of trolldom [witchcraft]

An inner unison drove us toward one another (Ibid. 21).
The troll woman gains her magic power by going through a transformation, a
death and rebirth. Furia is entombed for allowing the vestal fire to go out, but is
released by Catilines friend Curius, who has been like a son to him. Furia has
been able to bewitch Curius as well and entice him to betray the Catiline he loves.
In this case we are dealing with the shadow side of the death and rebirth
archetype.27

The new life is not one of selfless love but of destructive revenge.

There is nothing like the fury of a woman.

At the conclusion of the play Catiline has been defeated in his attempt to
overthrow the Roman Senate. Despite his defeat Furia insists he has realized the
glory of his dream of becoming the hero whose name will be remembered for
centuries. She loves him because he has become the hero of her dreams. But she
also hates him. By stabbing him she finally gets revenge over the man who drove
her sister to commit suicide. Her role as the goddess Nemesis is realized.
That is where the play should have ended. It did not. As dawn appears on the
horizon, in the throes of death Aurelia calls out to her husband to follow her to
heaven, and turning his back on Furia, he throws himself on his wifes body and
declares:
You have dispelled the darkness in my soul; in my breast there is
peace.
See, I am following you to the home of light and freedom (Ibid. 57).
It is difficult to imagine that a man can turn to the feminine which he has just
killed and expect it to have the power to save him. Such a sudden transformation
is simply not true to life. In this instance Ibsen was too much influenced by
romanticism. But in his earliest play we have crossed over the threshold into the
world of magical power, mystery, and the numinous.
42

The Warriors Barrow (1850) and Other Poetry

Despite Ibsens protestations to the contrary the influence of Oehlenschlger
upon Ibsen in these early years is unmistakable. Catiline had been written in the
blank verse of Oehlenschlgers romantic dramas. In a letter to Ole Schulerud
dated January 5, 1850 (Ibsen, Samlede verker 1928-1957, 15:27-32) Ibsen
describes the works he has in progress, among them a companion piece to
Oelenschlgers Hken Jarl; and now came a one act dramatic poem Kjmpehjen
[The Warriors Barrow], which was undoubtedly strongly influenced by
Oehlenschlgers Baldur hin Gode [Baldur the Good].
Oehlenschlgers drama is set among the gods of Valhalla and concerns the
story of the death of Baldur, god of wisdom and gentleness. The author attempts to
reconcile the vigorous fighting spirit of the pagan gods with the meek and gentle
Christ. He finds in the god Baldur a foreshadowing of the Christ who was to
conquer the Viking land and establish a new and nobler race of men. The drama
ends:
The evil of Loke28 shall long endure, that is sure; and the sight of
cruelty
Shall overshadow the feats of the gods, till the earth forget them all.
43

But when the ancient world has sunken deep into the darkness of time,
All-Father shall raise the grass-green earth through the ocean spray.
Thor29 is dead, but strength and courage, sons of the gods, are never
dead
Lif30 himself shall become the progenitor of a new ennobled race.
You Baldur shall forge Thors hammer into a cross
And the lilies of piety, the fruit of Ydun,31 shall entwine the sword of
strength. (Strm 1901, 21).
Ibsens The Warriors Barrow begins where Oehlenschlger leaves off. He
accepts the latters thesis that the end of the pagan world, Ragnarok, occurred with
the coming of Christianity to the North, and that the wild life of the Vikings has
been superseded by the gentle spirit of the Baldur-Christ.

In the words of

Oehlenslger:
Then, it is said, will Ragnark have stilled
The wilder powers brought forth a chastened life;
All-Father, Baldur, and gentle Freya32
Will rule again the race of men in peace! (Orbeck 1921, 90).
Ibsen dramatizes the meeting of a Viking pagan, who has arrived on an island
in the southern seas, with a Christian girl named Blanka, who is living there. The
Viking has vowed either to avenge the death of his father, presumably killed on
this very island, or to die himself. Since the girls foster-father is the only man on
the island, it appears that her foster-father must be the murderer and therefore the
victim of the Vikings revenge.
In the meantime Viking man and Christian girl fall in love. Rather than kill the
girls foster-father, the Viking decides to abandon the pagan law of blood
vengeance for the Christian spirit of forgiveness and self-sacrifice. He will not
avenge his fathers death. But since his oath is sacred and inviolable, he must
44

himself die. The dilemma is neatly solved with the discovery that the girls fosterfather is in reality the Vikings own father, who was not killed after all; hence the
cause for revenge no longer exists. The Viking and his bride return to Norway to
live in peace with their neighbors:
Yes, Baldur ruleth now, through you, my Blanka!
I see the meaning of my Viking life!
Twas not alone desire for fame and wealth
That drove me hence from my forefathers home;
No, that which called me was a secret longing,
A quiet yearning after Baldur. See,
Now is the longing stilled, now go we home;
There will I live in peace among my people (Ibid. 124).
Even though Ibsen wished to revitalize the spirit of the Vikings, as indicated in
his essay on the heroic ballad, he faced a dilemma: how to maintain the vitality of
the Viking spirit while rejecting its blood-thirsty nature. In attempting to live
within himself the life of a Viking, Ibsen was confronted with an ugly truth: men
are instinctively killers, and their victims are often other human beings.
The ethics of pagan society is based upon honor: on one hand, the code of
blood vengeance, which is the instinct of men of any age, ancient or modern, to kill
the person who has murdered his kinsman or violated his wife or daughter. As the
father of three daughters I know how strong that impulse can be. On the other
hand a mans word is sacred. If he has said he will do something, he must do it, or
he is dishonored.
The demand of blood for blood is central in Western mythologies, not only
Nordic, but Greek as well. The story of Cain and Abel concerns the mark of God
which is placed on Cain in order that he be spared from the code of blood
45

vengeance. Nevertheless, blood for blood is the law in gang warfare in our cities
today, as well as among the tribal societies of the Middle East. Revenge is the
dark side of human nature, in both men and women (i.e., Furia in Catiline).
Countering revenge is forgiveness, motivated by love.

Oehlenslger talks

about Baldur as a foreshadowing of such love, and Ibsen accepts his thesis. Ibsen
attempts to go beyond Oehlenschlger, and in his dramatic poem to demonstrate
the power of love, but he is still too young to speak authoritatively from personal
experience, and therefore his argument remains unconvincing. As we shall see, he
returns to the redemptive influence of love again and again in his later plays.
According to Sturtevant, during 1850 Ibsen also began a large work entitled
Rypen i Justedal [The Grouse in Justedal], which was written in the conventional
iambic pentameter of Oehlenschlgers tragedies, interspersed with rhymed verse
and with prose (Sturtevant, Olaf Liljekrans and Ibsen's Literary Development,
5#3,113). The work was based on the legend of Justedalsruna [Runes33 from
Juste Valley] found in the second edition of Fayes Norske Folke-Sagn [Norwegian
Folktales] (Faye, Norske Folke-Sagn 1948, 129).34
The legend is one of many found among the mountain villages concerning the
terrible plague which hit Norway in 1350 and destroyed an estimated two-thirds of
the population (Ibid. 125). During the plague a number of the richest and most
prominent families fled to the valley of Justedal and settled on farms there. They
allowed no one to visit them, and their only communication with the outside world
was through letters which were left under a certain stone, still called Brevsteinen
[The Letter Stone].
Nevertheless, almost the entire population of the valley was wiped out. The
cattle on the farms wandered in herds into the adjoining valley, and the people
there, fearing that something was amiss, decided to investigate.

46

When they

arrived, all were dead save a young girl they happened to see hiding in the woods
like a wild and frightened bird.
She was captured and taken to a farm where she was raised as a member of the
farmers family. When she married, she settled again in Justedal and became the
progenitor of a new race there (Ibid. 127). Although The Grouse in Justedal was
never completed, Ibsen returned to this legend in a later play, Olaf Liljekrans
(1857), and formed from this short account found in Faye his conception of the
wild yet fascinating wood sprite, Alfhilde.

47

St. Johns Eve (1853)

After his appointment to the theater in Bergen, Ibsen was expected to write an
original drama each year to be presented on the anniversary of the theaters
founding.

The first play which he wrote for production at Bergen was

Sancthansnatten [St. Johns Eve] (1853).35

In it he turned to theatrical account the Huldreromantik, the fairy
folklorethe continued lighting of bale-fires at midsummer (St. Johns
eve), once a pagan rite, and the belief not only in magic potions, but also
in domestic goblins and sylvan elves, which have the power to show
themselves to mortals and even to affect their destiny. The balladry
which Landstad was collecting and the stories which Asbjrnson and
Moe had begun to publish abounded in such creatures and their antics.
Some songs introduced in the course of the play reproduce the style of
the old popular poetry. In assembling all these elements Ibsen had to
some extent been forestalled by the earlier experiments in dramatizing
Hudreromantik [Fairy Romanticism], P. A. Jensens Huldrens Hjem
[The Fairy Home] and his friend Botton Hansens Huldrebrylluppet
[The Fairy Wedding] . . . The former had been performed at Christiania
while Ibsen was there (and he had not liked it), the latter first appeared in
Manden (Downs 1946, 41).36

48

In this play we can again see the seriousness with which Ibsen approaches
folklore. He was not using folk literature simply to supply ornamentation and local
color for his dramas; on the contrary, he saw within folklore the very secret of life
itself.
His intention was to show that only the innocent and confiding soul can
come in touch with the secret natural powers hidden in folklore, and so
arrive at a true interpretation of life; while he who dabbles poetically
with the question sees nothing of what stirs underneath the surface, and
does not attain truth. The play is purely romantic, and is intended to be
national, although the folk songs on which it is built are as much Danish
and Swedish as Norwegian (Koht, The Life of Ibsen 1931, 1:90).
In Julian Poulsen, the main character in St. Johns Eve, we see the conflict
between the intuition of some profound truth in the literature and native life of the
farm folk, and the influence of urban sophistication which will not allow him to
believe his intuition. He has come out into the country to find life in its simple,
national essence; but as a city-dweller he has become superficial, adulterated by
foreign cultures, too aesthetic in his tastes. Poulsen wants to be both national and
sophisticated, but the result is that he is neither.
The attraction of folk life was once very real to Poulsen. He fell in love with a
country wench, a huldre,37 but after reading a collection of folk tales he suddenly
discovered to his dismay that this delightful female had a tail which could in no
wise be hidden. So he had to leave her; his aesthetic taste would not allow him to
love such a person. He says:
My national I reasons as follows: You, a man of the people, who go
with a sheath-knife at your side and write all nouns with lower case,38
how can you renounce a creature whom our national poets hold so
dear?... Then along comes my aesthetic I and says: No, it cant be so,
49

since it runs contrary to your aesthetic ideas to feel strongly about one
who is endowed with these, to us, abnormal protuberances so
incompatible with your concept of beauty. What shall I do? Which of
my two Is is right? (Ibsen, Samlede verker 1928-1957, 2:62).
In the conflict between the national and the aesthetic in Poulsen we see again
the same battle which was fought between Wergeland and Welhaven in the thirties:
the national is primitive, romantic, irrational, while the aesthetic is urbane,
sophisticated, rational. The two viewpoints are apparently irreconcilable; one must
choose between them.
Poulsen: The aesthetic and the national fought a battle of life and
death in my breast. I had to give up my lovethat cost a lot, you
may be sure, but it had to be so. Everything, my originality, my
primitivenessI meanwas lost, and I could never escape the
reproachful voice which reminded me that because of a miserable
prejudice I had given up my love. I did everything to awaken to life
my national I.

I went with a sheath-knife and began to write

orthophonetically, but I knew well enough myself that it was all

wrong. How do you know what is stirring inside me? It is something
like what the Germans call Welteschmerz (Ibid. 2:56).
To be separated from the source of folk life was indeed a matter of deep
personal loss for Ibsen. In writing the passage, he had originally slipped into
purely autobiographical references, revealing his dismay over the effects of his
journalistic efforts in Christiania. Of the three partial or complete manuscripts of
Sancthansnatten, this last passage, written in Ibsens own handwriting, was
inserted into the first and most complete manuscript, and agrees in most particulars
with the other two fragments:

50

Everything, my originality, my primitivenessI meanwas lost. I

had to take up a negative attitude toward humanity. I began to bury
my soul in theater criticisms and correspondence and articles for the
provincial press. Enough saidI went further and further along this
negative path. Little by little there crept into me something dark,
something devilishly blinddemonic I might almost say, or
something like that; let us call it contempt for humanity, somewhat
Byronic. From this came this division, this disharmony which you see
in me. On the outside I am cold, if not ice-cold, but here inside it is
burning, do you believe me? It is burning (Ibid. 2:104).
Something was happening to Ibsen which he did not like. He was losing
contact with his deeper self, but he believed, for the moment at least, that folklore
had the power to call forth the real self, the national self, again. In contrast to
Poulsen, who was blinded by his urbane sophistication, Birk, another character in
the play, saw the elves and fairies on St. Johns Eve. The result was a profound
self-revelation:
That is the thing. I have seen too deeply. Not into the punch glass,
but into myself. I have looked into the very depths of myself! And it
is a good thing that it happened; it was about time, for otherwise it
would have been the same with me as with her who drank from the
golden horn and forgot home, forest and valley, and herself. Surely
I can now see through the mist that has beclouded my childhood. It
isnt, as I thought, time or absence or anything of that kind has lulled
me into forgetfulness. It was the empty, pointless, but blinding life
there in the city (Ibid. 2:73).
Birk does not believe that the fairies actually exist, nor is there the slightest
doubt in his mind that what he saw on St. Johns Eve was simply a dream, but this
51

dream has brought clarity to [his] confusing childhood memories (Ibid.). The
simple truths apprehended by the child and forgotten by the adult nevertheless
haunt the memory until they are recaptured for the innocent and confiding mind in
folklore. Speaking of the fairy vision, Birk says, It seems to me as if distant,
forgotten, yet most precious images of the past slipped by me in that colorful whirl
in there! (Ibid. 2:70).
In St. Johns Eve we see the importance for Ibsen of turning inward, into the
depths of the subconscious soul, in order to reach the truth.

Here lay the

foundation for his later insights into the inner promptings of his characters, his
understanding of human psychology, which made him such a great playwright.
The drama was first presented in Bergen on January 2, 1853. Since this was
the first original play to be presented at the theater by the young dramatist, there
was a certain air of anticipation in the town. The premiere was completely sold out
and many had to be turned away (Bull, Inledning til Sancthansnatten 1928-1957,
2:16). But the play was anything but a success. Some hissed and others whistled.
When the drama was performed for the second and last time, many of the seats
were empty. Ibsen was undoubtedly deeply hurt by the lack of appreciation with
which his first attempt at a truly national drama was met. With a characteristic
sense of irony Ibsen followed his own drama with a production of P.A. Jensens
Huldrens Hjem) [Home of the Fairies], which he had earlier condemned severely
for its superficiality as a national drama.39
Ibsen realized that he had to change his approach. Much as he might himself
have felt the depth of psychological understanding running through Norwegian
folklore, he had not yet found an effective way of presenting these folk insights on
the stage. Simply to personify elves and hobgoblins was not enough.
According to Psche, after 1852, Ibsen used elves purely as ornamental
figures in the painting of a lyrical mood (Psche, Ibsen og nationalromantiken
52

1909).

I would strongly disagree with Psche.

Trolls were anything but

ornamental. But Ibsens attitude toward folklore did change after his journey to
Germany in 1852, due to the profound influence of Hermann Hettner.
Ibsen has related that Hettners book on Das moderne Drama
constituted his chief theoretical reading during his stay in Germany.
Here he came under an influence for which he was always in later life
deeply thankful.

Hettner had with conclusive force held that the

dramatist who set for himself the highest goal: to write a

psychological character tragedy, must in his portrayal feel himself
bound hand and foot to the world of reality. The characters own
disposition must by an inner necessity create the plot. It cannot be
formed around a pure accident or the action of an almighty power, nor
indeed by any interference from without (Ibid.).
Here we see the first major change in Ibsens attitude toward folklore. The
numinous powers which elves and trolls represent were no longer to be considered
as acting upon the individual from without. By the time we reach The Lady from
the Sea and The Master Builder, the mermen and the trolls are deep within the
individual himself.
In writing St. Johns Eve Ibsen turned from Oehlenschlger to Shakespeare and
Heiberg for his literary models. According to Francis Bull, in his book on Das
moderne Drama Hettner had specifically named Shakespeares A Midsummer
Nights Dream as the best example of the Mrchenlustspiel (Bull, Inledning til
Sancthansnatten 1928-1957, 2:12).40 And at the time Ibsen was beginning the
drama, during his visit to Copenhagen in 1853, he met Heiberg personally.
Presumably he was well acquainted with Heibergs play Syvseverdag. As Francis
Bull remarks, All of these three pieces, that is, Shakespeares A Midsummer
Nights Dream, Heibergs Syvseverdag, and Ibsens Sancthansnatten, take place
53

on a summer evening when the world of fairy tales or legends reveals itself; and as
in Heiberg, Ibsens piece is presented in such a fashion that only those who possess
a poetic instinct are able to see the miraculous; for the philistines the whole thing is
incomprehensible and beclouded (Ibid. 2:13).

54

The Master Builder (1892)

It is time to turn to one of Ibsens later works to see how they are related to his
interest in folklore and to his earliest plays. The Master Builder was first conceived
as a poem. On March 16, 1892 he wrote a poem beginning De sad der, de to
[They sat there, the two of them] as a "first sketch for The Master Builder.
Although short, the poem contains all the essential ideas of the drama (Seip 19281957, 12:20).
The play is a fairy tale. A logical mind, such as that of Doctor Herdal in Act I,
cannot make head or tail of it. We have passed over the threshold of which Prof.
Wheelwright spoke and entered into a world apprehended by metaphorical
language in which words and images are plurisignative. Unfortunately, many of
the connotations contained in the words are lost in translation.
This is true, for instance, in the names given to Ibsens characters. We have
seen this with the name Aurelia in Catiline, who represents the coming of the
dawn, Aurora. The Master Builders last name, Solness, alludes to the sun (sol),
and in Act III he speaks of a new dawn together with Hilde; but unlike the
contrived ending of Catiline, the sun is setting at the end of this play. In describing
his longing to do the impossible, Solness refers to the myth of Icarus, who flies too
close to the sun.
Ragnar, the Master Builders architect, evokes memories of Ragnarok, the
apocalyptic time for the Norse gods when they shall be forgotten by the
55

Scandinavian folk. At the end of the play Solness challenges the Christian god as
if He is no more worthy of obedience than the ancient Nordic gods. In fact, it is
Solness himself who has been superseded by the rising generation, exemplified by
Ragnar, who works for him. Solness fall from the tower is his Ragnarok.
Of great importance is the name Hilde, which comes from hildre, to fascinate,
to cast a spell around, the word used by Curius in Catiline to describe Furias
control over him (Ibsen, Samlede Vrker 1962, 1:37). Hilde is a female troll who
becomes Solness Nemesis.41
Also important is the meaning of the word master builder (bygmester). Hilde
asks him why he does not call himself an architect, but like Ibsen himself, Solness
has had no formal training in the technicalities of his career; Ragnar is hired to do
the architectural designs. Solness has had to teach himself his craftsmanship
through personal experience and hard labor by working his way up as a builder.
Ibsen did poorly in the entrance exams and was not able to attend the university
as his competitors in poetry Oehlenschlger, Heiberg, Welhaven, and Wergelund
had done. He did not have the credentials for being a poet. In this respect he is an
example of the self-taught son of the land who flourished in Grundtvigs
folkehjskoler as opposed to those who studied at the black university. Ibsen is
writing from inward experience, as a master builder.
Ibsens play is a projection on to the stage of a drama that was inspired from
Ibsens own subconscious mind, a work of the imagination. He himself insisted
that his plays had their origin within. As Virginia Woolf put it, I hope I am not
giving away professional secrets if I say that a novelists chief desire is to be as
unconscious as possible (Woolf October 30, 2002). In my own experience as a
writer, if the author gets out of the way, the characters appear and create their own
dialogue, display their own personality, take on a life of their own. They are

56

subconscious parts of a writers personality that have not been lived in the real
world, but are nevertheless real possibilities.
The play is also intended to be a drama that is occurring in the minds of the
spectators or those reading the play. The audience subconsciously becomes all of
the characters, living in their imaginations parts of their own personality, of which
they are probably not aware.
Such a drama has a numinous, magical quality, like a fairy tale, and
communicates its meaning through the use of metaphoric language, images which
constitute the language of right-brain thinking.42 Some of these images appear as
personalities which are described as archetypes by C. G. Jung (Jung n.d.), but what
Jung means by archetypes is difficult to comprehend for the logical mind because
there is no precise definition. One can only apprehend their existence through
intuition, personal experience, and observation.
Human beings who play an archetypal role can have an extraordinary power
over other persons, and The Master Builder is a study of the use of such power. As
the father of three daughters, I have had the opportunity to observe several young
men who were archetypal trolls. Jung would call them puer aeternus43 [eternal
boys]. It is difficult even for a father not to be charmed by them. On the other
hand, as a teenager I fell in love with a female troll, and even though after some
five years she died for me psychologically (in a too realistic dream of her falling
under a subway train), it was only by traveling abroad that I escaped from her
power.
Archetypes reoccur in the literature of many cultures as they did in the dreams
of Jungs patients, and therefore seem to be universally inherited by the human
psyche or subconscious mind. When Joseph Campbell wrote about the archetype of
the hero, he quite correctly called his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Literature that uses such archetypes speaks to our souls, so that we feel as if
57

something profound has been communicated to us even if we cannot articulate

precisely what it is.
In discussing the female characters in Catiline, I have already mentioned one
such archetype identified by Jung, the feminine side of a man. Hilde is such an
archetype. Ibsen came to know her through his imbibing of Norwegian folk tales,
so he calls her a troll. Hildes first entrance upon the stage depicts who she isa
young woman with a backpack, no clothes other than a single change of underwear
(and that already needs washing), no money nor means of obtaining any, a walking
stick in hand. She is no ordinary woman, but a troll come down from the
mountains to do her mischief.

Doctor Herdal has met her earlier up in the

mountains and calls her a coquette, a deliberately entrancing woman, as her name
indicates.
Solness is her counterpart, the masculine side of a woman, a hero. But just as
the feminine side of a man is bipolaron the one hand she can be the goddess who
leads him to fulfillment; on the other she can be the witch who destroys himso
also a womans masculinity can be her intellect, but on the other hand the warrior
with a killer instinct.
As Solness says in Act II there are light-haired and dark-haired devils. He is
dark-haired, as is illustrated in his relationship with Kaja, his bookkeeper. She has
been engaged to Ragnar for four or five years, but when she comes to work for
Solness she falls under his spell.
Ibsen describes how a man casts his spell over a woman by becoming her hero,
even her god, since as the unconscious part of a woman, her masculinity has a
numinous quality. His sole purpose for entrancing her is to keep her fianc Ragnar
under his thumb. If she stays, Ragnar will stay.
To begin with, he pretends she is the center of his attention, the one without
whom he cannot live. But at one point Solness almost loses it:
58

Solness [breaking out]: But, damn it all! What about Ragnar? Why
Ragnars the very person I
Kaja [looking at him with terrified eyes]: Is it mostly for Ragnars
sake thatthat you
Solness [controlling himself]: Oh, no, of course not!

You dont

understand at all. [Gently and quietly] Naturally, its you I want.

You, first and foremost, Kaja (Ibsen, The Master Builder 1898-1902,
132).
It was a close call; Solness almost told the truth about his reason for playing the
role of the hero. But he caught himself in time.
Persons who play the archetypal role are very intuitive as to what other people
want them to say, for as long as they do so, they are very enchanting. It appears as
if they are able to read another persons mind. In a dialogue between Doctor
Herdal and Solness in Act I, the doctor attributes this intuitive ability to all women:
Women, you seetheyve a deuced keen instinctabout some things (Ibid.
135).
The doctors remark leads Solness to reveal that when a woman becomes
infatuated with him, he can make her do whatever he wishes her to do:
Solness:the idea struck me: if I could get [Kaja] here in the office,
then perhaps Ragnar would stay too.
Dr. Herdal: That was a reasonable enough idea.
Solness: Yes, but I didnt drop a hint at the time, not a word about that.
I just stood and looked at herand wished with all my heart that I had
her here. The next dayshe came here to me again and behaved as
though Id made some arrangement with herabout the very thing Id
had in my mind. But I hadnt said a single word about it (Ibid. 137).

59

Solness asks the good doctor what he should make of his magical power, but a
man of science doesnt have a clue. Theres no scientific explanation. We have
crossed the threshold into the world of the fairy tale, the world of the subconscious
mind.
There is a price to be paid, however, for becoming such a magician. One can
never really tell the truth. Solness is imprisoned in the role which he must play and
obsessed by the need always to be saying the right thing.
Solness:its a cursed nuisance for me in the long run, you know.
Here I have to go on day after day pretending I . And its treating
her badly, poor girl. [Vigorously.] But I cant do anything else (Ibid.
138)!
He has lost the freedom just to be himself, if indeed he even knows who he is.
Why should he make such an effort to play the role? It is because it gives power,
total control over his victim, as was the case with Furia and her control over men.
Kaja kneels before Solness as if he were her god, which to a certain extent he
has become, for as an embodiment of her soul he is the divine part of her being.
But power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. A man who discovers
his power over women finds it difficult not to use it over and over again with any
woman, as Solness has apparently done on numerous occasions. Dr. Herdal says,
I know youve known a good many women in your life (Ibid.135).
But a man who has the ability to charm may suck the life out of his victim until
she has no power to be herself. That has been the fate of his wife, Aline. As
Solness says, Yes, devils! And the troll in me too. Theyve sucked all the lifeblood out of her (Ibid. 194). Aline has become one of the living dead, a condition
which primitive tribes describe as a loss of soul. This is what Nora discovers is
happening to her in Ibsens A Dolls House and is the reason why she must leave
her husband and children in order to find out who she really is.
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Ibsen makes specific reference to the similarity between Aline and Nora in the
third act when Aline discloses that the worst thing about her parents home burning
down was not the loss of her twin boys. She could accept that as the will of God.
No, the worst was the loss of her dolls. Solness has succeeded, as did Torvald in A
Dolls House, in keeping his wife as his little girl, totally dependent upon him to do
her thinking for her. All that remains is for her to do her duty.44
After the conversation between the doctor and Solness, Hilde appears, and
arrangements are made for her to stay in one of the three childrens rooms they
have in their new house (although they have no children). She can be their child,
Solness tells her. He is already trying to work his magic as an archetype who, by
keeping a woman in a child-like state of mind, is able to gain total control over her
thinking, just as Ragnar says Solness has done with Kaja:
Ragnar: She said hed taken hold of her mindutterly and completely.
Taken possession of all her thoughts, for himself alone. She says she
can never let him go. That shell stay here, where he is(Ibid. 199).
Hilde reminds Solness that it was precisely ten years ago, when she was twelve
or thirteen years old, that he first met her in her mountain home while building a
church up there. By doing the impossible (putting the wreath on the top of the
church steeple),45 he became her hero. She fell in love.
Solness called her his princess and promised her in ten years time to return as
a troll to whisk her away to some foreign land like Spain and buy her a castle (Ibid.
148). Hilde says he even kissed her, bent her over and kissed her, many, many
times (Ibid. 149), which Solness adamantly denies. But then he changes his mind;
he must have thought it, willed it, wished for it, wanted it. Oh, very well, damn it
all,then I did it, I suppose (Ibid. 149)! he says.
We are clearly in the realm of the fairy tale, played out in the subconscious
mind, where there is no difference between wishing something and actually doing
61

it. But look at what he wants! He is a grown man lusting after a young girl, a
pedophile, regardless of whether or not he carries out his wishes in the real world.
Rather than revering the sacredness of the innocent feminine, he is exploiting her
to satisfy his own desires, raping her, in other words, at least in his own mind.
Recall Catiline when he raped Furias sister, causing the sister to kill herself. It is
just such an attitude toward a female that kills the feminine in Solness, his own
psyche, and like Furia, Hilde will get her revenge.
Solness asks her if anything more came of it, if indeed there may have been a
sexual relationship. No, there wasnt, but that is beside the point. When one has
fallen in love with another person, there need not be any sex involved. In fact, the
attraction of the troll is even more powerful because it is going on in the heart and
mind of the victim, in the subconscious over which the person has no control.
Hilde is therefore unable to extricate herself from Solness power.
Finally, Solness is finished confessing that he had completely forgotten about
their meeting ten years ago, and yet, in a way, he hadnt. He says, The more I
think it overthe more it looks to me as if, all these long years, Ive gone on
tormenting myself withhmwith trying to find something againsome
experience I seemed to have forgotten. But I never had any idea what it could be
(Ibid. 154). Hilde replies, Oh yes, I suppose there are trolls like that in the
world, too.
Something profound happened in the master builders soul on that journey up
into the mountains, a violation which is unforgivable but totally repressed. It
gnaws in the back of his mindnot an event in the real world, actually being
unfaithful to his wife.

No, this repulsive behavior occurred only in the

subconscious mind of Solness, but that fact does not diminish its reality or its
consequences.

62

Hilde is a princess who wants her kingdom, just like the princess in the fairy
tales. She succeeds by the end of the first act in casting her spell over Solness by
appealing to his egotism and telling him what he wants to hear, namely that he is
the only person who has the right to build. He confesses that he needs her above all
others, and she is on the path of getting her troll kingdom.
In Act II we learn that the master builder still has a conscience and is burdened
with a profound sense of guilt over what he has done to his wife. It is for her sake
that he has just finished building a new home for them. It is a house that has a
steeple, like a church. In the Scandinavian tradition, he is about to place a wreath
on top of the tower, despite the fact that he is no longer a young man. But it will
never become a real home filled with love and the laughter of children.
Hilde refuses to be their child. She complains about the way she is treated by
Mrs. Solness:
Hilde: She could have said that she would [buy some clothes for me]
because she likes me so awfully much. Something of that kind, she
could have said. Something that was really warm and affectionate, you
know (Ibid. 164).
But Mrs. Solness has lost her soul and is incapable of loving. All that she has
are her duties to perform. For she had her calling, as the master builder says:
She had her life-work, too. Just as much as I had mine. [Solness
voice trembles.] But her life-work had to be ruined, crushed, all
knocked to pieces [by the death of their twin boys after their first home
burned to the ground]so that mine could break its way through to
to something like a great victory. For you must know that Alineshe
had her gift for building too.Not houses and towers and spiresand
the sort of thing I work at. For building up the souls of little
children, Hilde. Building up childrens souls so that they could rise up
63

into independent, full-grown human souls. That was what Aline had a
gift for. And all thisthere it lies now. Unused and useless, forever.
And serving no purpose in the world. Just like a heap of ruins46 after a
fire (Ibid. 72).
It is the price Aline had to pay for Solness becoming an artist.
Hilde thinks the master builder has a very fragile conscience (Ibid. 177) and
should have a more robust one like those of the Vikings in the sagas who, as
Solness says,
Solness: sailed to foreign lands and plundered and burnt and killed
men
Hilde: And carried off women
Solness: and kept them captive
Hilde: took them home with them in their ships
Solness: and treated them likelike the worst of trolls.
Hilde [looking straight before her with half-veiled eyes]: I think that
must have been exciting.To be carried off (Ibid. 179).47
Solness asks her if she understands why such women often do not want to leave
their captors at all, and she replies, I can understand those women perfectly well
(Ibid. 179).
We often find it impossible to understand why battered women return to their
husbands, but a womans dream of masculinity in its negative form is of a man
using overwhelming physical force. She can become entranced by it to the point
where she is not only powerless to resist, but even finds it attractive.
Solness is very adept at getting women to fall in love with him. He knows how
to play the archetypal role well. How can one recognize such trolls? By their
excessive egotism. During Act II we see how totally self-centered the master
builder is. He is horribly cruel toward Kajas fianc, Ragnar, in order to keep him
64

under his thumb, Solness excuse being that he cannot be anything other than what
he is. But as a dark-haired troll, he is intolerably destructive, incapable of empathy
because his feminine side, the source for establishing personal relationships, has
been killed.
We are in the realm of the folk tale again when Hilde and Solness admit that
they are both trolls and its the troll in one, you seeits that that calls on the
powers outside us (Ibid. 178). For in the folk tale, if we are to reach the kingdom
and win the princess, we cannot do it on our own. There must be outside powers
that guide us.
In the tale Askeladden [the ashes child] and the Good Helpers the first two
brothers do not pay attention to the helpers and are therefore unsuccessful; the third
does listen and as a result wins the princess and half of the kingdom (Asbjrnsen,
P. Chr. og Jrgen Moe 1957, 2:352). In the life we know as the real world those
helpers are intuitions, feelings about what we should do next whether or not it
makes any sense.
Among many personal examples, on one occasion I saw an ad concerning the
need for English teachers in China and had a feeling I should answer it. The result
was a life-transforming experience.
A light-haired troll will accept such help with humility, recognizing his total
dependence on the powers on the other side of the threshold. On the other hand, it
is possible to act with a robust conscience, as Hilde prefers, crushing others under
our feet, as Solness has done, in order to reach the top.
Here Ibsen returns to his earlier interest in the sagas about the Vikings. The
Viking way has been the choice made by the master builder, but Solness is afraid
the helpers and servants wont pay any attention to him anymore, that Nemesis will
have her revenge. And indeed the consequence of such hubris is usually a fall
from the heights, as was also the case with Catiline.
65

In Act III we discover that Solness was once a light-haired troll. As a young
man he felt it was his calling to build churches to the glory of God. But then he
came to realize that God makes absolute demands: the master builder was to build
churches and nothing else. His need for love and personal happiness were not to
be taken into account (Ibid. 126).48
Most of us try to avoid recognition of such a peremptory requirement. In the
conventional Christian faith if we sin, we shall be forgiven. When Jesus said,
You must be perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect, even his disciples
were appalled and replied that fulfillment of such a demand was impossible. Ibsen
deals with this issue in greater depth in the drama Brand.
Having confronted God as the demanding taskmaster He truly is, the master
builder deliberately defies Him after the death of his two sons. He decides to build
homes for people, not churches, and to do the impossible by means of his own
willpower.

In defying God he is realizing the consequences of defiling the

sacredness of the feminine.

Like Furia in Catiline, Hilde will become the means by which the feminine
takes vengeance on the master builder. She will do so by first descending into a
gravklder, literally a grave cellar, just as Furia was buried alive in an
underground prison, before being rescued in order to return to life and to kill
Catiline.
Unfortunately, Hildes descent and resurrection is totally lost in the translation.
In the Penguin edition Hilde says, Ive just come up from a vault (Ibsen, The
Master Builder and Other Plays 1958, 193). The translation should be, Ive just
risen from the grave. Ibsen does not include a single word in his dramas unless
there is a purpose for its being there. Gravklder clearly refers to Ibsens earlier
plays49 and to the archetype of the woman who descends into the grave and rises
again as the goddess Nemesis.
66

Hilde drives Solness to his death by appealing to his egotism, overcoming his
fear of failure by claiming him as her hero who can accomplish anything. When
he successfully reaches the top of the steeple with the wreath, he becomes her
hero, even though he loses his balance and falls to his death. Many a football
player has been injured, or a soldier has died, trying to be the hero for a woman.
Just before the master builder falls to his death, the fairy tale contains a
dialogue between Hilde and Solness dreaming of building a castle in the air. The
image may be taken from the folk tale The Golden Castle that Hung in the Air
(Asbjrnsen, P. Chr. og Jrgen Moe 1957, 2:242). It is a tale of Askeladden
releasing three princesses who are captured, or entranced, by many-headed trolls
who own castles made of gold that hang in the air.

Among the many helpers that

made it possible for him to win the princesses are jars filled with the water of life
and death. As Askeladden approaches the castles from a distance, they appear as
moons, but as he gets closer they are like suns in the sky. The references to the sun
and Solness, to the theme of death in life, the princesses who are ensnared by trolls
and the denotation of the master builder as a trollthe overtones of castles in the
air are so plurisignative as to make it impossible to analyze them without
destroying the meaning of the metaphor. But the importance of Norwegian folklore
in fully understanding Ibsens masterpiece is patently obvious.

67

Lady Inger of strt (1855)

During the first six years of his career as a dramatist, Ibsen made a complete
circle in his attempt to awaken in the Norwegian folk an honest loyalty to their
national traditions. The wars of revolution on the international scene had stirred
him into creative heat, so that, as he was preparing for the entrance exams to the
university, he turned to an historical warrior of a foreign culture, Catiline, as his
first dramatic subject.
But under the influence of the strong nationalistic movements in Norway and
guided by the example of Oehlenschlgers romantic tragedies, he soon
concentrated on purely Nordic material.

Having in The Warriors Barrow

reconciled temporarily the pagan and Christian traditions in the figure of the god
Baldur, Ibsen set before himself the task of becoming a spokesman for the
collective unconscious of the folk.
By recalling in St. Johns Eve the primitive memories contained in folklore, he
hoped to reveal to his audiences their true, national selves unclouded by false
aestheticism. He failed miserably; the supernatural world of elves and trolls could
not be taken seriously by the sophisticated people of the towns and cities.
If he were to speak of the supernatural, of the mysterious, the numinous, the
fascinating, it must be on terms that all men can understand, and not just those
gifted with poetic insight. He must learn to envision his characters with such
68

realism and clarity that the numinous reveals itself as an inescapable part of the
personalitys structure, as in The Master Builder, written forty years later. The
audience must be convinced that a troll does reside in Solness.
As early as the 1850s, Ibsen understood the nature of trolldom (witchcraft). In
1855 he returned to an historical figure, this time an unmistakably Norwegian one,
in another attempt to excite nationalistic feelings. Other literary critics have traced
the historical and literary influences50 in his writing of Lady Inger of strt,
especially the technical devices in dramaturgy used by the French playwright
Eugene Scribe.51

But Ibsens understanding of the characters came from his

knowledge of fairy tales.

The protagonist of the drama is Lady Inger Ottisdatter Gyldenlve, a personage
of great power in Norway during the sixteenth century when Norwegian
nationalism was at its lowest ebb, and Norway slipped under the control of
Denmark. While she was the best-born, the wealthiest, and probably the most
capable woman of her time, Ibsen dramatizes her as a woman torn between loyalty
to her countrymen who were struggling to free themselves from Danish tyranny,
and maternal love for an illegitimate son.
Ibsen imbued an ostensibly historical play with a numinous quality by referring
to folktales and to archetypal themes which we have already discussed. At the
very beginning of the drama Lady Ingers daughter, Eline, mentions the fairy tales
of her childhood:
Have you forgotten how many a time, when we were children, we sat on
your knee in the winter evenings?

You sang songs to us, and told us

tales. Ah, then, Birn! Then I lived a glorious life in fable-land,

and in my own imaginings. Can it be that the sea-strand was naked then
as now? If it was so, I knew it not. Twas there I loved to go weaving
all my fair romances, my heroes came from afar and sailed again across
69

the sea; I lived in their midst, and set forth with them when they sailed
away. How I feel so faint and weary. I can live no longer in my tales.
They are onlytales. Birn, know you that has made me sick? A truth;
a hateful, hateful truth (Archer, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen
1906-1912, 1:10).
But fairy tales are not just illusions. They are stories about the nature of human
beings, often parts of our humanity which are too horrible to acknowledge as real.
Eline begins to understand that her mother, Lady Inger, has plans for her to marry a
man she has every reason to hate. She says to her mother:
Have you heard about the mother who rode over the mountain tops
during the night with her small children in a sled? A pack of wolves was
chasing after her; it was a matter of life or death; and she cast her little
ones behind her, one after another, in order to gain time and save
herself. You are like that mother; and your daughters you have thrown
to the wolves, one after another. The first was the eldest. Five years ago
Merete left strt; now she is sitting in Bergen as Vinzents Lunges
wife. But do you think she is happy as the wife of that Danish knight
(Ibsen, Samlede Vrker 1962, 103)?
Her second sister, Lucia, was sent to Bergen on a visit, but a year later, upon
her return home, she died because her mother would not let her marry the man she
loved. Eline is not about to let her mother decide whom she should marry.
Ibsen is making clear the connection of the fairy tale with real life. The tale
reveals the character of Lady Inger. She is a woman capable of sacrificing her own
daughters in order to promote the welfare of her son.

She has the robust

conscience of a Viking woman, as Hilde put it in The Master Builder.

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In Act II Nils Lykke [meaning good fortune, luck] appears for the first time at
strt. He is the man whom Lucia loved, although Eline is not aware of that fact.
Alone in the hall, he says:
If I were a frightened man, I could persuade myself to believe that when
I set foot in the doorway of strt, [Lucia] rolled over in her grave.
When I walked over the castles yard, she undid the lock on her casket.
And when I just now pronounced her name, it was as if a voice bore her
up out of the grave cellar. Perhaps she is groping her way up the stairs.
The sweat from her brow is getting in her way; but she is groping along
anyway. She is all the way up to the knights hall! Shes standing and
looking at me behind the doorpost (Ibid. 110-111).
We again see the archetypal52 image of the feminine who rises from the dead to
gain her revenge.
Time and again Ibsen returns to the mystery of a love relationship in which one
person fascinates another to the point where he has total control. Nils Lykke is a
notorious seducer, and in the beginning of Act III there is a masterful description
of the art of seduction.
Eline is alone in the knights hall, overwhelmed with hatred for Nils because he
has tried to make arrangements with her mother to marry her, without her consent.
When he offered her flowers at their first meeting, she threw them at his feet.
Nevertheless, she admits, When Bjrn told me fairy tales, all of the princes
looked like Nils Lykke. When I sat alone here in the hall and dreamed of fables
and my knights came and wentall of them looked like Nils Lykke (Ibid. 118).
In her dream life, Nils is her hero. As discussed earlier, a hero is not so much a
real person, but an archetype, a womans subconscious perception of masculinity
inherited down through the ages. That perception is based upon the masculinity in

71

the woman herself and has a numinous quality, because it is the embodiment of her
soul, that part of her personality which connects her to the divine.
But it is not possible for her to see consciously her own soul; it is subconscious.
She can therefore perceive it only in a mirror, darkly. A man who plays the role of
her hero becomes that mirror, and therefore her god, the one whom she must obey.
In a true love relationship a man may not be aware of his power over the woman
who loves him. If he is, he chooses deliberately not to use it.
But Nils enjoys using that power, and has become quite proficient at doing
soover many women. He is a seducer. When Nils enters the room, he perceives
that Eline is in a very emotional state, thinking with her feelings rather than her
intellect. That makes her vulnerable, and he immediately seizes his advantage.
He begins by using flattery, telling her what she wants to hear, awakening her
archetypal nature as an embodiment of the feminine. Had he met her earlier, she
could have inspired him to true greatness: For of this I am certain, he says. A
woman is the mightiest in the world, and in her hand is the power to raise a man to
the heights that Lord God will have him (Ibid. 118).
As in The Master Builder, a man who intentionally plays the archetypal role of
the hero has an intuitive sense of what a woman is thinking. Nils describes to Eline
her feelings as a lonesome woman, and Eline is taken aback. Where did you get
the power to put my most secret thoughts into words? How can you tell me what I
have carried innermost in my heartwithout even knowing it myself? To which
Nils replies, What Ive told you, Ive seen in your eyes. (Ibid.).
How does he know when he is not saying the right thing? As soon as he fails to
be what she wants him to be, she will become angry and upset. But Nils Lykke is
too experienced to make such a mistake.

He is mirroring her subconscious

masculine side, her intellect, her hero. Once he is able to appear to read her
thoughts, he can make the transition to doing her thinking for her.
72

Then he opens his heart to her, telling her secrets about himself which he says
he has revealed to no other. He is demonstrating how much he trusts her, at the
same time trying to gain her sympathy. Finally, to throw her off guard, he tells
her, I dont love you, and will never love you. As I said before, youre perfectly
safe; Ill never again try toBut whats wrong with you (Ibid. 119)?
Thinking only with her emotions, Eline is now completely confusedjust as
Nils intends her to be. He is planning to leave that night, but after she leaves the
room, he says, If I could have only two daysor even just one day moreshe
would be under my control just like all the others (Ibid. 119-120). By entering
her world of dreams and fairy tales, the realm of the subconscious, and
intentionally playing the role of the hero, he is able to create a narrative over which
she has no control; she is helplessly entranced.
In Act IV, however, Nils does not have the same luck with Lady Inger. She
also hates him, and should he succeed in winning Elines heart, she would drive
him away like a dog; cast him out with derision, with scorn, with contempt; make
it known all over the land that Nils Lykke in vain tried to court favor in strtI
tell you, Id give ten years of my life to experience such a moment (Ibid. 127).
She may be filled with hatred, but she is still in control of herself. For as a
wealthy widow, highly regarded among the peasants, she has had to play a role in
the political life of the country, to think and act like a man, to have a mind of her
own. When she realizes that Nils, as a political envoy, has an agenda of his own
contrary to her best interests, she does not hesitate to put him under house arrest.
In the beginning of Act V Nils and Eline are alone together; they are engaged.
Nils asks if she will be faithful to him even though he must leave her for a time.
Her reply: Do I have any will power anymore? Do I have the power to be
unfaithful to you? You came during the night. You knocked on my door, and I let
you in. You spoke to me. What was it you said? You looked into my eyes. What
73

kind of an enigmatic power was it that fooled me and charmed me into some kind
of trolls net (Ibid. 138)?
The drama ends in tragedy. Eline discovers that Nils is the man who caused
her sisters death. The shock of that discovery breaks his spell over her, and her
infatuation is consumed by hatred. She will have nothing more to do with him, and
leaves.
Out of loyalty to her landsmen, Lady Inger kills the man she assumes will be
the next king of Norway and Sweden and has him placed in the casket prepared for
herself. She is determined that her own illegitimate son will be king. She will be
the kings mother. Despite her determination to act as it suits her best, she is
conscience-stricken and says, When I was a child, they told me a fairy tale about
the knight ge, who came with his casket on his back. One night, as he lay in his
coffin, he got the idea of coming with it on his back and saying, Thanks for
lending it to me. (laughs quietly) Hm, we adults dont have anything to do with
our childhood beliefs. (with intensity) But such fairy tales are good for nothing
anyway. They cause disturbing dreams (Ibid. 144).
This fairy tale is nevertheless ironically true to life, for she discovers too late
that she has murdered her own illegitimate son whom she had hoped to place on
the throne.

74

The Feast at Solhaug (1856)

Having devoted much attention to the literature and history of Norway during
the Middle Ages while writing Lady Inger of strt, Ibsen now looked for new
sources which might afford material for dramatization (Archer, The Collected
Works of Henrik Ibsen 1906-1912, 1:183). At first he turned to the Sagas of the
Kings, but those did not interest him much at the time. Next he read the Icelandic
Family Sagas (Petersen 1901), and there he found in abundance
what I required in the shape of human garb for the moods,
conceptions, and thought which at that time occupied me, or were, at
least, more or less distinctly present in my mind. In the pages of
these family chronicles, with their variety of sounds and of relations
between man and man, between woman and woman, in short, between
human being and human being, there met me a personal, eventful,
really living life; and as the result of my intercourse with all these
distinctly individual men and women, there presented themselves to
my minds eye the first rough, indistinct outlines of The Vikings at
Helgeland (Archer, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen 1906-1912,
1:189).
He was particularly impressed with the two women, Brynhild and Gudrun, in
the Volsunga Saga, and he conceived the idea of a great banquet scene at which the
fateful quarrel between the two would occur.
75

Ibsen intended, in short, to

reproduce dramatically exactly what the Saga of the Volsungs gives in epic form
(Ibid.).
But various obstacles of a personal nature intervened, not the least of which
was the fact that he was also making a close study of Landstads completed
collection of Norske Folkeviser [Norwegian Folksongs] which had been published
two years previously. As he tells us, My mood of the moment was more in
harmony with the literary romanticism of the Middle Ages than with the deeds of
the Sagas, with poetical than with prose composition, with the word-melody of the
ballad than with the characterization of the Saga.

Thus it happened that the

fermenting formless design for the tragedy, The Vikings at Helgeland, transformed
itself temporarily into the lyric drama, The Feast at Solhaug (Ibid. 191).
Brynhild and Gudrun of the saga became the sisters Margit and Sign, while
Sigurd, the far-traveled Viking, became the knight and minstrel, Gudmund Alfson.
The banquet scene, which Ibsen had first conceived to be the scene of greatest
dramatic intensity (as it did become in The Vikings) now became the beginning
scene in which the characters were introduced.
Although the personalities in The Feast at Solhaug are taken from the sagas,
the form and style of the drama are purely lyrical, based directly on the ballads
found in Landstands collection.53 So much is this play influenced by the folk
ballad that at the critical moments in the drama a song is sung which summarizes
what has happened so far and prepares us for some important event to follow. In
Act I, after Bengt Gauteson,54 the Master of Solhaug, and his wife, Margit, are
introduced, Margit sings a ballad beginning
The Hill-King to the sea did ride;
Oh, sad are my days and dreary
To woo a maiden to be his bride.
I am waiting for thee, I am weary (Ibid. 205)
76

It is the well-known ballad about Little Kersti who married the Hill-King and
became rich with gold and silver, but sad in heart. There are actually four versions
of the ballad Liti Kersti given by Landstad (Landstad 1853, 431-451), and many
more versions were known to have existed. The central theme, however, remains
the same: the power of the Hill-King to fascinate, to draw the maiden to himself
until she has forgotten all that she ever was.
Margit suddenly realizes that she is herself the maiden in the ballad, for she has
forsaken her true love and married for purely material wealth. She has denied that
which lies deepest in her and cast away that love which is her only hope of real
happiness in order to follow a man she does not love. Woe! Woe! I myself am
the Hill-Kings wife (Ibid.)!55 she says.
The minstrel, whom Margit has deserted for Bengt Gauteson, returns and falls
in love with her sister, Sign. At the end of Act I the minstrel Gudmund says to
Signe:
I have to laugh when I remember how often I have
Thought of you as you were when I carried you
In my arms. Then you were just a child;
Now youre a huldre who charms and teases.
To which Sign replies:
Take care! If you awaken the wrath of a huldre,
Be careful. Shell enchant you in her net! (Ibsen, Samlede Vrker
1962, 1:74)
A huldre is defined as a wicked Norwegian fairy who appears as a beautiful girl to
seduce shepherds. In The Master Builder she is Hilde.
In Act II, with all the acrimony of a jilted woman, Margit becomes insanely
jealous of her sister. She dreams of poisoning her husband, the Hill King, who has
imprisoned her with his wealth. In talking to Gudmund, the minstrel, she says:
77

If only I were
A witch who sits on a mountain side.
How I would slyly spin my witchcraft!...
How I would chant, how I would wail!
Wail and chant both night and day!
(with increasing vehemence) How I would entice that cheerful mate
Through green forests into the mountain hall;
There could I forget all the worlds misery;
There could I be on fire and live with my friend!...
(with even greater intensity) In the dead of night
Will we sleep in the forest the sweetest moments of sleep;
Ill be struck dead with the rising sun.
What a merry way to die;is it not (Ibid. 78)?
Both sisters are determined to enchant Gudmund, but he will marry Sign in
spite of her sisters overweening jealousy. He sings a song in which he warns the
Queen of Elfland that in spite of her threats and spells, Naught can sunder two
true hearts/ That love each other well (Archer, The Collected Works of Henrik
Ibsen 1906-1912, 1:260)!
Margit replies by singing a ballad of her own which ends Act II at a highly
dramatic pitch (Ibid. 262). The ballad is the despairing story of a maiden who is
taken away by the Hill-King into the mountains. A wandering minstrel with his
harp and song breaks the spell of enchantment over the maiden; but he sails away
again with his new-found bride, leaving the maiden behind in the mountain of the
Hill-King.
The situation would normally lead to a tragic conclusion. In Act III Margit
attempts to poison her husband, but he is instead killed by enemy soldiers. She is
again a free woman, but instead of pursuing her determination to spend a wild
78

night with Gudmund, she suddenly blesses her sisters engagement to him and
decides to become a nun. She is thereby condemning herself to the life of isolation
she has hated so much during her three years of married life, without the wealth
she has enjoyed.
The early critics, among them Georg Brandes, were quick to point out that
Ibsens use of ballads was not entirely original with him. As Brandes wrote later
in his book, Critical Studies of Ibsen and Bjrnson:56
No one who is unacquainted with the Scandinavian languages can
fully understand the charm that the style and melody of the old ballads
exercises upon the Scandinavian mind. The beautiful ballads and
songs of Das Knaben Wunderhorn have perhaps had a similar power
over German minds; but, as far as I am aware, no German poet has
ever succeeded in inventing a metre suitable for dramatic purposes,
which yet retained the medieval ballads sonorous swing and rich
aroma. The explanation of the powerful impression produced in its
day by Henrik Hertzs Svend Byrings House is to be found in the fact
that in it, for the first time, the problem was solved of how to fashion a
metre akin to that of the heroic ballads, a metre possessing as great
mobility as the verse of the Niebelungenlied along with a dramatic
value not inferior to that of the iambic pentameter. Henrik Ibsen, it is
true, has justly pointed out that, as regards the mutual relations of the
principal characters, Svend Dyrings House owed more to Kleists
Kthchn von Heileronn than The Feast at Solhaug owes to Svend
Dyrings House. But the fact remains that the versified parts of the
dialogue of both The Feast at Solhaug and Olaf Liljekrans are written
in that imitation of the tone and style of the heroic ballad, of which
Hertz was the happily-inspired originator (Brandes 1899, 88)
79

Indeed, the entire play is so permeated with the Norwegian ballad that, as Koht
remarks, almost every line is reminiscent of some old song of one kind or another
(Koht, The Life of Ibsen 1931, 1:113). The Hill-King is no longer the numinous
figure of the ballad Liti Kersti, who opens the mountain supernaturally by riding
around it three times; he is now the very real and human master of Solhaug and
husband of Margit. But Margit has been charmed just as much as Little Kertsi into
riding off with the Hill-King. As Little Kersti drank the magic potion three times
and forgot her birthplace (i.e. her true self), so also Margit has forsaken her true
love and married for riches.
Unfortunately, Ibsen is so absorbed by the word melody of the ballad and the
literary romanticism of the Middle Ages that he violates the character of Margit.
The play should end as a tragedy. Pavel Frnkl discusses at some length the
problem which Ibsen had in overcoming the desire to be in harmony with his
surroundings and to sidestep sorrow and tragedy. According to his thesis Ibsen
first became a real dramatist when he was able to accept his own isolation from
society and to portray the tragedy of life without the romantic happy ending
(Frnkl 1955, 62). In the following play Ibsen portrays the tragic consequences
which naturally follow from the relationship between these two sisters taken from
the Icelandic Sagas.

80

The Vikings at Helgeland (1857)

Ibsen again turns to the Icelandic sagas for his dramatic materials. In The
Vikings at Helgeland he returns to the story of Brynhild and Gudrun57 in the
Volsunga Saga. The central character is Hjrdis, foster daughter of rnulf after
her biological father was killed on the battlefield. She, together with rnulfs
daughter, Dagny, has been forcefully seized during a Viking raid on Iceland and
taken to Helgeland in the northernmost part of Norway. In the beginning of Act I
their father has come to claim a bride-price from Gunnar for Hjrdis and from
Sigurd for Dagny, or else! Fortunately, arrangements are made to pay the price,
and the matter is settled peaceably.
But Hjrdis does not want peace; she desires combat, blood-letting, and uses
her feminine wiles to stir up trouble among the men despite their determination to
remain friends. For she is a true Viking woman. Her biological father gave her the
heart of a wolf to eat, and in Act II she describes her true character: Sometimes
there comes over me a tempting desire to perform such deeds; it must come from
my ancestors. an indomitable lust to fight among men, to put on a warriors
armor with weapons in hand, a lust to sit like a witch on the back of a whale, to
ride on the front of a Viking ship, to arouse storms and draw men into the depths
with beautiful songs of enchantment (Ibsen 1962. 1:160).

81

Hjrdis is consumed with rage when her foster father, in a fit of anger, says that
a woman seized on a Viking raid has no legal husband. [Such women] are only
recognized as concubines according to the law (Ibid. 1:154)! She will not be
dishonored.
Sigurd, her sisters husband, says of her: No warrior will own her as a wife,
except the one who comes to her cage,58 kills the polar bear which stands leashed
to the door, and carries her off in his arms (Ibid. 1:158). Hjrdis marries Gunnar,
believing that he is the one who has accomplished this fearful deed, when in fact it
was Sigurd.
Hjrdis is the dream of every true Viking hero, especially of young Sigurd, the
most renowned of them all, who says, A pleasingly ornamental housewife is not
what a hero needs.

The one I choose will never tolerate living under poor

conditions; no honor must seem too high for her not to strive after it; on a Viking
raid she must be willing to follow me; she must be clothed as a warrior59; she must
goad me into fighting and not blink an eye when the swords flash; if she is fearful
Ill not think her honorable (Ibid. 1:171).
Quite a woman! In Jungian terms we would recognize Hjrdis as a woman
possessed by the dark side of her masculinity. As such, she has the power to
manipulate everyone around her. Even Gunnar, her husband, is deathly afraid of
her, yet cannot help but do her bidding in spite of himself, even if it means killing
his foster brother, Sigurd. Her husband says of her: witchcraft [trolldom] infuses
everything you say; every deed seems beautiful to me when you suggest it (Ibid.).
His brother Sigurd speaks to her as follows: There is a strange power in
everything you say (Ibid. 1:175). We are again in the world of the trolls who
enchant, but in this case are very destructive. By the end of the play most of the
men are dead as the result of her machinations.

82

Such women in particular desire at heart a certain kind of hero to worship, a

man who is a true warrior,60 with great physical strength, who plunders and
destroys everyone and everything in his path without mercy.

He is the

embodiment of the totally negative side of masculinity. Revealed in him is a

mystery regarding the depravity of human nature which we do everything in our
power to ignore: the lust that males have to kill simply for the sake of killing.
I remember, for example, a young man who confided in me that, as a child, he
loved to use a magnifying glass to concentrate the rays of the sun on an insect so
that he could watch it die. An incident occurred a few miles up the road from our
house when three male teenagers tortured one of their friends until he died, simply
to experience what it was like to kill someone. Some, although not all, of the
details were reported in our local newspaper. They were arrested because one of
them could not refrain from bragging about what they had done. Two of them
have been executed; the third is trying to have his death sentence changed to life in
prison.
To return to the drama itself, Ibsen conveys the positive side of masculinity in
the character of Sigurd, associating him with the coming of Christianity and the
gospel of love. Although Sigurd as a young man was a true Viking pagan, we
learn at the end of the play that on a visit to England he became a Christian.
Therefore, he sought peace with Hjrdiss foster father when, at the beginning of
the play, the latter demanded a bride price, and attributed his successful
reconciliation with her father to the almighty above.
Sigurd was actually the man who killed the bear guarding Hjrdiss cage, but
his love for his foster brother Gunnar was such that he selflessly gave Hjrdis to
him in spite of his own desire to possess her. Instead, Sigurd married her sister
Dagny, who civilized him, turning him from a killer into a settled householder.

83

In the end, however, Sigurd does not escape from the wrath of Hjrdis, when
she discovers she has married the wrong man. Her attempts to make her husband
Gunnar kill Sigurd having failed, she sends an arrow through Sigurds heart
herself, thinking that they will be joined together in death in Valhalla, only to learn
too late that he will be going to the Christian God.
The mysterious world on the other side of the threshold permeates the play in
other ways as well. There is the prescient ballad sung by Hjrdis biological
father, Jkul, as he is slain on the battlefield:
Jkuls descendants shall prepare the way for
Jkuls vengeance in every which way;
Whoever owns Jkuls property
Shall never be happy with what he owns (Ibid. 1:155).
Jkuls property is, of course, his daughter Hjrdis.
In Act IV rnulf sings a long ballad mourning the death of all his sons, as
determined by the norne, the three Scandinavian Fates who weave our destiny. A
wolf has shown itself three times to Hjrdis, which according to Nordic folklore
means that she is about to die. After her death she participates in Asgrdsreien, the
ride of the fallen warriors to Valhal. As the clouds gather overhead, her son Egil
cries out:
Egil: (in terror) Father! See, See!
Gunnar: What is it?
Egil: Up thereall the black horses!
Gunnar: It is the clouds that
rnulf: Nay, it is the dead mens home faring.
Egil: (with a shriek) Mother is with them . . .
Gunnar: Child, what sayst thou?
Egil: Therein fronton the black horse!
84

(Egil clings in terror to his father; a short pause; the storm passes over, the
clouds part, the moon shines peacefully on the scene.) (Orbeck 1921, 114).
For a moment a purely natural phenomenon becomes infused with the
preternatural. The myth of the Asgrdsreien comes true, but only for the old
Icelandic chieftain, rnulf, and the young child who imagine the clouds61 to be the
dead warriors riding off to Valhal; the others see only clouds, but nevertheless are
filled with a sense of dread before the numinous.
Not only did Ibsen use the Volsunga Saga as a source for The Vikings at
Helgeland and The Feast at Solhaug, but as Duve points out, he was to use the
same material again in Hedda Gabler, so that even this modern play is rooted in
Nordic myth:
Hedda Gabler is connected most intimately with Ibsens earlier
production.

Especially is the resemblance with The Vikings at

Helgeland easily seen. Henrik Jger has appropriately called Hedda a

Hjrdis in a corset. One can also recognize again Gunnar, Sigurd and
Dagny in the disguises of Jrgen Tesman, Eilert Lvborg and Thea
Elvsted. Both dramas end in the same way. Hjrdis and Sigurd die.
Gunnar and Dagny go off together to the isle of saga-writing. The
parallel between Hedda and Eilert Lvborg, who kill themselves, and
Thea Elvstad and Tesman, who draw together in their literary interest,
is quite obvious (Duve 1945, 318)
However, he did not want to be misunderstood. The heroic ballad was not just a
fairy tale about supernatural beings.

Its purpose was to convey the spiritual

meaning behind actual historical events.

The relationship between the Christian faith and the ancient pagan gods was
still troubling Ibsen. Nordic folklore was pagan in origin. Of that there could be no
85

doubt. Yet of all the various forms of folklore which had survived to the present
day, it seemed to Ibsen that only the heroic ballad was still a vital force in the life
of the people.

This he attributed in part to the fact that the ballad was the

collective creation of the folk. In addition, the ballad contained a sense of the
miraculous, respect for the mysterium tremendum not found in other folklore. This
made all the difference to Ibsen.

86

Hedda Gabler (1890)

As a poet Ibsen is very sensitive to the connotations and pictorial associations
which words convey. He is therefore very particular in the names he gives his
characters. Hedda conjures up the Eddas, from which Ibsen got his materials for
The Feast at Solhaug and The Vikings at Helgeland. Given the similarity between
Hedda Gabler and The Vikings at Helgeland, by devising the name Hedda, Ibsen is
intentionally referring to his earlier work, especially since he has suggested that to
understand his works one has to read through them in their entirety.
Her husband Tesman [thesis-man] is an academic who writes theses. The play
is named Hedda Gabler, not Hedda Tesman. The picture of her father, General
Gabler, center stage, is a reminder that, like Hjrdis in The Vikings at Helgeland,
Hedda is primarily her fathers daughtera warrior woman.
The similarity between Hjrdis and Hedda is also important in understanding
the latters character. Heddas petulance at not getting all the material goods she
wants at the end of Act I may make her seem to be simply a spoiled brat, but if we
remember Sigurds statement regarding Hjdis: that she must never be content to
live in straitened conditions, then we realize that Hedda has Viking blood in her. It
is a matter of respect that she has the best of everything, for, as in pagan times,
honor is more important than anything else.
Her sensitivity to honor and respect is unfortunately lost in translation, for it
has to do with the use of the formal word for you, De, and the informal du. Until
87

recently in Scandinavia one did not use the informal du except with close friends
and relatives. Even though Aunt Julle is now a relative by marriage, Hedda cannot
force herself to use du when speaking with her, and her ridiculing of the poor
womans hat in the first act is a vicious attempt to put Aunt Julle in her place. As a
maiden aunt with little money she has no standing in society.
The name Thea Elvsted is clearly metaphoric. Thea is the Greek word for
goddess, although at one point (Ibsen, Hedda Gabler 1898-1902, 33) Hedda calls
her Thora by mistake, referring to the Nordic god Thor. Elvsted is the riverplace, plurisignative with all the associations of life-giving watercleansing,
baptism, resurrection. Unlike her treatment of Aunt Julle, Hedda immediately
demands that she and Thea say du to one another as if they were the best of
friends, but she does so with ulterior motives.
Ejlert Lvborgs first name is significant, for it means not learned.62 Unlike
Tesman with his doctoral degree, Ejlert is self-taught, in the spirit of the folk
college movement, and intends not to compete with Tesman for a professorship,
but to give a series of lectures to inspire the folk.63 His topic is the future, about
which no research can be done. Although Hedda and Ejlert have been intimate
friends in the past, she insists upon his addressing her as De in her own home, for
he is no longer a respectable person.
As during the Viking period, until very recently a womans standing in
Scandinavian society depended on her husbands position. For Hjrdis it was
important that her husband be recognized as the pre-eminent Viking, the one who
could do the impossible by killing the polar bear who guarded her lodging. Since
it is obvious that Hedda had many admirers, it may seem strange that she should
choose Tesman, whom she obviously does not love, as her husband. But as a
professors wife she is known as Mrs. Professor Tesman.

88

It is difficult for us Americans to appreciate how highly regarded professors are

in Scandinavia. Even up into the 1970s, in my own experience,64 women would
curtsey before the professor, students would stand as soon as he entered the room,
and even medical doctors were lower in status than a professor. A professors wife
is a very honorable position for Hedda.
Her other reason for marrying Tesman is also lost in the translation. She tells a
friend of the family, Judge Brack, And when he came to me and finally with
violence and power demanded permission to take care of me, I really didnt see
why I shouldnt accept his offer (Ibid. 55). In other words, she was carried off by
force just as Hjrdis had been, the dream of any Viking woman. In Six Plays by
Henrik Ibsen the passage is translated as, And then since he was so absolutely
bent on supporting me, I really didnt see why I shouldnt accept his offer (Ibsen,
Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen 1951, 374).
Hedda Gabler is another play in which Ibsen plumbs the depths of femininity,
especially its bipolar nature as the goddess who inspires and witch who destroys,
or as Ibsen put it, the difference between the light-haired and dark-haired trolls.
Theas hair is unusually fair, almost whitegold (Ibsen, Hedda Gabler 1898-1902,
25). Thea is Goethes eternal feminine, the goddess whose calling is to inspire, or
breath into, with all the ramifications of divine creativity. The new creation may
be an infant, or in the case of Thea, a spiritual child, a book.
Of her own husband Thea says, I dont believe he really cares about anyone
but himself.

And perhaps a little for the children (Ibid. 35) from his first

marriage. Their relationship is an impossible one, for she is always giving of

herself while he is simply taking without regard to her needs as a person. Like
Nora in A Dolls House she has left her husband for good, no matter how much she
is condemned by society for doing so. Needless to say, in Ibsens time, such
independence from marital vows was abhorrent.
89

I only did what I had to do,

Thea says, for all I know is that I must live near Ejlert Lvborg, if Im to live at
all (Ibid. 37).
By assuming the role of the goddess archetype she begins to have a sort of
power over [Ejlert]. After a while he gave up his old habits. Oh, not because I
asked him toI never would have dared do that. But I suppose he realized how
unhappy they made me, and so he dropped them (Ibid. 38). In other words, she
has never imposed her will on him. His reformation is freely chosen. Such is the
way in which true love respects the freedom of man (or woman) to choose.
Hedda says, So you have resurrected him (Ibid.). Ejlert is an alcoholic.
Under Theas influence he has been freed from his obsession:
Hedda (Concealing a scornful smile): So, my darling little Thea,
youve actually reformed him!
Mrs. Elvsted: Well, he says so, at any rate, and in return hes made a
human being out of me. Taught me to think and understand so many
things (Ibid.).
The relationship between Thea and Ejlert is true love, based on mutual support.
Ejlert has not selfishly used Thea simply for his own purposes. He has taught her
to trust her own masculinity, to think for herself, freeing her from her husbands
tyranny. Ejlert has been her savior, as much as she has been his.
Together they write a book which will restore his honor and respect among the
people. But playing the role of a goddess is rather demanding, and Thea is only
human. She cannot quite trust Ejlert, that he will not return to his old ways. She
must be there to keep an eye on him. The result of her lack of faith in him is fatal.
Heddas hair is brown (Ibid. 17); she is a dark-haired troll of the worst kind.
She makes a habit of casting her spell over men in order to gain power over them.
Hedda does so by becoming an archetype. Whenever she is together with a man,
she becomes the woman he wants her to be. As a result, she cannot tolerate being
90

alone, as she was so often on her honeymoon while her husband was doing his
research work. Such a womans very existence depends upon a mans admiration.
When no men are present, she is intolerably bored. Inside she is empty and has no
knowledge of who she really is or what her calling might be.
Many men believe a womans calling is to create new life. That is what
Solness in The Master Builder thought was his wifes destiny. Hedda is pregnant,
but giving birth to a child is the last thing in the world she desires. She would
rather kill children than give birth to them.
The essence of the feminine as witch is the obsession with power, the need to
make men obey in spite of themselves. Hedda thinks she might like to make her
husband become a politician, even though she knows he is not at all suited to be
one, just in order to exhibit her power. As she says concerning her influence on
Ejlert at the end of Act II, For once in my life I want the power to shape a human
destiny (Ibid. 89).
But power corrupts, and Hedda is the supreme example of a woman who
destroys for no other reason than the mere enjoyment of being able to do so. It is
difficult to imagine a woman is capable of being such a Viking who creates havoc
and welcomes death, mainly because men would rather perceive females as
goddesses, and women will not admit such possibilities in themselves.65 Hedda is
a murderer, not by using her own hands, but by using words.
She knows that Ejlert is an alcoholic and tries to get him to drink a glass of
punch, but he refuses several times. Then she sticks the dagger into Thea by
referring to her fatal mistake, her lack of complete trust in Ejlert:
Hedda: (Smiles and nods approvingly to Lvborg): There, you see!
Firm as a rock.

Faithful to all good principles now and forever.

Thats how a man should be. (Turns to Mrs. Elvsted and says with a

91

caress) What did I tell you this morning, Thea? Didnt I tell you not
to be upset?
Lvborg (Amazed): Upset?
Mrs. Elvsted (Terrified): Hedda! Please, Hedda.
Hedda: You see? Now are you convinced? You havent the slightest
reason to be so anxious and worried (Ibid. 84).
Lvborg realizes that Thea does not quite trust him, and his faith in her is
destroyed. He insists on drinking a glass of punchseveral in factand starts on
a drinking spree, during which time he loses his only copy of the manuscript which
he and Thea have composed together. He is lost.
As a matter of fact, the manuscript ends up in Heddas hands, and she has the
power to restore it to him, but she does not do so. Act III ends with Hedda sitting
next to the stove
Hedda (She throws part of the manuscript in the fire and whispers to
herself): Your child, Theayour child and Ejlert Lvborgs. Darling
little Thea, with the curly golden hair.

(Throws more of the

manuscript into the stove) Im burning your child, Thea. (Throws in

the rest of the manuscript) Im burning itburning it(Ibid. 117).
Thea had temporarily saved Ejlert from the power Hedda has previously
exerted over him. Earlier, Hedda and Ejlert had been confidants, sitting in General
Gablers parlor, pretending to read while Hedda probed him to confess the
dissolute lifestyle he was leading at the time.
Lvborg: Do you remember, Hedda, all those wild things I confessed
to you? Things no one suspected at the timemy days and nights of
passion and frenzy, of drinking and madness. How did you make
me talk like that, Hedda? By what power (Ibid. 77)?
Lvborg wants to know why she questioned him so. She replies:
92

Isnt it quite easy to understand that a young girlespecially if it can

be donein secret
Lvborg: Oh?

Hedda: Should be tempted to investigate a forbidden world which

Lvborg: Which?
Hedda:which one is supposed to know nothing about (Ibid. 78)?
Like Hjrdis, Hedda wants to be a true Viking, a man, to actually live her
masculinity, but that was not possible in the nineteenth century.
Eventually, she broke off the relationship with Ejlert. I realized, she says,
the danger; you wanted to spoil our intimacyto drag it down to reality (Ibid.
79). A troll woman must create a dream world, a fantasy of the subconscious, in
order to maintain her power. She cannot breathe in the real world.
Having killed Thea and Ejlerts child, Hedda remains in her fantasy world,
this time dreaming of how Ejlert can become her hero, by committing the most
honorable of Viking deeds, namely to kill himself rather than be dishonored.
Seeing no possible future ahead, Ejlert takes the pistol which she offers to him, but
his death is not the courageous act she had dreamed it would be. In fact, the gun
fired accidentallythe bullet piercing his lower abdomenwhile he was visiting a
brothel.
Judge Brack, however, recognizes the pistol used as belonging to Hedda, a fact
that must be kept secret if she is to avoid a scandal.66 The judge would like to
spend every evening with Hedda that he cannot that he is in love with her. He
understands human nature too well to succumb to enchantment. With his secret
knowledge about the pistol he is the one with powerover Hedda, for the rest of
her lifean intolerable situation. So, like Hjrdis, she does the manly thing, and
kills herself. In so doing, she is also killing Tesmans real child. She is the
epitome of the witch, or dark-haired troll woman.
93

The actions of an enchanting woman are not necessarily deliberately chosen. I

believe they are autonomous promptings arising from the subconscious mind.
Hedda says, I suddenly get impulses like that, and I simply cant control them
(Ibid. 60). Bewitching men comes naturally, especially to young women. At least
that has been my observation.67

94

On the Heroic Ballad (1857)

In his essay On the Heroic Ballad and its Meaning for the Art of Poetry (10
& 17 May 1857) Ibsen gives us the most complete rsum of his thoughts on
Nordic folklore and its use in contemporary literature. He begins by positing the
real source of this literature to be, not a single poet, but the creative ability of the
entire folk: Of the art of the past the heroic ballad is certainly the only monument
which has been able through the ages, with all their vicissitudes, to lead a fresh,
and powerful life in the consciousness of the folk. The heroic ballad is not
created by a single person. It is the sum of the whole folks poetical powers. It is
the fruit of its poetic gifts (Ibsen, Samlede verker 1928-1957, 15:130).
Later on Ibsen corrects this statement by admitting the original ballad is created
by a single person. This does not deny the fact that in the form we now have it, the
ballad is the product of all the people.
Concerning what I have just said, it will presumably be clear that I
have by no means become entangled in a contradiction when I earlier
said that the heroic ballad was composed by the people themselves,
and now I differentiate between the people and the composer.

The

relationship is the same as in the sagas: that is, the heroic ballad
naturally depends upon a single person for its first draft; but that draft,
that form, in which it has come down to us is harmonious in the most
intimate manner with the viewpoint of the people (Ibid. 141).
95

Because folklore is grounded in the collective poetic powers of the people,

arising from its collective subconsciousness, it is able to appeal to the common
man in a way that literature derived from foreign cultures is incapable of doing.
If the new is to speak to the people, it must also to a certain extent be
old. It may not be discovered but recovered. It may not appear as
foreign and incongruous to that body of conceptions which is the
heritage of the people, and in which the greatest part of the national
vigor rests. It may not be poured from an esoteric ladle whose use is
unknown and whose style does not fit in with the everyday dishes. It
must be recovered as an old family heirloom which we had misplaced,
but which we remember as soon as we catch sight of it because it
recalls so many memoriesmemories which in some way lay deep
within us, fermenting in darkness and uncertainty, until the poet came
and put them into words (Ibid. 131).
Folklore is an oral, not a written literature. It depends for its vitality upon the
living word. That is, it must be passed by mouth from generation to generation.
The phrase the living word is Grundvigs. In fact, the original conception of the
folk college was that it was to be a school oriented around the spoken rather than
the dead letter of the printed word (Grundtvig 1832, Introduction).

When I

attended Lollands folkehjskole in 1957, Headmaster Bengtsson gave a daily

lecture on Nordic Mythology in order to keep alive the spoken word. He could tell
when a student began to listen with his heart and to understand that the numinous
world of the students ancestors was describing his own personal experience.
Speaking from his own experience as one who had collected folktales from the
lips of the peasants he had visited in the Norwegian valleys, Ibsen declared that
once put into print, the word loses its original power.

96

In the meantime it is rather a strange thing with this as with every

product of the peoples spontaneous poetic urge; it seems as if passing
[the heroic ballad] on from mouth to mouth were the only way in which
it can freely develop to lead an ever renewed life among the people.
Once the heroic ballad passes over into the world of books, it will at the
same time and to the same extent cease to live on the peoples lips. It
will also appear to us in an entirely different light. In print the heroic
ballad becomes old and grey, even old-fashioned if you will. On the lips
of the people it knows nothing of age. The living word is for the heroic
ballad what the apple of Ydun was for the gods: it not only nourishes; it
renews and renews (Ibid. 133).
With the coming of civilization and urban culture the creation of oral literature
by the entire folk has passed away. The increasing civilization takes away that
national uniqueness which is the fundamental condition for all folk poetry. In
order to produce poetry the folk need, moreover, a vigorous, strong and eventful
age, rich in incidents and outstanding personalitiesrich in men in whom many, or
at least a few, of the folks characteristics have become concentrated (Ibid. 134).
Although the folk may no longer produce their own literature, Ibsen prophesied
that the art of Norway would turn to the ballads as an endless source of inspiration.
That time will come when the national poetic art will seek out the ballad as an
inexhaustible gold mine. Cleansed, restored to its original purity, and elevated
through art, the ballad will again take root among the people. A beginning has
already been made with the sagas. Oehlenschlgers genius intuited the necessity
of a national foundation for a national poetry, and it is upon this principle that the
whole of his work is built (Ibid.).

97

There is, however, a distinct difference between the saga and the heroic ballad
as far as Ibsen is concerned. The ballad contains an appreciation of the numinous
which the saga does not have.
When I have previously used the expression saga, I should like to point
out that I do not understand this category to include the historical
tradition only, but also the mythical legends and songs.

In

contradistinction to these, the heroic ballad must be considered as for the

most part Christian. The ballad certainly contains a heathen element in
it, but even that is on an entirely different and higher plane than in the
mythical legend.

It is in this very aspect that Christianitys poetic

descendant, Romanticism, reveals its influence on balladry.

The

worshipper of the ancient gods, not knowing the power of faith where
the intellect fails, constructed for himself a world in which the laws of
intellect were completely abolished.

In this world everything, and

therefore nothing became supernatural. This is how he got along; in this

way he managed to reconcile faith and intellect. The romantic outlook
on life, on the other hand, takes another direction.

It pays homage to

that sentence of Shakespeare: that more is found between heaven and

earth than philosophers know how to express.

It concedes to the

intellectual its rights and its validity; but beside the intellectual, over and
through it, goes the mysterium, the enigmatic, the inexplicable, the
Christian if you will, since Christianity is itself a mystery. It preaches
faith in that which cannot be comprehended. It is in this respect that the
mythical legend is fundamentally different from the heroic ballad. Their
relationship is the same as that between the fable and the fairy tale: the
fable does not know the miraculous; the fairy tale has its roots in it (Ibid.
138).
98

Having drawn this distinction between mythic legend and heroic ballad, Ibsen
later distinguishes between the skaldic lay and the ballad. Skaldic poetry was an
artificial fabrication; balladry a powerful, living fruit.

The skaldic lay was

manufactured; the heroic ballad was composed (Ibid. 144).

Now that Ibsen has discussed the lay and the saga, as well as mythic legends
and songs, he traces them all to the same primeval source.

The intimate

association of the ballads to mythic themes makes it not unlikely that the whole of
mythology once long, long ago in ancient times was expressed and propagated
among the people in ancient lays which in a way form the skeleton of our own
ballads (Ibid. 145).

99

Olaf Liljekrans (1857)

Also written in 1857 was Olaf Liljekrans, in which Ibsen again used a folk
ballad as his primary source. This time it was the story about Oluf [sic] Liljekrans
(Landstad 1853, 355). But as in The Feast at Solhaug Ibsen did not rely entirely
upon the ballads; he also drew much from the legend of the Jystedalsrypen [The
Grouse in Jyste Valley], which he had used in his earlier play Rypen I Justedal.
In his critical review of Jensens Huldrens Hjem [Home of the Fairies] Ibsen
had written on June 22, 1851: The national author is the one who understands
how to communicate through his work the fundamental tones which ring out to us
from mountain and valley, from pasture and shore, but above all from our own
inner being [italics Ibsens] (Ibsen, Samlede verker 1928-1957, 15:74).
From the material I have covered so far we can begin to see what he meant by
this statement. The national poet must appeal to something which lies deep within
the subconscious soul of the individual Norwegian, a unique heritage which
distinguishes the Norwegian folk from all other peoples. The poets words must
have a domestic tone; they must rediscover for the individual some ancient tribal
memory. To forget these memories is to lose contact with the deepest self, to
become superficial and too intellectual. Whereas these memories were formerly
kept alive by the oral traditions of folklore, the advance of civilization has
destroyed the poetic vitality of the collective folk. Now individual authors and

100

dramatists must carry on the tradition in a new way, but how? How can a modern
dramatist reach that folk heritage in the inward being of each man?
At first Ibsen tried to carry on the work of Oehlenschlger by Christianizing the
Vikings in The Warriors Barrow; but already in 1853 when he revised the play, he
had come to realize that the pagan did not become Christian quite so easily. In the
first version of The Warriors Barrow, written in 1850, all the Vikings follow the
lead of Gandalf and suddenly become Christian, but in the revised version, each is
treated as an individual. Gandalf becomes Christian, but gaut heads for Iceland
to escape the Christian disease. (Psche, Ibsen og nationalromantiken 1909, 649).
Next Ibsen tried to show the superiority of a Birk (in St. Johns Eve), whose
fairy vision brought deeper insight into his own soul, over a Poulsen, whose
aesthetic sophistication did not permit him to penetrate to the inward depths. But
this approach also proved to be entirely unsatisfactory. A miraculous vision or
dream might be granted to a chosen few like Birk, but quite obviously there were
not very many of the chosen in Ibsens audience. If he wanted to awaken the folk
spirit in the ordinary Norwegian, he must be able to speak to him in terms of his
own experience; there can be no appeal to the supernatural. So Ibsen turned, in
Lady Inger of strt, to historical facts and known historical figures. Perhaps
through them he could stir the tribal memories of his contemporaries; but historical
facts proved to be too cold and objective; they did not touch the depths of the soul.
From his essay on the heroic ballad it would seem that Ibsen had found what he
was looking for in the Nordic ballads. Here was a vital, living tradition still known
to his contemporaries. So thoroughly did Ibsen become imbued with the spirit of
the ballads that he was able in The Feast at Solhaug literally to recreate the songs
in dramatic form; and he succeeded in reaching the very depths of his Norwegian
audience. So intensely human were the ballads it was no longer necessary to

101

appeal to the supernatural; the sense of the mysterious, the fascinating, the
preternatural was an integral part of the lives of the ballad folk.
In writing Olaf Liljekrans Ibsen drew upon numerous ballads, and according to
Psche some passages in the play are direct quotations from the ballads.68

The

meeting between Alfhilde [the enchanting elf] and Olaf reminds us of several
songs. Olaf has gone wandering in the mountains:
Bewildered I grew and lost my path; I wandered far, far in among the
mountains; I discovered the beautiful valley,69 where no foot has trod,
where no eye has feasted ere mine. A heavy slumber fell upon me
there; the elf maidens played in the meantime, and they drew me into
their play.

But when I awoke, there was affliction in my soul;

homeward I rode, but down there I could no more be content; it seemed

as if I had left behind me the richest and best in life, as if a wonderful
treasure were held in store for me, if only I sought and found it (Psche,
Olaf Liljekrans. Et bidrag til studiet av Ibsens forhold til vore viser og
sagn 1909, 131).
Olaf returns to the mountain valley and finds Alfhilde there. On their first
night together he forgets both kinsmen and friends; the second night my
Christian name and my forefathers home; and the third night I forgot more than
God and home, more than heaven and earth. I forgot myself (Ibid. 132).70
Although Olaf never ceases to be purely human, Alfhilde steps out from the
world of the fairy tale. This is particularly apparent in Act I, 10, when Ibsen in his
directions states that Alfhilde shall be fantastically dressed and adorned with
flowers and garlands of leaves. She is a huldre, although at times she appears
human enough.

In her is embodied the mystery of the attraction which the

mountains hold for the Norwegian folk. On a psychological level she is the eternal
feminine. She and Hilde (The Master Builder) are sisters.
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In this play Ibsen again introduces the difference between falling in love and
true love. Olaf is enthralled by the troll woman while in the mountains. When he
gets down to earth, in the valley, he is persuaded by his mother to turn against
Alfhilde and dutifully marry Ingeborg, who in fact does not really love him, but
prefers another man. The situation creates extreme suffering for Alfhilde, who has
come down into the valley to become Olafs bride, so much so that she can no
longer live the real life down below.
Her only recourse is revenge. The motif of the spurned woman who sets fire to
the church where her lover is being married can be traced to the ballad Liti
Kerstis hevn. [Little Kerstis Revenge] (Landstad 1853, 551). This ballad was
also the most influential in forming Ibsens conception of Alfhildes character.
But it is through this suffering that Olaf and Alfhilde are prepared truly to love
one another. In the end Olaf freely chooses, against his mothers wishes, to marry
the girl who had enchanted him. His love for her is no longer the result of a spell
she has cast over him, but a choice willingly made. His mother is about to pass a
death sentence upon Alfhild:
Lady Kirsten. [With a loud voice] For the last time! There stands the
witch and incendiary! Who will save and marry her?
Olaf. I will save and marry her! . . .
Lady Kirsten.

Olaf Liljekrans, my son!

What have you done?

Disgrace yourself for all time?

Olaf. No, I blot out the shame and disgrace which I brought on myself
by my treatment of her!... You used me merely to build aloft your own
pride, and I was weak and acquiesced. But now have I won power and
will; now I stand freely on my own feet and lay the foundation of my
own happiness (Ibsen, Samlede verker 1928-1957, 195).

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Sturtevant believes that Ibsens attitude toward fairy-lore has changed

considerably in the past seven years to a more realistic appraisal of its value.71
Sturtevant also contrasts Alfhilde, the mountain elf with whom Olaf falls in love,
and Olaf: Alfhilde representing the illusionary visions of fairy-lore, Olaf the actual
facts of life.
Certainly Olaf is imprisoned by his mother in the practical world of political
convenience. He is betrothed to Ingeborg. Their marriage will end an ageless
dispute between their two families. But Sturtevant fails to realize that Alfhilde is
not illusionary, but rises from the numinous world of the subconscious. She is a
real presence in a mans heart, the feminine in its childlike innocence and purity,
which inspires a man to create, to be a poet.72
Ibsens conception of the poets mission as interpreter of the national spirit73
remains the same in both the speech of Knud in Rypen I Justedal (Act II) and in
that of Thorgjerd, Alfhildes father, in Olaf Liljekrans (Act III, 10). The national
poet: Must watch for the life that beats in the soul, / And clothe in music what
people but dream, / And give voice to its sorrow and dole (Orbeck 1921, 237)!
In this case, in an attempt to maintain the poetic form, Orbecks translation is
misleading.74 A literal translation would be: Must call forth that life which beats
in the breast, / clothe dreams of the folk in music and word, / and clarify its
fermenting thoughts. In other words, the inspiration upon which poetry is based
is not just a matter of expressing emotions, which in a modern, scientific age, after
all, are not real because they can neither been seen nor touched.

Quite the

contrary. Inspiration is that which connects the inward life of the soul, both
individual and collective, which thinks in pictures, in dreams; and the intellectual
life of the conscious mind absorbed in the events of the world out there.75
least, that is what I understand Ibsen to be saying in these three lines.

104

At

In Ibsens work the mountain top appears to be a metaphor for the world on the
other side of the threshold, subconscious and therefore inaccessible to conscious
control. He is referring to the soul, apprehended in our dreams, full of fantastic
creatures who speak through the writer if he but stand aside and listen to them.
Such creatures appear as fermenting thoughts, as if they have been slowly agitating
until they present themselves as fully realized characters to the conscious mind. In
my own experience they appear to be much more than, in Sturtevants words,
mere poetic imagery. They are, in Ibsens words, music which ring[s] out to us
from mountain and valley above all from our own inner being.
The tendency among some academics has been to dismiss Ibsens early plays
with their trolls and elves as insignificant, when in fact they are the foundation for
his intuitive knowledge of the psychic forces which we spend a lifetime
confronting. In Ibsens words, To live is to struggle with the trolls in the vaults of
the heart and the mind (Ibsen, At leve--er krig med trolde. 1877-78).

105

The Lady from the Sea (1888)

In Norway the numinous powers of folklore reside high in the mountains, but
as Landstad reminds us:
In the Danish collections there are not ballads about those drawn into the
mountain, but instead about girls who are seduced and drawn into the sea
(cf. the beautiful song about Agnete and the Merman, Nyr. 1, 310 and
313).76 This trait is characteristic of national poetry. The same ideas are
dealt with, but in different ways according to the countrys natural
characteristics.

While the Norwegian and Swedish ballads place a

mysterious world in the mountains, the Danes place it in the sea, and our
mountain king is the same as their merman (Landstad 1853, 432).
In 1888 Ibsen again returned to the theme of a person who is fascinated into
following, with her soul at least, one who has cast a spell over her. This time Ibsen
was living in Denmark and spending many hours watching the sea from the shore
outside Frederikshavn. The fascination of the sea recalled to his mind this very
ballad which Landstad mentions, that of Agnete and the Merman, the Danish
counterpart of Liti Kersti. The result of his reflections was the drama The Lady
from the Sea, and several reviews of the play in 1888 drew attention to the fact
that Ellida Wangels fate was a new variation of the theme from the Danish folk
ballad concerning Agnete and the Merman (Bull, Inledning til Fruen fra havet
1928-1957, 11:9).
106

In fact a specific reference is made to the ballad at the very end of the play:
Ellida. When you have once become a land-creature you can no longer
find your way back again to the sea, or to the sea-life either.
Ballestad. Why, thats exactly the case with my mermaid.
Ellida. Something likeyes.
Ballestad. Only with this differencethat the mermaid dies of it, while
human beings can acclamacclimatize themselves (Ibsen, Four Plays by
Ibsen n.d., 432).
In the ballad Agnete is drawn into the sea and gives birth to seven children.
She asks the merman for permission to return to her home for a brief visit, but
when she does so the people in the community do not know her, the images in the
church turn their eyes away from her, she cannot pray, and she spills the chalice
with the holy wine on to the ground. She has become a pagan, and rather than
return to the sea she dies (Buchanan n.d., 76).
The Lady from the Sea begins with the painter Ballestad describing the painting
he is working on which he will call The Mermaids End. It was the lady of this
house [Ellida], he says, who got me thinking about painting something like this
(Ibsen, Fruen fra havet 1898-1902, 8). We are in the world of mythological
images. Ellidas name suggests an ancient heritage. She is, according to her friend
Arnholm, a pagan, as the old minister called you, because your father had you
baptized, as he said, with the name of a ship and not with a Christian name (Ibid.
23).
Ellida, Dr. Wangels second wife, is described as having a special relationship
to the sea, and we soon discover that ten years ago she has briefly met an American
sailor in her home town far up north, and fallen in love with him. Again we are
talking about becoming possessed by an archetypal figure in the subconscious

107

mind, for she knows nothing about him as a person, as he really is. Nevertheless,
he has cast his spell over her. He is determined that she will belong to him.
When, back at sea, the seaman reads in the newspaper that she has married
another man, he says, But she is mine, and shell remain mine. Shell follow after
me, even if I should come home to get her as a man drowned in the dark sea (Ibid.
34). Although Ellida is very fond of her husband, she cannot give her whole heart
to him; such is the archetypal power of the man with whom she has fallen in love.
Her husband tries to understand why she cannot love him whole-heartedly. He
says: You think that my mind is split in two between you and [my first wife].
You see something unsettling in our relationship. It is therefore that you no longer
canor no longer will live with me as my wife.

You cannot stand the

environment. There is not enough light for you, not enough open skies around you
(Ibid. 48-49).
To demonstrate how totally committed he is to their relationship, he is willing
to leave behind all that he has held dear, his birthplace, his practice as a doctor, in
order to move to a place where she will be more at home. Such is his selfless
devotion.
But moving somewhere else will be no solution. Ellida finally confesses her
attachment to the American sailor. She is not even sure what his real name is; he
keeps changing it.

In fact, he murdered his captain and had to leave Ellida

immediately afterward. But the reality of who he is, is unimportant. To her he is a

reflection of something in the depths of her own being, her soul. She tries to
explain to her husband what she cannot really understand herself. During their
short time together she and the American talked:
About storms and silence. About dark nights on the sea. The sea in
glittering sunlight we also spoke of. But most of all we talked about
whales and porpoises, and seals, which like to lie on the rocks along the
108

inlet during the warmth of the middle of the day. And we spoke about
martens and eagles and all the other seabirds, you knowThink about
itisnt it strangewhen we spoke about such things, it seemed to me
as if both the sea animals and seabirds were part of him. and it almost
seemed as if I also became one with all of them (Ibid. 53-54).
Ellida is describing that state of ecstasy which we may be fortunate enough to
experience on rare occasions, an altered state of consciousness when the soul
speaks, and we know we are One with all that exists. Being in love can indeed be
an ecstatic experience.
In a numinous ritual the stranger has bound two rings together and cast them
into the sea, so that they are metaphorically married. The sea may be seen as a
metaphor for what Jung called the collective unconscious. In that mysterious,
unknown world, they are bound to one another for life.

Ibsen expresses his

intuition regarding our collective memory through Ellidas words: I believe that if
human beings had from the very beginning gotten used to living their lives on the
seathat is, in the seathey would now have been completely different from
what we are. Both better and happier (Ibid. 72).
In the presence of the stranger, Ellida has no will of her own, but after he leaves
she comes to her senses, and when he writes to her, she writes back that they must
never see one another again. But the stranger pays no attention to her dismissals;
he will have his way, and there is nothing she can do about it. She cannot escape
from his control.
After waiting for his return for seven years, Ellida finally, as she puts it, sells
herself by marrying Dr. Wangel, even though she cannot truly love him. She
becomes very fond of him, as a friend, but she is bound to the sea and cannot free
herself from that bondage, any more than Kaja could escape from Solness in The
Master Builder.
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The ballad about Agnete and the Merman, however, raises another issue. What
if the troll, or merman, gives his victim her freedom? The merman allows his wife
to leave his kingdom and rise again into the conscious world. When the stranger to
whom Ellida is bound does finally return, he expects her to go with him, has made
all the arrangements on the ship for her accommodation, even her clothing. As we
learn at the end of Act III, however, she must come to him willingly. It is her
choice to make, not his.
At this point Ibsen offers his answer to the all important question: How is the
transition made from falling in love to true love? In most respects Dr. Wangel
refuses to impose his will on Ellida. I would rather have her just as she [is] (Ibid.
98), he says. But he cannot totally abandon control over her; he needs her too
much for that. He must do her thinking for her, because she is not in her right
mind if she should imagine leaving him to go off with a stranger. In other words,
he must be her intellect, the one to make the decisions for her.
As long as he insists on doing so, she has no alternative but to be drawn by the
stranger into the life of the sea. She can make no conscious choice herself. She
therefore pleads with her husband to give her the freedom to choose. What I want
is that we two shall agree to freely release one another (Ibid. 109), she says. I
will not excuse myself because I am another mans wife. Not excuse myself
because I have no choice. Otherwise there will be no decisive outcome (Ibid.
110). In a true love relationship there must be total freedom.
Ellida has to be able to face alone what is horrifying. The horrifying, she
says, it is what frightens and beckons (Ibid. 111). In my own experience, when
confronted with the trolls, or archetypes, that inhabit the subconscious mind, one
cannot rely on outside help, when one has fallen under their power. But they are
horrifying only so long as they control us.

110

On one occasion, when I was beset by the negative side of the feminine
archetype, I had a vivid hallucination of the Wicked Witch from the West, in The
Wizard of Oz. I asked her, What is the power that you have over me? Her
answer: I have no more power than what you are willing to give to me. Since
that time I have felt free, and in my dreams the witch is no longer a horrifying
figure, but rather a caricature riding backwards on a broomstick, an object of
ridicule.
Dr. Wangel understands his wifes predicament, for in his relationship with the
woman he loves he finds her to be both frightening and beckoning,77 as is perhaps
the case with most men. It is probably best for both of usif we part.But I can
not anyway.You are for me the terrifying, Ellida. The beckoningthat is your
power (Ibid. 112).
Dr. Wangel, however, is able to put his own feelings aside and to concentrate
solely on her welfare. I can [let you go], he says, because I love you so
much. Now you can choose freely. And take full responsibility (Ibid. 138139). At this point the stranger loses his power, and Ellida can choose to love her
husband without reserve, for as that wise sage of the Middle Ages Meister Eickhart
says, love is a matter of choice.
A transformation has taken place. Ibsens explanation for it is contained in the
words of Dr. Wangel: You sense and think in picturesand in visual ideas.78
Your longing and striving for the sea,his attraction for youtoward a total
strangerthat has been an expression of an awakening and growing need for
freedom (Ibid.140). Dr. Wangel gives her the freedom she must have.
The miraculous ending of the play may appear to be rather too romantic, a
return to Ibsens romanticism in Catiline. Human beings do not normally change
so quickly.

Perhaps one has to experience it himself to believe that such a

transformation is possible, that the spell of the enchantment can be broken, that
111

when water is poured over the Wicked Witch of Oz, she melts away. But the
myths assure us that such miracles are possible. When we listen to them with our
hearts, we know that they speak the truth.
In a subplot Ibsen describes another difference between true love and
infatuation. The sculptor Lyngstad adores Wangels young daughter, Bolette. To
him she is the feminine archetype as goddess in its purest form. In this case there
is no attempt to control the person with whom he has fallen in love. Rather it is a
matter of the feminine in a man being the source of his creativity.
Lyngstad is totally immersed in his own feelings and has little regard for
Bolette as a real person. He says, I believe that marriage must be regarded as a
kind of wonder. That a woman little by little is transformed to be like her husband
(Ibid. 88).
Bolette asks him if the same might be true of a man, that he becomes like his
wife. He replies, A man? No, Ive never thought of that, because a man,
especially an artist, has a calling which he must follow. He continues, But that
she can help him to createthat she can make his job easier by being with him and
making things cozy for him and take care of him and make his life really
enjoyable. It seems to me that must be so very delightful for a woman (Ibid. 90).
To which Bolette replies, Oh, you dont realize yourself how self-centered you
are (Idid. 90). She is in her early teens, too young to be thinking of marriage, but
she is wise enough to recognize that Lyngstrand is in love with himself and has
little interest in her.
He is about to leave on a long journey and asks her to write to him, to think
about him, to wait for his return. She will be the inspiration for his life calling.
Bolette knows that in fact he is dying. There is no future for them. She is not
entranced by his dreams, but sees them for what they arefantasies of the
imagination, or in Jungian terms, a mans experience of the feminine in himself
112

Loves Comedy (1862)

After spending nearly six years in Bergen as director of the National Theater,
Ibsen returned to Christiania in the summer of 1857 to become director of the
Norwegian Theater in the capital. The period which followed was a trying one
indeed. The responsibilities which his recent marriage (June 26, 1856) placed
upon him and the hesitant and inadequate support which the Norwegian Theater
received from its patrons combined to place him in a situation of insistent poverty.
The idealism of his nature was drowned in bitterness, and after five years he wrote
Krligheds Komedie [Loves Comedy] (1862), a bitter satire. In the play Ibsen
holds up to ridicule a priest of the church, a precedent which was entirely
unforgivable in his day. In 1862 the theater at Christiania went bankrupt. He was
both poverty-stricken and ostracized.
According to Archer, the author argues for the mariage de convenance as
superior to the love-match, which all too often proves superficial and temporary,
leading inevitably to a marriage of mutual dissatisfaction. I would argue that, as in
The Lady from the Sea, Ibsen is making a distinction between infatuation and love
based on the freedom to choose.
Loves Comedy marks the beginning of Ibsens use of modern settings to deal
with contemporary social problems. Until now he had attempted to deal with the
passions and complexities of contemporary human beings by revitalizing stories of
the past in which profound human insights had been captured in a context of myth
and magic. In Loves Comedy he reversed the approach by concentrating on the
113

contemporary social problem, giving a sense of the timeless universality of his

theme, however, by alluding to a single Icelandic saga.
In the tale of the Vlsunga Saga Svanhild was the daughter of Sigurd
and Gudrun, the Siegriend and Kriemhild of the Libelungenlied.
The fierce king Jormunrek, hearing of her matchless beauty, sends his
son Randever to woo her in his name. Randever is, however, induced
to woo her on his own, and the girl approves. Jormunrek thereupon
causes Randever to be arrested and hanged, and meeting with
Svanhild, as he and his men ride home from the hunt, tramples her to
death under their horses hoofs (Archer, The Collected Works of
Henrik Ibsen 1906-1912, 1:463).
In the first draft of the play, the saga is referred to directly in Falks remark,
Svanhild, as she now is, must be trodden underfoot, stamped upon, crushed under
the horses (Ibsen, Efterladte Skrifter 1909, 1:459).

In the final version the

reference is simply to the mythical princess who, guiltless, died beneath the
horses feet (Archer, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen 1906-1912, 1:317).
In Ibsens play the young man who woos Svanhild is a poet by the name of
Falk. He begins by making reference to her name:
Falk: But [your] name grabbed my attention at once;
That wild Vlsung Saga with its horror,
With its long family history of fallen heroes,
Which seemed to me to stretch down into our own times;
I saw in you a Svanhild number two
In another form, accommodated to our present time (Ibsen, Samlede
Vrker 1962, 1:206).
Falks own name, meaning hawk, also comes from the saga, for as Randver
was led to the gallows, he took his hawk and plucked the feathers from off it, and
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bade show it to his father; and when the king saw it, then he said, Now may folk
behold that he deemeth my honour to be gone away from me, even as the feathers
of his hawk; and therewith he bade deliver him from the gallows. But in that
while had Bikki wrought his will, and Randver was dead-slain (Of the Wedding
and Slaying of Swanhild n.d.).
So Loves Comedy is based upon a saga of romantic love in which three young
couples fall in love and must pay the consequences for doing so. By this time
Ibsen was completely disenchanted with romanticism, and in particular with a love
which begins in ecstasy and ends in lifeless marriage.
Falling in love, which in Norwegian is called forelskelse (literally before
love), can be something that occurs instantaneously, as was the case with the
pastors wife: She had met Strmand in The Drama: to see and to love him were
one and the same (Ibsen, Samlede Vrker 1962, 1:192).
Later on, the pastors wife could not remember at all what she felt at the time,
even though she had left her family to follow him up into the mountainswithout
their first being married. She has even forgotten what it is to love someone. But
then, she is now pregnant with their thirteenth child.
Falling in love also means living in the moment: I sit here and live; intoxicated
in this moment, there is nothing more I desire (Ibid. 1:189), says Lind, the student
of theology. Its not the book that is enough to be the Jacobs ladder to my God.
Now I must go out and seek him in life (Ibid. 1:194).
There is also an awakening of the creative spirit. With Styver, another young
man, it is the writing of poetry (Ibid. 1:187). Pastor Strmand had composed
music which he sang while playing the guitar.
If falling in love is a matter of a man projecting his feminine side, his soul, onto
a woman out there, it is also a revelation of the divine, creative spirit in himself
with which he has not had contact before. It is crossing the threshold into the
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world of the numinous, the mysterious, the unknown. But it is a transformation

that is going on in the man himself, and has little to do with the woman as she
actually is.
Falk falls in love with Svanhild, and her first reaction is to recognize what he
really isromantic, self-centered:
Svanhild: You used earlier a picture which has awakened me
To a clear understanding of your flight from the earth.
You compared yourself to a hawk that must head
Against the wind if it is to reach the heights;
I was the puff of wind that could carry you toward the blue;
Without me your abilities were powerless.
How pitiful! . . . .
I saw you, not as a hawk, but as a charmer,
A poetic charmer, made of paper (Ibid. 1:208).
She instinctively recognizes that romantic love is self-centered and will not
have anything to do with such childs play. She is after all a descendant of the
Vikings, a loner with a mind of her own.
But in Act II Falk gives a long lecture on the nature of love, suggesting that its
home is the land of fairytales (Ibid. 1:221) and ending with his determination to
fight a war against lies [that] look like the truth (Ibid. 1:225). The conventional
lie is that romantic love must result in marriage, when in fact it is often a very poor
foundation upon which to build a permanent relationship. In my personal case it
never crossed my mind to marry the woman with whom I fell in love. I was
enchanted; when she beckoned, I came.

But there was no freedom in the

relationship.
Falks honesty wins Svanhilds heart. Everyone else turns against him because
he calls love a comedy, but she declares: If you will fight against lies, I will stand,
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as armor-bearer, faithfully by your side (Ibid. 1:227). Spoken like a true Viking
womanreminiscent of Hjrdis in The Vikings at Helgeland. In Svanhilds eyes
Falk is becoming a hero, but in this case he is not a swashbuckling killer, but a man
of intellect fighting for the truth against the conventional wisdom of society.
Social expectations were that if a man falls in love with a woman, then they
would become engaged, and the women in the play (with the exception of
Svanhild) are terribly excited about Linds and Styvers engagements. They, as
well as Pastor Strmand, the official spokesman in such matters, are more than
willing to give their advice to the young loving couples.
Lind, a student of theology, is committed to his calling: to fight the good fight
overseas, among the emigrants in America, of all places. But this struggle for
faith, that is my futures best dream, Lind says, to which Styvers fiance replies,
Oh, who believes in dreams in our civilized time (Ibid. 1:217)? So the women
convince Lind that he should give up any idea of traveling overseas.
Meanwhile, the pastor counsels Linds fiance to put aside her fear of leaving
home and be willing to follow a man so committed to his calling, as is the duty of
any wife. Therein lies the comedy, for by listening to the advice of others rather
than to their own hearts, Lind and his fiance end up more confused than ever
about what their future should be. In my own experience, following ones calling
often means doing what appears to be impractical in the eyes of others, but in
retrospect is clearly obeying the will of God.
Living in the fairy tale world of romantic love may be fine for a while, but
when a man becomes engaged and then married, society requires that he become
more practical in his thinking. In the case of the pastor, he abandoned his calling
up in the mountains when the first twins were born. His responsibility first and
foremost became to provide a pleasant life for his family, and he became a straw
man, [which is the meaning of his name Strmand] devoid of spiritual depth. His
117

advice to Linds fiance to follow Lind overseas is not based upon encouraging
them to obey the will of God, but upon the conventional idea that a woman must be
under her husbands thumb.
Throughout his work Ibsen emphasizes the importance of a man sacrificing
everything in order to follow his destiny. Otherwise, he is likely to become a
straw man, empty inside, engaged in a job which provides no meaning because it
is not what he was meant to do.
Falk and Svanhild are loners, free from paying attention to what others might
say and highly critical of romantic love. In the beginning of Act III they realize
that their love is a gift from God that makes absolute demands and requires
sacrifice as well as suffering (Ibid. 1:231). Earlier Falk has declared: You have
awakened in me a higher calling;/ in the midst of the crowd stands the noble
church,/ where the voice of truth shall ring loud and clear (Ibid. 1:228). And later
on: I feel as if I am Gods lost child/ Then he called me home with mild hands/
And as I come, he has lighted the lamp (Ibid. 1:232).
Their love is a revelation of Gods love in their hearts. They are not thinking
about themselves and their own happiness, but of the gift which has been given to
them. Svanhild says, And see how easy it is for two to conquer,/ when he is a
man, to which Falk replies, And she is totally a woman (Ibid. 1:232).
Then Guldstad appears. He is an older man who was once in love with the
pastors wife, whom he has just met again after many years. Of the overwhelming
feelings he felt for her as a youth, there is nothing left. For him, falling in love is
humbug, an illusion. He proposes to marry Svanhild and offers her the kind of
love which is the foundation of a good marriage: friendship, and caring for the
other person, not as a projection of his own fantasy but as a person equal in her
own right. She is not to give her answer immediately. He will return in a year to
discover what it is.
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Whereas Svanhild up to this point has thought that Falk was the one man she
could ever love, she is now faced with a choice, freely made, uncontaminated by
the conventions of society. Svanhild realizes that although she was entranced by
the idea of following her hero Falk, she does not in fact really want to be his wife.
So she chooses Guldstad.
Archer calls it a mariage de convenance, but I do not think so. Real love, the
kind that is eternal, is a choice, not a matter of turbulent emotions.79 Consistent
with Ibsens later plays, Svanhild is making a choice to marry an older man
because he is mature enough to give her the freedom and respect she needs.
As for Falk, he gladly accepts Svanhilds decision, for he realizes that her
choice is best for both of them:
Yes, this is the only way I can reach you!
Just as the grave is the way to lifes morning light,
so is love first married with life
when it is freed from longing and from wild lust
love flies to the spiritual home of memoryfreed. . . .
Now I have lost you in this life,
but I have won you for eternity (Ibid. 1:249).
In Jungian terms the last you is not Svanhild, the woman out there, but the
feminine within himself, the goddess, his very soul, the source of the creative
spirit.
On the ship sailing from Guangzhou to Hong Kong so that we could fly home, I
could not sleep, but found myself walking the deck, and suddenly receiving my
next call: to teach in Russia. In the taxi on the way to the airport the next day, I
spoke to my wife about my intuition. Her reply? You must be mad! But my
wife is an Agnes.

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As is so often the case with such voices from the heart, we did not go precisely
to Russia, but to Lithuania, close enough, where in 1991 we rejoiced with the
Lithuanians when they gained their freedom from the Soviet Union. My own
yardstick for determining the difference between my will and Gods will? If it is
something you really would rather not do, it is probably Gods will.

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The Pretenders (1863)

In the same year (1858) that Ibsen was beginning to form the design for Loves
Comedy, he was also attracted by the accounts of the civil war between the Baglers
and the Birkebejners contained in the third volume of P. A. Munchs Det norske
Folks Historie [The History of the Norwegian People] (Munch 1852-59). The
theme was already well known: Adam Oehlenschlger had written his famous
poetic drama Hkon Jarl [Earl Hakon] on the same subject, and Bjrnsterne
Bjrnson had begun his literary career with a drama dealing with the BaglerBirkebejner feud entitled Mellom Slagene [Between the Battles] (1856). Ibsen was
at the time particularly aware of Bjrnson and the popular acclaim which he was
receiving, while Ibsen himself was being denounced for his latest drama, Loves
Comedy.
In a letter to Peter Hansen, Ibsen described the state of acute depression under
which he wrote The Pretenders: The fact that all were against me, that there
was no longer anyone outside my family circle of whom I could say, He believes
in me, must, as you can easily see, have aroused a mood which found its outlet
in The Pretenders (Archer, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen 1906-1912,
2:xxi).
It was not until 1863 that The Pretenders assumed its final dramatic form, and
the catalyst which brought about the final formulation of the drama appears to have
been a week-long festival of song at which Ibsen was an invited guest. Bjrnson
gave a speech in which he made a point of praising his rival, a praise which Ibsen
121

sorely needed. In a note of thanks to Randolph Nilsen he wrote that the festival
had been like a salutary hour in church (Duve 1945, 91).
The influence on Ibsen of Bjrnsons fearless self-confidence is apparent in his
delineation of Hkon Hkonsson, the pretender to the throne who never doubts his
God-given call and his power to win out over all other challengers. Skule, on the
other hand, is Ibsen himself: unsure of his call, afraid to act decisively, yet
determined to be on top.
Although many critics have called attention to Ibsens uncertainty of his
calling, Psche places this criticism in true perspective: It has become a dogma
that Ibsen for many long years lived a poets life in doubt as to his own abilities.
There has certainly been doubt. But he doubted less about his own right and
ability to speak as one who has authority, than about the others understanding.
There was surely a struggle to find himself, but at the same time there was a
certainty that that self was there (Psche, Ibsen og nationalromantiken 1909,
517).
The Pretenders is imbued with the numinous from beginning to end. The play
begins with a miracle: Hkon Hkonssn is proven to be of royal lineage when his
mother carries the red-hot iron in the church.
Inga (on the church steps). God has passed judgment. See these
hands; with them have I carried the iron.
Voice among the crowd. They are clean and white, just as earlier
(Ibsen, Kongs-emnerne 1898-1902, 7).
There are also signs and omens portending the future. Act V begins:
A bodyguard. How red the sky is.
Another. It stretches over half the heavens like a burning sword.
Brd Bratte. Oh holy King Olaf, what does this fearful sign portend?

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An old Vrblg. It is most certainly a sign that a great leader will die
(Ibid. 137).
During the last act the ghost of Bishop Nikolas appears. The bishop, unable
himself to become king because of his cowardice in battle, is determined that no
one else shall succeed as king. He sows seeds of doubt and discord, taking from
each victim whatever peace and happiness he might have had, and bringing wars
and rumors of wars into the land. The bishop dies, however, before he is able to
dislodge Hkon from the certainty of his call; but at the end of the play he returns
from the dead to haunt the Norwegian folk forever.
The central theme of the play is the importance of a vocation, a subject to
which Ibsen returns again and again. Gods will is that every man has his own
calling. Discovering what it is, is a matter of the heart, not of the intellect.
Hkon.but we must look toward the heavens;
there it is a matter of a calling and a duty. I know it deep within
myself,
and Im not ashamed to say
itI am the only person who can best steer the country
in these times (Ibid. 9).
Duke Skule thinks that he has the right to be king over the whole land, but for
him it is a matter of pride (Ibid. 92). He never sees Gods will for himself because
he has set his will against the will of God (Ibid. 171). Ibsen emphasizes the
universality of this rebellion by referring to the myth of the first successful attempt
to establish an independent kingdom: the uprising of certain angels against God
and their establishment of their own reign. In the words of the bishop from his
abode in Hell,
a powerful
kingmore powerful than any of the hundred thousand
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earls up there (Ibid. 43).

Noteworthy is the fact that those who are most aware of Gods calling are the
very ones who rebel. As the bishops ghost puts it:
In order to rise [in hell] to an acceptable level,
Yes, almost even to get into the place
Its absolutely necessary to learn Latin.
And one must keep up when at the guest table
One sits every day with such learned persons
Fifty who on earth were called popes,
Five hundred cardinals and seven thousand skalds80 ( Ibid. 158).
The attempts of the bishop to cast doubts as to the legitimacy of Hkons right
to rule demonstrates the difference between fact and myth.

Whether or not

Hkons lineage is actually royal is irrelevant. Mythologically he is the right man

at the right time in the right place. This is demonstrated by his having good
fortune and success on his side. As Hkon proclaims:
The
happiest man is the greatest man. The happiest is the one who performs the greatest deeds,
he whom the demands of the time flood
with passionately created thoughts, which he cannot himself
understand, but which point out for him the right way. He himself
does not know where it will lead,
but he nevertheless follows it and must follow it (Ibid. 40).
Because Hkon Hkonsson is destined to be king, he has a noble vision of the
future of Norway.
Norways kingdom,
as Harald and Olaf created it, is like a
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church which has not yet been consecrated. . . .

Gods living spirit has not
enlivened it. I will
complete the consecration. Norway was a kingdom; it shall be
a folk (Ibid. 93).
It was a vision to which the great national poet, Henrik Ibsen, had dedicated
himself, but he was becoming sorely disillusioned with the Norwegian folk. In
Loves Comedy he had lashed out at their inane customs surrounding engagements
and marriages, customs which destroyed love, rather than nourished it. But the
people would not listen to him; they only condemned him. Ibsen had spent more
than a decade trying to recall the Norwegian folk to their true greatness by
reminding them of their unique heritage in Nordic folklore and history. Yet in a
few years he was to write to John Grieg on March 22, 1866:
At home in Norway poetry must unfortunately in our own day start in
another direction. To call forth our historic memories has for the
moment no inward urge toward truth nor any insistency to it. What
has happened among us in the last 2 or 3 yearsor rather, what has
not happenedshows clearly that there is about as much connection
between present-day Norwegians and our mighty past, as there is
between the Greek pirates of today and their ancestors, who had
courage and faith and will-power, and therefore also the gods, on their
side (Ibsen, Samlede verker 1928-1957, 16:134).
Using the historical figure of Bishop Nikolas, Ibsen makes of him a myth
embodying all of the pettiness, the inconsistency, the lack of will, of the
Norwegian folk. The bishop declares:
My might is assured through the years and the ages,
the haters of light shall be still in my wages;
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in Norway my empire forever is founded,

though it be to my subjects a riddle unsounded.
While to their life-work Norsemen set out
will-lessly wavering, daunted with doubt,
while hearts are shrunken, minds helplessly shivering
weak as a willow-wand wind swept and quivering,
while about one thing alone theyre united,
namely, that greatness be stoned and despited,
when they seek honor in fleeing and falling
under the banner of baseness unfurled,
then Bishop Nicholas tends to his calling
the Bagler-Bishops at work in the world (Archer, The Collected
Works of Henrik Ibsen 1906-1912, 3:323)!
As director, first of the national theater in Bergen, and then of the Norwegian
Theater in Christiania, Ibsen had been in the vanguard of those who were calling
their people to national greatness. Through ballad and saga, legend and fairy tale,
he had tried to revive the ancient memories of the folk. He was intolerant of
nationalists like P. A. Jensen or a Poulsen, but that was because they were too
superficial in their treatment of so important a subject. And Ibsen could not
tolerate pettishness.
Now the great moment of decision was approaching. The conflict between
Prussia and Denmark over Slesvig and Holstein was getting serious, and it looked
as if war were inevitable. Norway should soon decide if she were to support her
Danish brethren with men and arms if necessary. This was to be the test of her true
greatness.

126

Brand (1865)
On March 29, 1864 the Norwegian storting [parliament] set aside an
appropriation of money for the purpose of waging war against Prussia alongside
the Danesthat is, on the condition that either England or France would join in the
war effort. According to Koht the storting also declared, with a bare majority, that
the Norwegian people did not wish for any closer political ties with Denmark
(Koht, The Life of Ibsen 1931, 1;243). The meaning was clear enough: the
Norwegians had no intention of making any sacrifices for their Danish brothers.
Ibsen no longer had any respect for his countrymen. He had received a fellowship
from the Norwegian government. It was only a few days later, on April 2, 1864,
that he sailed from Christiania for Copenhagen. He did not return again
permanently until almost thirty years had passed.
Yet on that same day (April 2), while Ibsen was attending a farewell party, the
theologian Christoffer Bruun was addressing an impressive meeting of the student
society in which he exhorted all, in the name of truth, the fatherland, and the
honour of students, to place themselves, so long as higher consideration did not
bind them, in the ranks of the fighter (Duve 1945, 120).
While Bruun went to war, Ibsen traveled through Denmark and Germany to
Italy, far from the field of battle. He was in Berlin on May 4 when the victorious
Germans paraded through the streets with the cannon captured from Dybbl, and
127

he watched them spit into these symbols of brave Danish resistance. After this
experience Ibsen could only feel that Norwegian national romanticism was just a
lot of words, and he reprimanded himself for having written in the romanticist
strain:
For we have played to a decaying race,
And painted up the corpse of ancient glory
And decked with giant swords the halls of story,
To give the modern dwarf a smiling face.
We sang about the day, though it was night,
Forgetting one important thing to measure;
How may the heritage be held aright,
By hands that are too weak to grasp the treasure?
*

And therefore I have turned my thoughts away

From all the soulless sagas of past making;
And from false dreams of future times awaking,
I face the misty dimness of today. (Koht, The Life of Ibsen 1931,
1:256)
When the war was over, Bruun journeyed on foot through Germany and the
Alps to Italy, where he joined his mother and family, who were there for reasons of
health (Duve 1945, 121). While in Italy, Ibsen and Bruun were often together, but
to Ibsen, Bruun was a constant reminder that he had not himself joined in the fight
against the Prussians.

He, like Bishop Nikolas in The Pretenders, had been

81

afraid.

In writing Brand [Fire] Ibsen created an image of the strong, single-minded,

self-willed individual he would himself liked to have been. He once wrote in a
128

letter: Brand is myself in my best moments (Duve 1945, 124). Many of Brands
characteristics are modeled after Christoffer Bruun. According to Downs, Bruun
was also an ardent propagandist for Sren Kierkegrd.82

According to Hans

Ording (Ording 1928) and Valborg Eriksen (Eriksen 1923) the Either/Or of
Kierkegrd can be clearly seen in the all or nothing of Brand. In forming
Brands character Ibsen may also have had in mind a Pastor Lammers,83 who
withdrew from the church in 1856 in disagreement with Lutheran doctrine
concerning christening and the forgiveness of sins. He began a pietistic movement
of his own, to which both Ibsens mother and sister belonged (Duve 121).
Brand was begun in July 1864, a few months after Ibsen left Norway. At first
it was conceived as an epic poem, but after a years work on it, Ibsen was still
dissatisfied with the result. During a visit to Rome in July 1865, he went to St.
Peters Cathedral, and while there it suddenly came to him how the material could
be formed into a drama (Ibid.).
The writing proceeded very quickly after that, and the whole was ready for
publication in November of the same year. Its publication was delayed, however,
because the publisher feared it might be interpreted as an attack against the church.
In a letter to Georg Brandes in 1869 Ibsen protested such an interpretation:
I could have applied the whole syllogism just as well to a sculptor, or a
politician, as to a priest. I could quite as well have worked out the
impulse which drove me to write, by taking Galileo, for instance, as
my heroassuming, of course, that Galileo should stand firm and
never concede the fixity of the earth (Ibsen, Samlede verker 19281957, 12:123).
As a matter of fact, Ibsen was at the time anything but anti-religious. While
working on the drama, he wrote in a letter: I read nothing else than the Bible. It is
powerful and strong (Ibid. 12:227).
129

It is no wonder that at the decisive period in his life, when Ibsen left his
homeland and broke with so much that had bound him to the past, he should be
particularly drawn to men like Bruun and Lammers, self-sufficient men who
placed their God-given call above all else. Since he could no longer maintain
connections with a theater group, Ibsen must now depend entirely upon his writing
for a living. He must stand alone and self-sufficient, gathering together all of his
creative energies for the writing of great drama. His muse did not fail him.
Brand was published on March 15, 1866, at Copenhagen, and the whole
Scandinavian world was taken by storm. The sale was immense. Four editions
appeared before the close of 1866; the eleventh appeared in 1889 (Archer, The
Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen 1906-1912, 3:vii). He had passed through the
fire and was ready to become the greatest man which Hkon Hkonsson had
dreamed of becoming in The Pretenders.
Brand is a sequel to Loves Comedy. The latter play ends with Falk heading up
into the mountains to follow his calling as a man dedicated to telling the truth.
Now we meet Brand, a traveling curate, walking alone in the high mountains of
northern Norway, who meets a young couple, Einar and Agnes,84 who are madly in
love.
Brand is no ordinary pastor, but one who has rebelled against the conventions
of orthodox Christianity. He speaks of the death of Einars god, the kindly old
man in the sky. No, he says, Im no preachifier. I dont talk like a minister of
the church. I dont even know if Im a Christian, but I do know that I am a man
(Ibsen, Samlede Vrker 1962, 2:16). Brand refuses to become like Pastor Straw
Man in Loves Comedy, a man who in his youth had shown a dedication to his
calling, but once he married and assumed the duties of a father, he ceased to be a
real man.

130

In this play Ibsen turns from the mythology of the Nordic countries85 to the
Judeo-Christian stories which have replaced it, first and foremost the myth of the
calling.86 Brand finally reaches a spot in the high country where:
Here at one time there was a sacrificial temple,
That was probably in King Beles time;
Eventually a church was built in its place (Ibid. 2:74).
The church building which replaced the pagan temple has lasted until the
present day. Brand becomes the pastor of the parish and ends up building a new,
much larger edifice, for he feels that serving this congregation is his calling, one
which he must follow regardless of the consequences.
Here I will remain in spite of you,
One does not choose where he will do his work
The man who knows and accedes to his goal
Has an intuition written in fire,
Gods outcry: here is where you must be (Ibid. 2:55).
For Brand there is only one goal: To be the slate upon which God can write
(Ibid. 2:41). But the God Brand worships is a demanding God. Jesus said, You,
therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48,
RSV). The word translated as perfect is which means having reached its
end, finished, mature, complete. (Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament
1950). In other words, it refers to a person who has become all that he was meant
to be, who has fulfilled his calling.
To reach perfection, suffering and sacrifice are required. Ibsen turns to the
central story of Christianity, the crucifixion. From a human point of view the will
of God may well appear to be heartless. As Brand says, Was God humane toward
Jesus Christ (Ibid. 2:57) while he was hanging on the cross?

131

Ibsen reminds us that God requires all or nothing. Brands mother is a

wealthy woman who on her deathbed calls for her son to give her the final
sacrament. He refuses to come until she has given up all her worldly possessions.
She is willing to part with half, and finally nine-tenths, but he says no; she must
give all. She dies without her sons absolution.
Likewise Brand feels compelled to sacrifice his own son. Agnes, who is no
longer in love with Einar, has become his wife. Their infant son is weak. He
cannot tolerate the long, cold winters, and the doctor advises Brand to move to the
south to save the childs life. Agnes is ready to do what a mother must and will do
(Ibid. 2:60).
But Brand is determined to remain. He is certain that if he should leave, Out
of the hills, up from the mounds the trolls and water sprites will swarm (Ibid.).
The parish cannot do without him. He must remain. That is his calling. The result
is the death of his son, and subsequently of the wife who has offered him her
unconditional love.
Brand feels that his calling is to rewrite the foundation of the Judeo-Christian
faith, the story of Adam and Eve. I have bravely determined to create human
beings new and whole and clean (Ibid. 2:32), he says. Having rejected the God of
the Christian church, he will show a new way.
understanding of the teaching of Jesus:
Inward; inward! That is the word!
That is the way. There is the trail.
Your own heartthat is the sphere,
Newly created and ready for a godly life;
There the vulture of the will must die,
There the new Adam is born (Ibid. 2:33).

132

He begins with a true

But as a dramatist Ibsen deals with opposites, the contradictions in human

nature. Immediately after these words Brand contradicts himself. The inwardness
becomes self-centeredness, willfulness, the opposite of following Gods will. Yes,
the vulture of the will must die. But unfortunately for Brand, it does not do so. He
proclaims:
The will must first
Quench the laws thirst for righteousness. . . .
First this, to will death on the cross,
To will in the midst of the needs of the flesh,
To will in the midst of the spirits dread,
First this is the possession of your salvation (Ibid. 2:47).
This emphasis upon will-power leads him to cry out, Ones best love is hate
(Ibid.). The doctor states the contradiction succinctly:
Yes, your manly willpowers amount
Stands in your book in abundance;
But, priest, the love account
In your book is a page as white as a virgin (Ibid. 2:46).
In my experience the most difficult attainment on the spiritual journey is the
crucifixion of willpower, of the ego. So much of what Brand says about the
struggle in our hearts to obey the will of God is true, but his egotism is finally his
undoing. At the end of the play his congregation has abandoned him. Brand
crosses Wheelwrights threshold into a world of dreams. On the one hand, having
sacrificed his son as God had sacrificed His Son, he begins to feel as if he is
himself a Christ-figure, a god, which is the height of egocentricity. On the other, a
song in the air warns him:
Never, never will you be like him,
Since you are created in the flesh;
133

Do his calling or do it not,

In any case are you lost (Ibid. 2:120).
The ghost of Agnes appears, calling him to follow her and their son, insisting
that they are not dead, but still alive. She beckons him to follow the path of
unconditional love, but he refuses. He is the hero who will do the impossible:
The ghost: Brand, what will you do?
Brand

What I must:

Live, what until now has only been dreamt of,

Make true what one has intuited (Ibid. 2:122).
Brand cannot follow the path of love; therefore, he dies in an avalanche. As
Agnes has told him: Whoever sees Jehovah87 must die88 (Ibid. 2:81).
Agnes, on the other hand, is the epitome of unconditional love. She has
abandoned Einar, the young man with whom she had fallen in love, and chosen to
love Brand as completely as she possibly can. The commitment must be an
absolute one, and in Agnes case this means following her husband regardless of
the personal cost, for that appears to be her calling.
To choose to love is to surrender ones willpower in favor of obedience,
selflessness, commitment to serve the needs of others. Such a choice also renders
her helpless, for she cannot impose her will upon her husband. When it becomes
apparent that her child cannot survive the bitter cold, and her husband decides to
stay where they are, her acceptance of his decision is a true crucifixion. When
Brand demands that she give all of their infants clothes to a gypsy child, she
reluctantly but finally gives away everything. Her husband does not realize how
precious is the gift of love she is offering him.
Perhaps in writing Brand Ibsen was judging himself for not being brave enough
to fight on behalf of his Danish brethren as Christopher Bruun had done, but he
was also recognizing that the true heroic struggle is not out there, in the world
134

where the Vikings had conquered and captured and where nation states were
battling one another, but inside the soul of every individual.

His apparent

indecisiveness with regard to his calling as a writer is based, not so much on his
uncertainty that he is a genius, as on the difficulty of determining what the will of
God for his life is.
It is difficult for a writer, or any person relying upon inspiration, to determine
whether he is truly striving for perfection in the realization of his destiny in
fulfilling the will of God, or if he is motivated by an excessive self-esteem to be
recognized in future generations as a great man. The conflict is encapsulated in
Ibsens poem:.
To live iswar with trolls
In the vaults of the heart and the mind.
To writethat is to pass
Judgment upon oneself (Ibsen, At leve--er krig med trolde. 1877-78).
I think that anyone who has embarked upon a spiritual journey will recognize
the difficulty in determining whether a specific action is the will of God or a selfcentered act of ones own will. In the mid-1980s I felt that I was called to teach
English in China, not exactly what my wife and I really wanted at the time. We
were just beginning to build our new home, and the thought of moving to a
communist country was not particularly enticing. Following that call proved to be
the beginning of an unforgettable adventure, which ended with our leaving China
on forty-eight hours notice from the American Consulate after the massacre on
Tiananmen Square.

135

Peer Gynt (1867)

As indicated in articles by P. Kluften (Kluften 1930, 120) and H. Sl Bakken
(Bakken 1930, 680), the origins of Peer Gynt are a matter of dispute among the
critics. Ibsen himself insisted that he was an actual person. In a letter to his
publisher on August 28, 1867 he wrote: Peer Gynt is a real person, who lived in
the Gudsbrandsdal, probably at the end of the last or beginning of this century. His
name is still well known among the people up there, but nothing particular is
remembered of his doings, beyond what is to be found in Asbjrnsons Norwegian
Fairy Tales in the piece Highland Pictures! (Downs 1946, 107).89
Ibsen borrowed from Asbjrnsons tale not only the name of his character, but
also many of his characteristics, as well as certain other ingredients of the story,
such as the wild ride on the reindeers back, the great darkness (the Byg), and the
lascivious dairymaids. He may also have gathered a few details on his own during
his tour to collect folklore in 1862.
Ibsen called Peer Gynt a dramatic poem, not a play designed for production on
a stage. It is perhaps best known outside of Scandinavia for the music written by
Edvard Grieg, Peer Gynt Suites 1 & 2, which was inspired by certain scenes in the
drama. The dramas major theme is to answer the question: What does it mean
truly to be oneself?
Readers have a great deal of difficulty in understanding the symbolism in Peer
Gynt. As the metaphors are clearly plurisignative, there are bound to be many
136

rational interpretations. As for myself, I think it best to approach the dramatic

poem from a psychological point of view as a projection, especially in Act II, of
material within the psyche, the subconscious mind, of Peer, similar to the
conclusion of Brand.
Peer is a typical example of what Jung called the puer aeternus (Von Franz,
The Problem of the Puer Aeternus 1970), the eternal boy who never grows up. As
a result he lives in a fantasy world where no distinction is made between the
aspiration, the dream, and the real world.
The play begins with Peers recitation to his mother of the folk legend of
Gudbrand Glesne (Ibsen, Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem 1989, 4) riding on a
reindeer, except that for Peer it is a heroic deed which he has performed himself,
just now. After reciting it, he says, One of these days the whole parish is going to
sing your praisesjust wait until I accomplish somethingsomething absolutely
tremendous! (Ibid. 8). Yes, he is a dreamer, and his mother believes him, for she
worships the ground he walks on.
Like many eternal boys, Peer is very charming. Women fall in love with him.
Such is the case with Ingrid, who has fallen in love with Peer, but is about to be
married to another man. She locks herself in the store room until Peer rescues her,
takes her up into the mountain and having seduced her, abandons her.
So begins the archetypal story, or myth, which Ibsen used in his very first play,
Catiline. Peer has violated the sacred feminine, and in so doing he hardened his
heart, and lost his soul (Ibid. 32). As the Dovre-Master says, You human beings
are all alike. Lip service to your souls, but you worship only what you can grab
with your fists (Ibid. 46).
Peer is forced to flee, or he will be hanged by the outraged men in the
community. Later on, he prospers by grabbing every opportunity to make money.
But like Furia in Catiline the spurned feminine will rise from the grave and
137

demand its revenge. As the abandoned Ingrid says, We shall see who wins in the
end (Ibid. 31)!
In Act II the revenge begins with three wild girls who have been spurned by
their lovers. Peer leaps into their midst, crying out Im a three-headed troll, and a
three-girl man! (Ibid. 35). He has abandoned himself to lust. The result is that he
meets a female troll, the daughter of the King of the Dovre, and is taken into the
mountain. As indicated earlier, being taken into the mountain is a common theme
in Norwegian folklore, a means by which the ordinary folk explained how a person
became possessed by contents from his subconscious mind and was no longer
himself.
As was the case with Solness in The Master Builder, Peer becomes a troll.
When the Dovre-Master asks him, Whats the difference between a troll and a
human? he answers No difference at all, it seems to me (Ibid. 41).
The Dovre-Master disagrees:
So there is a difference, after all.
Allow me to tell you what it consists of:
Out there, under the radiant sky,
They say To thine own self be true.
But here, in the world of trolls, we say
Troll, be self-centered. (Ibid. 42).90
We need to define more clearly what is meant by the self. As I understand it,
we are dealing with an archetypal image which is bipolar. On the one hand there is
the self as ego, the I of which we are conscious. In our youth the ego must
develop its strength, from the baby helplessly crying to the rebellious teenager who
must break away from his parents in order to create his own personal identity. The
development of the eternal boy is arrested at this point, and he remains
egocentric for the rest of his life.
138

On the other hand is the subconscious Self.91 She is the Self in Whitmans
Song of Myself which, using metaphoric language, encompasses all of mankind.
Marie-Louise von Franz defines the Self as the center of the self-regulating
system of the psyche, on which the welfare of the individual depends (Von Franz,
The Interpretations of Fairy Tales 1996, 52).
It is this Self whose image is reflected in Agnes in Brand and in Solveig in
Peer Gynt. Solveig, like Agnes, offers Peer her unconditional love and remains
faithfully waiting for him from the beginning of the play until the end. She is, as
Peer says in Act IV, Das ewig weibliche ziehet uns an! (Ibid. 90), (Goethes
The eternal feminine [which] calls us upward). Peer does not want to realize that
Solveig is a reflection of his true Self.
At the end of the play Peer asks the Buttonmoulder, What, exactly, is being
ones self? to which the Buttonmoulder replies, To be ones self is to kill ones
self (Ibid. 158). In other words, in order to become ones true self and to fulfill
ones calling, one must crucify egocentricity. The Buttonmoulder continues, I
doubt if that answer means anything to you. So well put it this way: to show
unmistakably the Masters intention whatever youre doing (Ibid. 158).
Peer. But what if a man has never discovered
What the Master intended?
Buttonmoulder.

Then he must sense it (Ibid. 158).

The voice of the subconscious mind is intuition.

In describing the bipolarity of the self/Self, Ibsen uses the metaphor of the
camera:
Dont forget there are two ways of being yourself;
The right and the wrong side of the garment.
You know that in Paris theyve found the way
To make portraits with the help of the sun.
139

You can either show the straightforward picture

Or else what is called the negative.
In the latter light and shade are reversed;
To the unaccustomed eye it seems ugly;
But the likeness is in that, too, all the same;
It only needs to be brought out.
Now, if a soul has been photographed
During its life in the negative way,
The plates not rejected because of that
Quite simply, they hand it on to [the Devil] (Ibid. 163).
If a person remains totally egotistical, he becomes a troll, in which case his
judgment becomes distorted. In the Hall of the Mountain King Peer at first sees
things as they really are: the musicians [who] ripple the Dovrean harp are a cow
[twanging] a gut string with its cloven hoof and the dancers [who] tap the
Dovrean floor are a sow in tights [jigging] to the strumming (Ibid. 44).
In order to become a legitimate troll the Dovre-Master must scratch Peers left
eye,92 to help him see obliquely, and must remove his right one 93completely. Then
what is ugly will appear beautiful and what is beautiful will seem ugly.
There is no end to Peers ambition. He is willing to marry the Dovre kings
daughter in order to rule over a kingdom, albeit that of the Mountain King. Later
on he proclaims himself an emperor. The lust for power is unbridled in the
egotistical man.

Nevertheless, Peer is reluctant to make such a permanent

commitment to the kings daughter, and is saved by the church bells ringing.
Having escaped from the Hall of the Mountain King, Peer meets the mysterious
Byg, a voice in complete darkness. Commentators have had great difficulty in
understanding what it is, for it is plurisignative by nature. When Peer asks who he
is, he replies, Myself that is to say, he is the bipolar self/Self.
140

Voice. The Byg, Peer Gynt! The only one.

The Byg thats unharmed, and the Byg that is wounded.
The Byg that is dead, and the Byg thats alive (Ibid. 49).
That aspect of the Byg which is unharmed but dead is the egotistic self. That
aspect which is alive but wounded is the Self, which one can only reach through
the suffering of going through the darkness.
One might also call the Byg the dark night of the soul. As I remember my
experience as a teenager, in order to make my way through the Byg, I had to
abandon all hope of doing so through my own volition and make the leap of faith
into the darkness, only to find myself in the arms of the sacred Self, the I AM
(Yahweh).
But Peer is unwilling to let go and let God. He must conquer this darkness
by the force of his own will-power. On the other hand, The great Byg conquers
everything without an effort (Ibid. 50). God is love, and love is helpless, but
conquers without effort. However, since Peer is self-centered, determined to fight
willfully, he cannot make his way through the darkness but must go around it. He
does not come to know his true Self.
In Act IV Peer meets the Byg again, this time in the form of the Sphinx,
This fantastic mongrel creature,
This changeling, half lion and half a woman,
Is he out of some legend94, as well?
A legend! Now I remember the fellow!
Of course, its the Byg (Ibid. 109).
As mentioned earlier, every human being in his totality is half masculine (the
lion) and half feminine, like the Sphinx. In a man the egotistical self is the
masculine, while the numinous Self is the feminine.

141

So the Byg is a plurisignative metaphor. It is the self/Self, the dark night of

the soul, the divine I AM, the masculine/feminine. It is a character taken from
folklore, and its story is a myth. Here we see most clearly the influence of Nordic
myth on Ibsens dramas.
The ultimate goal of making ones way through the dark forest of the soul is to
reach the sacred feminine: Solveig in Peer Gynt. Solveig (her name means path to
the sun) commits herself as a young woman to Peer, but as a young man who has
raped a woman he is unable to defile her purity by entering her hut in the forest
after his sojourn in the hall of the Mountain King.
Standing in front of Solveigs dwelling, he says, Theres no way straight
through this from you to her. Go in now? So contaminated? Go in with all this
troll-dirt on me? To speak, and say nothing: confess, yet conceal? Its Sunday
evening. To go to her now, in the state I am in, would be sacrilege (Ibid. 62).
That Peer does still honor the sacred feminine, even if he cannot come into a
relationship with her, is his one redeeming trait. He has the same attitude toward
his mother, and these two women save him from total destruction. When Peer first
meets the Byg, he is on the verge of being destroyed when the church bells ring
and the scene ends with these words: Hes too strong. There are women behind
him (Ibid. 51).
In Act IV Peer has traveled abroad and become a rich man. He attributes his
success to the fact that he has never married.
The reason [for my success] is that Im not married.
Yes, gentlemen, as obvious
As that. What ought a man to be?
Himself; theres my simple answer.
His duty is to himself and what
Is his. And how is this possible
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If he makes a pack-horse of himself

For another persons benefit? (Ibid. 72).
He has been a businessman, trading in negro slaves for Carolina and heathen
images for China. Since he has totally repressed his feminine side, she who creates
relationships, he has no empathy for others. His conscience is clear.
So I trustif the maxim He who does
No ill does good is validthen
I can be sure, more than most people,
That my past mistakes will be overlooked
And my virtues be seen to outweigh my sins (Ibid. 77).
He thinks he is a good Christian, convinced that God has provided the
opportune moments for his rise to wealth and power. What marvelous peace and
consolation, he says, to know you are personally looked after (Ibid. 85).
Peer defines being oneself as:
The Gyntian Selfits the regiment
Of wishes, appetites and desires;
The Gyntian Self is the sea of ambitions,
Needs and demands; in fact, whatever
Causes my breast to heave uniquely,
And makes me exist as the I that I am.
But just as the Almighty needs
The earth to make him omnipotent,
So, for my part, I need the gold
To make myself an Emperor (Ibid. 80).
Although Peer is proud of being just himself, in fact, since his soul is dead,
he becomes whatever other people want him to be. What am I? O Godhold
on!/ Im whatever you want,a Turk, a sinner,/a troll (Ibid. 121). Ibsen uses
143

the image of an onion: the outer layers are peeled off until Peer reaches the core
but there is no core. Will the heart of it never come to light? says Peer. My
God, no, it wont! Right to the center/ its all made of layers (Ibid. 144).
At the end of the play, as much as Peer would like to think of himself as a selfmade man, he is nothing. He is neither saint nor sinner. At the crossroad he meets
the Buttonmoulder, who wants to melt him down, together with similar human
beings, to make buttons. Peer realizes that his only salvation from such a fate is
Solveig, who is still waiting for him. As the sun rises he throws himself into her
arms. Then tell me the answer! he says.
Peer. Where was I myself, the entire, true man?
Where did I have Gods mark on my forehead?
Solveig. In my faith, in my hope, and in my love. . . .
Peer. [a ray of light goes over him, and he cries out]
My mother; my wife; purest of women!
Hide me there, hide me in your heart! (Ibid. 168).
We have completed the circle and are back again at where we started, with the
conclusion of Catiline, when Catiline seeks salvation in the arms of Aurelia. This
time, however, a note of caution is added. The Buttonmoulder says, We shall
meet at the last cross-road, Peer; and then well see whether; I say no more (Ibid.
169).

144

Endnotes
1
In his chapter on The Mythic World-View in The Burning Fountain Wheelwright criticizes Chase for
presupposing that the needs which call forth magic, ritual and myth are as much with us now when we
turn from science to poetry or to the critical problems of life as they are with the Maori and the
Bushman. (Italics Wheelwrights) This is to overlook the fact that our present world-view is scientific
(i.e. objective) whereas the primitive world-view is ritualistic (i.e., Nature yields nothing without
ceremonies.)
2
See Jungs Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.
3
Kohts entire article is reprinted in the Centenary Edition 15, 43.
4
See, for example, Jungs essay on Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype.
5
They were released from adscription, under which all peasants between the ages of 14 and 36 were
bound -to remain on the estate where they had been born. At this time the peasants constituted 70% of
the Danish population. (Bukdahl 1959, 645)
6
Everywhere the old villages were disintegrating; the inhabitants exchanged their strip holdings, so that
each man has his own land more or less in one lot, and were released from the former co-operating
cultivation . . . . But this process could only take place when it was accompanied by a moving out from
the villages. (Ibid. 646).
7
Provincial Diets established along the lines laid down by the Prussian Estates Constitution. Some
members of the estates were chosen by the king, although the great majority was elected by those eligible
to vote (approximately 3% of the population). Cf. Ibid. 703.
8
By 1864 Slesvig was largely German in population; Holstein and Lauenberg were entirely so. In
accordance with a resolution of German federal law, Frederik VI was obliged to grant Holstein a special
Estates Constitution as a member of the German Federation. (Ibid. 702)
9
Saxo Grammaticus was the author of a history of ancient Scandinavia based on runic inscriptions, lists
of Danish kings, popular tradition, folk tales and songs, Old Norse mythology and heathen legends. He
lived at the end of the twelfth century.
10
An English translation by George Borrow, The Death of Baldur (London, 1889), was published in a
limited edition.
11
Published under the title Inledning til philosophiske Forelsning.
12
Today we use the Greek word for soul, psyche.
13
In 1771-1772 the German physician to the insane King Christian VII, Struensee, managed through a
palace revolution to take over control of the government. Although his brief rule was an enlightened one,
his intolerance of Danish culture was an affront to native pride.

145

14

Before leaving Copenhagen in 1800, ostensibly for good, Baggesen willed his Danish muse at a social
gathering of literary figures to the young Adam Oehlenschlger (Mitchell 1957, 99).
The university was first established in Norway in 1811.
16
Ole Bull was a virtuoso violinist of international recognition who popularized Norwegian folk tunes
and played an active role in the cultural life of Norway.
17
Sven Grundtvig, on the other hand, made a strong effort in his collection of Danish ballads to keep
them as close to the spoken word as possible.
18
The Prose Edda has been translated into English by A. G. Broucur (New York, 1929); The Poetic
Edda by B. M. Hollander (U. of Texas, 1928).
19
A kenning is a much-compressed form of metaphor, originally used in Anglo-Saxon and Norse poetry.
In a kenning, an object is described in a two-word phrase, such as whale road for sea.
20
He dealt with the god Baldur in The Warriors Barrow, but his was probably derived entirely from
Oehlenschlgers treatment of the same theme in Baldur hin Gode. The story of Sigurd and Brynhild,
from the Burgundian cycle of The Lays of the Heroes, formed the basis for The Vikings of Helgeland, but
Ibsen used the prose version of the story found in the Saga of the Volsungs for his source.
21
As a boy in Skien, Ibsen had enjoyed seeing the plays of Oehlenschlger, Scribe, Ketaebue and
Heiberg acted by theatrical strollers (Mosfjeld n.d.)
22
In Jungian terms the anima.
23
Jung calls them animus figures.
24
In the words of St. Paul, I die daily.
25
Aurelia is not mysterious; Furia is. This is because she represents a destructive force in all of us whose
existence we do not want to admit. The elimination of six million Jews in the concentration camps is a
horror we can scarcely comprehend. But if we have faced the trolls in our own souls, we know that we
could just as well have been one of the Nazi guards ourselves, in which case the mystery disappears.
26
This is the way that Ellida in The Lady from the Sea regains her freedom to be herself.
27
This shadow side of the death and rebirth archetype also appears in Edgar Allan Poes Fall of the
House of Usher where Ushers sister is buried alive but manages to escape her entombment. She
confronts her brother who has buried her; his death is the result. There is no indication that Poe and Ibsen
read one anothers work. Rather, this is an example of Jungs archetypes which recur again and again in
different cultures.
28
A giant by birth, but adopted by Odin; Loke belongs both to heaven and earth.
29
God of Thunder.
30
One of the two remaining mortals after Ragnarok.
31
Goddess of eternal youth.
32
The wife of Odin.
33
Runes are ancient words full of magical powers.
34
Translated by Jacqueline Simpson (Faye, Scandinavian Folktales 1988).
35
The play is not included in Archers collection or in Orbecks Early Plays; indeed, at the time Archer
published (1923) it was still to be found only in manuscript. It has since been published in the Centerary
Edition, 2.
36
Although Landstad did not publish his Folkeviser until 1853, he had published a few examples of his
folk ballads in Langes Norske Tidsskrift for Videnskab og Literatur in 1849. Among them was Liti
Kersti som vart inkvervd which Ibsen repeated almost verbatim in St. Johns Eve (Psche, Olaf Liljekrans.
Et bidrag til studiet av Ibsens forhold til vore viser og sagn 1909).
37
A wicked Norwegian fairy who appears as a beautiful girl to seduce young men. While an apothecarys
assistant in Grimstad, Ibsen lived above the store and had to pass through the girls room in order to get to
his own. He apparently became enchanted by a huldre by the name of Rikke Holst and fathered a child
by her.
15

146

38
A stab at the language reformers who wanted to create a specifically Norwegian Language. In the
Dano-Norwegian literary language of the capital all nouns were begun with upper case.
39
For Ibsens review of Jensens play, cf. the Centenary Edition, 15: 74-81.
40
On November 27, 1855 Ibsen gave a lecture on Shakespeare and His Influence on Scandinavian
Literature before the Society of December Twenty-Second (Koht 1931, 1:117)
41
Solness uses the word gengldelsen, his greatest fear: that he will have to pay the consequences for
what he has done to other people.
42
The differences between right-brain and left-brain thinking have been developed from the research in
the late 1960s of an American psycho-biologist Roger W. Sperry. There are now numerous books on the
subject. We become aware of right-brain thinking as we are just about to go to sleep, and words give way
to pictures, or we wake up in the midst of a dream and remember the images.
43
Cf. Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus (Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus
1970).
44
Also notable is the fact that social conventions have until recently put a great deal of pressure on
women to fulfill a mans dream if she is to find a husband. Even today some men, particularly in the
Middle East, abhor the idea that a woman should be educated or able to earn a living to support herself.
The men must have a pure, undefiled goddess to be their wife, subservient to their every desire. In other
words, women must play their archetypal role.
45
It is a tradition in Scandinavia to put a wreath on the highest point of a building whose construction has
just been completed.
46
The word is grushaugene; its overtones are lost in the translation. Grus is garbage, but haug is a hill
that is a warriors barrow (cf. Ibsens play The Warriors Barrow) and is also connected with elves,
fairies and the like. Our home is called troldhaugen, the hill of the trolls.
47
The same words could have been spoken by Hjrdis (The Vikings) or Hedda Gabler.
48
Ibsens rebellion is against the God of organized religion that places the emphasis upon the church
rather than love. But Solness justifies his rebellion as against a God who has taken his children from him
as a sign that he should be willing to forego any loving relationship with other persons, which is certainly
not the will of a God of love. He has himself chosen not to love others by treating women as slaves, to do
as he wishes them to do. It is his inflated ego, not the will of God, which is the problem. These religious
issues in Ibsens dramas will be discussed more fully when we come to Loves Comedy and Brand.
49
Catiline and Lady Inger of strt.
50
Ibsen turned to known historical facts as he found them in P. A. Munchs The History of the Norwegian
People (Downs 1946, 45). For literary models he chose Andreas Munchs account of the murder of Knut
Alvsson in An Evening at Akershuus Castle (1849) and C. Paluden-Mllers story of Lady Ingerds
attempted revolt in The Counts Feud (1854). A few details were also taken from some documents about
the Dalecarlian squire in Norway printed by Cr. F. Lundh in the first volume of the Norwegian historical
periodical Magazine for the Language and History of the Norwegian People (Koht 1931, 1:97)
51
Of the 145 plays which Ibsen directed while at Bergen, seventy-five were French (twenty-five by
Scribe himself and at least another twenty-five by his imitators). The influence of Scribe is more than
apparent; all of the intricacies of plot, the mysterious, unidentified characters, and so forth are there.
52
Archetypal when one compares this narrative with E. A. Poes The Fall of the House of Usher, in
which Rodericks sister is described in much the same way, although Poe obviously knew nothing of
Ibsens play. According to Jung, such archetypes are inherited in our psyches, just as the physical
characteristics of our bodies are inherited. In particular, they are present in the literature and mythology
of disparate cultures totally disconnected from one another. Ibsen insisted that his inspiration for writing
did not come from mimicking others writing; it came from the depths of his own psyche.
53
.In his introduction in the Centenary Edition 3, 13, Francis Bull cites as sources the ballads of Margit
Hjuxe, Budmund and Signelita, Little Kersti, King Endel, Sir Peer and Proud Margaret, and Bendik and

147

relilja. Bull also makes an exhaustive investigation of other sources for the play (Ibid. 15). Downs
mentions the national story of Audun of Hegrens as a possible source (Downs 1946, 42).
54
Psche traces herr Bengt til Solhaug to the Bengt til Bjerkehaug in Rypen I Justadal.
55
To be taken into the mountain is a common archetype in Norwegian folklore. It is, however,
plurisignative, and Ibsen applies it to many different situations, giving it a different meaning on each
occasion.
56
It was in reply to Brandes criticism that Ibsen wrote the preface to the second edition of The Feast at
Solhaug.
57
Downs suggests that the personality of Hjrdis is plainly suggested by the Gudrun of the Lasds-Saga.
Dagny has counterparts in Hauchs Sister at Kinnekullen. Further materials are drawn from the Njls Saga
and Egil Skallagrimssons Saga.
58
Unhappy with her life in Helgeland, she says, Put an eagle in a cage, and it will bite through the bars,
whether they are of iron or of gold (Ibsen, Samlede Vrker 1962, 1:160).
59
We do not fight wars in civilian clothing. Putting on a uniform is a means of losing ones personal
identity, so that what one does as a soldier can become dissociated from ones true identity. In other
words, one becomes an archetype of the killer, permitted to do what he would never do in civilian life,
without feeling any personal responsibility. He does what must be done to protect his colleagues and
avenge their death. Men in uniform are also attractive to women, reflecting a womans experience of
masculinity. Indeed, some of us, including myself, must first put on a uniform in order to find a wife.
60
In Norwegian, hrmand. The title of the play is Hrmnd p Helgeland [Warriors at Helgeland]. A
viking is the raid upon which hrmnd go.
61
In his book Ibsens vei til drama [Ibsens Path to Drama] Frnkl makes a study of the images which
naturally come to Ibsens mind when he is discussing the subject of death. Prominent among these
images are clouds and horses. The association of clouds and horses with death would appear to be
rooted in this myth of the Asgrdsreien. Ibsen refers to the myth as early as July 1851, when his poem
Helges Ungdom [Helges Youth] appeared in Andhrimmer:
Before the moon the shadows glide
Young Helge watches them.
They are the fallen warriors
Who to Odin travel home (Frnkl 1955, 77).
Frnkl points out examples of clouds and shadows from the realm of the dead in Tvivl og Hb [Doubt
and Hope] (1848) and Hstaftenen [Harvest Evening] (1849) as well as Helges Ungdom. In
Rosmersholm they become the white horses which Mrs. Helseth catches a glimpse of as Rosmer and
Rebekka fall into the stream (Ibid. 72). Ibsens dramatic imagery is rooted in Nordic myth.
62
The associations with his name are the result of Ibsens fascination with the literature of the folk and
their intuitive striving for knowledge, as well as his competition against the university-trained poets of his
day.
63
In in manner of Henrich Steffens.
64
In 1969-70 I was a Professor of American Literature at the University of Oulu in Finland.
65
Many years ago a college at which I taught was putting on a production of Hedda Gabler. The young
woman who was playing the role of Hedda dropped out in the middle of the rehearsals. She was learning
too much about herself.
66
Ibsen was himself afraid of any scandal which might besmirch his honor.
67
The same, of course, can be said of men who bewitch women, a subject which will be covered in our
discussion of The Lady from the Sea.
68
One of the passages quoted by Psche in Dano-Norwegian is:
Du m ikke undres, hvi min kind er hvid,
tre ntter har jeg stridt s sr en strid;
du m ikke undres, hvi min pande er bleg

148

tre ntter har jeg vret i alfeleg.

In the original folk ballad Oluf Liljukrans (Landstad 1853, 358) it reads:
De er ki undrast at eg er bleik,
Fer eg heve vari i elveleik.
De er kje undrast, at eg er bleik,
No hev eg stai sa streng ein leik.
69
The valley is Justedal, where lives the solitary young girl who escaped the Black Death.
70
Reminiscent of the ballad Her Byrting og elvekvinna in which an elf-girl gives her lover the drink of
forgetfulness. He drinks three times until he has forgotten his home, his wife-to-be, and finally his God.
The magic potion which is to be drunk three times is present, however, in many ballads, for example also
in the ballad Liti Kersti. Psche traces other elements in Olaf Liljekrans to such ballads as Alvar og
Ingrid, Sigur og trollbrra, and Jomfruga Ingebjrg. (Psche, Olaf Liljekrans. Et bidrag til studiet av
Ibsens forhold til vore viser og sagn 1909). In Ibsen og nationalromantiken he claims that he could
show where Ibsen has drawn from about a dozen of Landstands folk tales.
71
It is significant that as early as the year 1850, Ibsen fashioned out of the simple character of Knud the
minstrel, in Rypen I Justedal, a symbolic figure representing that ideal call which was the one great
stimulus to Ibsens own life work. Psche has already shown (Gildet p Solhaug, p. 54) how the name
Knud, was changed to that of Thorgjerd, who was none other than the minstrel Morgeir Audunson, whom
Welhaven had glorified in his poem of 1849 (Alfernes Lind). Knud and Thorgjerd are divergent in their
attitude towards fairy-lore; Knud actually believes in the supernatural, while Thorgjerd views such as
mere poetic imagery from which he may draw inspiration for his artso far had Ibsen progressed towards
a realistic attitude in this regard (Sturtevant, Olaf Liljekrans and Ibsen's Literary Development 1917-1940,
5:118).
72
From the Greek , to create.
73
The word spirit is an example of how a word loses its meaning when it is no longer connected to visual
images. The Greek word is plurisignative (), meaning breath, air, wind, with the connotations of
that which gives life but cannot be seen.
74
The original reads as follows:
m lure det liv, som i brystet banker
klde folkets drmme i toner og ord,
og klare dets grende tanker!
(Ibsen, Olaf Liljekrans 1898-1902, 3:10)
75
With regard to the reality of the inward world as opposed to the world out there, in Hinduism and
Buddhism it is the world out there which is an illusion, while the realm of the soul is the real world.
76
Refers to the collection of Danish ballads from the Middle Ages made by Professors Nyrup,
Abrahamson, and Rahbek (1812-1814).
77
This is again the bipolar nature of the feminine: the witch who destroys and the goddess who inspires.
78
Today we would describe it as right-brain thinking springing from the subconscious mind.
79
It is the love displayed in Ibsens later plays by Tesmans aunts in Hedda Gabler, who choose to spend
their lives taking care of others in need; of Mrs. Lind in A Dolls House, who leaves her abusive husband
and chooses to care for the discredited Nils Krogstad. Nora, in A Dolls House. is still too much of a
child, playing with her own children as if she were one of them, to be a mother who properly loves them,
but the maid has chosen to dedicate her life to those children and give them the love they need.
80
Scandinavian poets.
81
The story is told (Koht, The Life of Ibsen 1931, 1:95) that thirty years after his affair with Rikke Holst
Ibsen revisited Bergen and they met again. During the conversation Ibsen asked, Why was it, really, that
nothing came of our affair? The lady laughed gaily as in olden days and replied, But, my dear Ibsen,
dont you remember that you ran away? Yes, yes, said Ibsen apologetically, face to face I was never
a brave man.

149

82

For a summary of interpretations of Brand, see (Kinck 1930).

According to Georg Brandes (Brandes 1899, 71).
Agnes is a fourth century martyr, patron saint of young girls.
85
An occasional reference is made to the time of the Vikings, concerning the story of the brothers Ulv
and Tor ( (Ibsen, Samlede Vrker 1962, 2:52).
86
The story of Moses is one example.
87
Jehova is the Old Testament God of retribution as compared to the New Testament God of love. There
are opposites and contradictions in the nature of God (as we understand Him) as well as in mans nature.
88
The meaning is plurisignative. On the one hand, ones ego must die. On the other, one must literally
die.
89
For an English translation of the relevant passages see (Archer, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen
1906-1912, 4;272). For a list of the material taken from Asbjrnson, in German, see (Woerner 1912,
1:233).
90
In the original: Mann, vr deg selv. . . Troll, vr deg selv nok!
91
Usually associated with the right hemisphere of the brain, which thinks with pictures, not words.
92
Which is controlled by the right brain, which provides the insights into what is the will of God.
93
Which is controlled by the left brain, the source of conscious, logical thought. It is amazing to me that
Ibsen had the intuition to make these distinctions.
94
This passage emphasizes the importance of the myth as legend; it is both an ancient story and an event
one has experienced himself.
83

84

150

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