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THE COLLECTED WORKS OF

HENRIK IBSEN

VOLUME II

THE VIKINGS AT HELGELAND

THE PRETENDERS

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF

HENRIK IBSEN

Copyright Edition. Complete in 11 Volumes.

Crown 8vo, price 4s. each.

ENTIRELY REVISED AND EDITED BY

WILLIAM ARCHER

London: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

21 Bedford Street, W.C.

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
HENRIK IBSEN

Copyright Edition

VOLUME II

THE VIKINGS AT

HELGELAND

THE PRETENDERS

WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY

WILLIAM ARCHER

LONDON

WILLIAM HEINEMANN

1910

Collected Edition, First printed 1906

Second Impression 1910

Copyright 1906 by William Heinemann

CONTENTS

THE VIKINGS AT HELGELAND.

INTRODUCTION.

Ibsen himself has told us, in his preface to the second edition of The Feast at Solhoug, how the reading of the Icelandic family-sagas suggested to him, in germ, the theme of The Vikings at Helgeland. What he first saw, he says, was the contrasted figures of the two women who ultimately became Hiördis and Dagny, together with a great banquet-scene at which an interchange of taunts and gibes should lead to tragic consequences. So far as one can gather from this statement, the particular theme which he ultimately borrowed from the Volsung-Saga had not yet entered his mind. On the other hand, the conception of the two women’s characters was certainly not new to him, seeing that a similar contrast presents itself in his very earliest work, Catilina, between the aptly-named Furia and the gentle Aurelia; while even in Lady Inger of Ostråt it reappears, somewhat disguised, in the contrast between Inger Gyldenlöve and her daughter Eline. While the scheme of The Vikings was still entirely vague, however, fresh influences, both of a personal and of a literary nature, intervened, and, transposing the theme from the purely dramatic into the lyrical key, he produced The Feast at Solhoug. The foster-sisters, Hiördis and Dagny became the sisters Margit and Signe, and the banquet, instead of being the culminating-point of the dramatic action, became its mere background.

The fact probably is that in 1855 the poet found himself still unripe for the intense effort of dramatic concentration involved in such a work as The Vikings. Probably, too, he knew that neither his actors nor his public at the Bergen Theatre were prepared to go back to the primitive austerity of the heroic age, as it was beginning to body itself forth in his mind. The good Bergensers were accustomed either to French intrigue (such as he had given them in Lady Inger), or to Danish lyrical romanticism; and he perhaps foresaw that the ruling taste of Bergen would be as hard to contend against as, in the sequel, the ruling taste of Copenhagen actually proved to be. At all events, from whatever mingling of motives, he put the heroic theme aside for two years, while he kept to the key of lyrical romanticism not only in the Feast at Solhoug, written in the summer of 1855, but also in the very feeble Olaf Liliekrans, conceived much earlier, but written in 1856. Not until he had left Bergen behind him and returned to Christiania in the summer of 1857, did the poet take up again, and rapidly work out, the theme of The Vikings. It is almost inconceivable that only a year should have intervened between it and Olaf Liliekrans.

Paul Botten-Hansen, perhaps Ibsen’s closest friend of those days, has stated that The Vikings was begun in verse. If so, the metre chosen was probably the twelve-syllable measure of Oehlenschläger’s Balder’s Death, supposed to represent the iambic trimeter of the Greek dramatists. In an essay On the Heroic Ballad, written in Bergen in the early months of 1857, Ibsen had condemned, as a medium for the treatment of Scandinavian themes, the iambic deca-syllable (our blank verse) in which Oehlenschläger had written most of his plays, and which Ibsen himself had adopted in his early imitation of Oehlenschläger, The Hero’s Grave. Blank verse Ibsen regarded as “entirely foreign” to Norwegian-Danish prosody, and, moreover, a product of Christian influences; whereas pagan antiquity, if treated in verse at all, ought to be treated in the pagan measure of the Greeks. At the same time we find him expressing a doubt whether Oehlenschläger’s Hakon Jarl might not have been just as poetic in prose as in verse—a doubt which clearly shows in what direction his thoughts were turning. It must be regarded as a great mercy that he abandoned the iambic trimeter, which, in Oehlenschläger’s hands, was nothing but an unrhymed Alexandrine with the cæsura displaced.

This same essay On the Heroic Ballad throws a curious light on the difficulties which occasioned the long delay between the conception and the execution of The Vikings. He lays it down that “the heroic ballad is much better fitted than the saga for dramatic treatment. The saga is a great, cold, rounded and self-contained epos, essentially objective, and exclusive of all lyricism.... If, now, the poet is to extract a dramatic work from this epic material, he must necessarily bring into it a foreign, a lyrical, element; for the drama is well known to be a higher blending of the lyric and the epos.” This “well-known” dogma he probably accepted from the German æstheticians with whom, about this time, he seems to have busied himself. A little further on, he adds that the accommodating prosody of the ballads gives room for “many freedoms which are of great importance to dramatic dialogue,” and consequently prophesies a great future for the drama drawn from this source. It was a luckless prophecy. He himself, though apparently he little guessed it, had done his last work in lyrical romance; and though it has survived, sporadically, in Danish and even in German literature, it can count but few masterpieces during the past half-century. Perhaps, however, Hauptmann’s Sunken Bell might be taken as justifying Ibsen’s forecast.[^[1]]

It must have been very soon after this essay was published (May 1857) that Ibsen discovered how to impose dramatic form upon the epic material of the sagas, without dragging in any foreign lyrical element. He suddenly saw his way, it would seem, to reproducing in dialogue the terse, unvarnished prose of the sagas themselves, eloquent in reticence rather than in rhetorical or lyrical abundance.

Had he, or had he not, in the meantime read Björnson’s one-act play, Between the Battles? It was not produced until October 27, 1857, by which time The Vikings must have been almost, if not quite, finished. But Ibsen may have seen it in manuscript several months earlier, and it may have put him on the track of the form in which to cast his saga-material. The style of The Vikings is incomparably firmer, purer, more homogeneous and clear-cut than that of Between the Battles; but Björnson’s mediæval comedietta (it is really little more) may quite well have given Ibsen a valuable impulse towards the adaptation of the saga-style to drama. The point, however, is of little moment. It is much more important to note that while Ibsen was writing The Vikings Björnson was writing his peasant-idyll Synnöve Solbakken; so that these two corner-stones of modern Norwegian literature were laid, to all intents and purposes, simultaneously.

In an autobiographic letter to Peter Hansen,[^[2]] written in 1870, Ibsen mentions this play very briefly: “The Vikings at Helgeland I wrote whilst I was engaged to be married. For Hiördis I had the same model as I took afterwards for Svanhild in Love’s Comedy.” More noteworthy is his preface to a German translation of the play, published in 1876. It runs as follows:

“In issuing a German translation of one of my earlier dramatic works, it may not be superfluous to remark that I have taken the material of this play, not from the Nibelungenlied, but in part—and in part only—from a kindred Scandinavian source, the Volsung-Saga. More essentially, however, my poem may be said to be founded upon the various Icelandic family-sagas, in which it often seems that the titanic conditions and occurrences of the Nibelungenlied and the Volsung-Saga have simply been reduced to human dimensions. Hence I think we may conclude that the situations and events depicted in these two documents were typically characteristic of our common Germanic life in the earliest historical times. If this view be justified, it disposes of the reproach that in the present drama our national mythic world is brought down to a lower plane than that to which it belongs. The idealised, and in some degree impersonal, myth-figures are exceedingly ill-adapted for representation on the stage of to-day; and, however this may be, it was not my aim to present our mythic world, but simply our life in primitive times.”

The reasoning of this passage does not seem very cogent; but it expresses clearly enough the design which the poet proposed to himself. Before discussing the merits of the play, however, I may as well complete the outline of its external history.

Part of that external history is written by Ibsen himself, in letters to the Christiania Press of the day. In the autumn of 1857, he presented the play to the Christiania Theatre, then occupied by a Danish company, under Danish management. After a long delay, he ascertained that it had been accepted and would be produced in March 1858. He then proposed to consult with the manager as to the casting of the piece, but found that that functionary had no clear conception of either the plot or the characters, and therefore left him a couple of months in which to study it. At the end of that time the poet again reminded the potentate of his existence, and learned that “since the economic status and prospects of the theatre did not permit of its paying fees for original works,” the proposed production could not take place. Ibsen hints that, had the choice been offered him, he would have consented to the performance of the piece without fee or reward. As the choice was not offered him, he regarded the whole episode as a move in the anti-national policy of the Danish management; and the controversy which arose out of the incident doubtless contributed to the nationalisation of the Christiania Theatre—the supersession of Danish by Norwegian managers, actors and authors—which took place during the succeeding decade.

In the meantime, almost simultaneously with the rejection of the play by the Christiania Theatre, it was rejected by the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. The director, J. L. Heiberg, was then regarded as an autocrat in the æsthetic world; and his report on The Vikings is now a curiosity of literature. He declared that nothing was so “monotonous, tiresome and devoid of all poetry” as the Icelandic family-sagas; he could not endure their “wildness and rawness” on the stage; the saga style, as reproduced by Ibsen, seemed to him “mannered and affected”; and he concluded his judgment in these terms: “A Norwegian theatre will scarcely take its rise from such experiments, and the Danish theatre has fortunately no need for them.”

The play was published in April 1858 as a supplement to a Christiania illustrated paper, the author receiving an “honorarium” of something less than £7. On November 24, 1858, it was produced at the little “Norwegian Theatre” in Christiania, of which the poet was then director. At the Bergen Theatre it was produced in 1859, at the Christiania Theatre (by that time pretty well Norwegianised) in 1861. It did not make its way to Copenhagen and Stockholm until 1875. In 1876 it was acted at the Court Theatres of Munich and Dresden, and at the Vienna Burgtheater. Thenceforward it was pretty frequently seen on the German stage; but it does not seem to have reached Berlin (Deutsches Theater) until 1890. In 1892 it was produced in Moscow. The only production in the English language of which any account has reached me took place in 1903 at the Imperial Theatre, London, when Miss Ellen Terry appeared as Hiördis and Mr. Oscar Asche as Sigurd. The scenery and dresses were designed by Miss Terry’s son, Mr. Gordon Craig.

It would need not merely an essay, but a volume, to discuss the relation of The Vikings to its mythic material, and to other modern treatments of that material—Friedrich Hebbel’s Die Nibelungen, Richard Wagner’s Ring der Nibelungen, &c. The poet’s actual indebtedness to the Volsung-Saga is well summarised by Henrik Jæger in his “Life of Ibsen”: “Like Sigurd Fafnir’s-bane,” he says, “Sigurd Viking has achieved the deed which Hiördis (Brynhild) demands of the man who shall wed her; and, again like his heroic namesake, he has renounced her in favour of his foster-brother, Gunnar, himself taking another to wife. This other woman reveals the secret in the course of an altercation with Hiördis (Brynhild), who, in consequence of this discovery, brings about Sigurd’s death and her own. The reader will observe that we must keep to very general terms if they are to fit both the saga and the drama. Are there any further coincidences? Yes, one. After Gudrun has betrayed the secret, there comes a scene in which she seeks to appease Brynhild, and begs her to think no more of it; then follows a scene in which Sigurd explains to Brynhild how it all happened; and finally a scene in which Brynhild goads Gunnar to kill Sigurd. All these scenes have their parallels in the third act of The Vikings; but their order is different, and none of their wording has been adopted.” From the family-sagas, again, not only the stature of the characters, so to speak, but several details of incident and dialogue are borrowed. The boasting-match at Gunnar’s feast, which, as we have seen, was one of the first elements of the story to present itself to Ibsen’s mind, has many analogies in Icelandic lore. Örnulf’s questions as to how Thorolf fell are borrowed from Egils Saga, and so is the idea of his “drapa,” or funeral chant over his dead sons. Sigurd and Hiördis are, perhaps, almost as closely related to Kiartan and Gudrun in the Laxdæla Saga as to Sigurd Fafnir’s bane and Brynhild. Indeed, Ibsen seems to have reckoned too confidently on the unfamiliarity of his public with the stores of material upon which he drew. Not, of course, that there could be any question of plagiarism. The sagas were as legitimately at Ibsen’s service as were Plutarch and Holinshed at Shakespeare’s. But having been himself, as he tells us, almost ignorant of the existence of these sagas until he came across N. M. Petersen’s translation of them he forgot that people who had long known and loved them might resent the removal of this trait and that from its original setting, and might hold it to be, in its new context, degraded and sentimentalised. “It may be,” writes H. H. Boyesen, in his generally depreciatory remarks on the play, “that my fondness for these sagas themselves prevents me from relishing the modification and remoulding to which Ibsen has subjected them.” Dr. Brandes, too, points to a particular instance in which the sense of degradation could not but be felt. The day-dream as to the hair-woven bowstring which Hiördis relates to Sigurd in the third act (p. [84]) is in itself effective enough; but any one who knows the splendid passage in Nials Saga, on which it is founded, cannot but feel that the actual (or at any rate legendary) event is impoverished by being dragged in under the guise of a mere morbid fantasy.

On the whole, I think Ibsen can scarcely escape the charge of having sentimentalised the sagas in the same way, though not in the same degree, in which Tennyson has sentimentalised the Arthurian legends. Indeed, Sigurd the Strong is not without points of resemblance to the Blameless King of the Idylls. But, for my part, I cannot regard this as a very serious charge. The Vikings is the work of a man still young (29), who had, moreover, developed very slowly. It is still steeped in romanticism, though not in the almost boyish lyricism of its predecessors. The poet is not yet intellectually mature—very far from it. But here, for the first time, we are unmistakably face to face with a great imagination and a specifically dramatic endowment of the first order. The germs of promise discernible in Lady Inger have ripened into rare technical mastery.

Ibsen was doubtless right in feeling that the superhuman figures of the mythical sagas were impossible on the non-musical stage, just as Wagner was right in feeling that the world of myth could be embodied only in an atmosphere of music. The reduction, then, of the Volsungs and Niblungs to the stature of the men of the family-sagas was not only judicious, but necessary. But was it judicious to go to the myth-sagas for the initial idea of a play which had to be developed in terms of the family-sagas? Scarcely, I think. The weak points in the structure of the story are precisely those at which the poet has had to replace supernatural by natural machinery. To slay a dragon and to break through a wall of fire, even with magical aid, are exploits which we can accept, on the mythic plane, as truly stupendous. But it is impossible to be really impressed by the slaying of Hiördis’s bear, or to share in the breathless admiration with which that achievement is always mentioned. If the bear is to be regarded as a fabulous monster, it might just as well be a dragon at once; if it is to be accepted as a real quadruped, the killing of it is no such mighty matter. We feel it, in fact, to be a mere substitute, a more or less ludicrous makeshift. And in the same way, Sigurd’s renunciation of Hiördis becomes very difficult to accept when all supernatural agency—magic potion, or other sleight of wizardry—is eliminated. We feel that he behaves like a nincompoop in despairing of winning her for himself, merely because she does not show an obviously “coming on” disposition, and like an immoral sentimentalist in handing her over to Gunnar. This, to be sure, is the poet’s own criticism of his action. It is the lie which Sigurd and Gunnar conspire to tell, or rather to enact, that lies at the root of the whole tragedy. We have here Ibsen’s first treatment of the theme with which he is afterwards so much concerned—the necessity of truth as the basis of every human relation. Gunnar’s acquiescence in Sigurd’s heroic mendacity is as clearly condemned and punished as, in Pillars of Society, Bernick’s acquiescence in Johan’s almost equally heroic self-sacrifice. Both plays convey a warning against excesses of altruism, and show that we have no right to offer sacrifices which the person benefiting by them has no right to accept. But to indicate a correct moral judgment of Sigurd’s action is not to make it psychologically plausible. We feel, I repeat, that the poet is trying in vain to rationalise a series of actions which are comprehensible only on the supernatural plane.

This unreality of plot involved a similar unreality, or at any rate extreme simplicity, of characterisation. All the personages are drawn in large, obvious traits, which never undergo the smallest modification. Sigurd is throughout the magnanimous hero, Dagny the submissive, amiable wife, Hiördis the valkyrie-virago, Gunnar the well-meaning weakling, not cowardly but inefficient. By far the most human and most individual figure is old Örnulf, in whom the spirit of the family-sagas is magnificently incarnated. We feel throughout the inexperience of the author, his incuriousness of half-tones in character, his tendency to view human relations and problems in a purely sentimental light. To compare Hiördis with Hedda Gabler, Sigurd with Halvard Solness, is to realise what an immeasurable process of evolution the poet was destined to go through. Indeed, we as yet seem far enough off even from Duke Skule and Bishop Nicholas.

But the man of inventive imagination and the man of the theatre are already here in all their strength. Whatever motives and suggestions Ibsen found in the sagas, the construction of the play is all his own and is quite masterly. Exposition, development, the carrying on of the interest from act to act—all this is perfect in its kind. The play is “well-made” in the highest sense of the word. Already the poet shows himself consummate in his art of gradually lifting veil after veil from the past, and making each new discovery involve a more or less striking change in the relations of the persons on the stage. But it is not technically alone that the play is great. The whole second act is a superbly designed and modulated piece of drama; and, for pure nobility and pathos, the scene of Örnulf’s return—entirely of the poet’s own invention—is surely one of the greatest things in dramatic literature. It is marvellous that even æsthetic prejudice should have prevented a man like J. L. Heiberg from recognising that he was here in presence of a great poet. The interest of the third act is mainly psychological, and the psychology, as we have seen, is neither very profound nor very convincing. But the fourth act, again, rises to a great height of romantic impressiveness. Whatever hints may have come from the sagas, the picture of Örnulf’s effort of self-mastery is a very noble piece of work; and the plunge into supernaturalism at the close, in the child’s vision of Asgårdsreien, with his mother leading the rout, seems to me an entirely justified piece of imaginative daring. I cannot even agree with Dr. Brandes in condemning as “Geheimniskrämerei” Sigurd’s dying revelation of the fact that he is a Christian. It seems to me to harmonise entirely with the whole sentimental colouring of the play. The worst flaws I find in this act are the terrible asides placed in the mouths of Gunnar and Dagny after the discovery of Sigurd’s death.

The word Vikings in the title is a very free rendering of Hærmændene, which simply means “warriors.” As “warriors,” however, is a colourless word, and as Örnulf, Sigurd, and Gunnar all are, or have been, actually vikings, the substitution seemed justifiable. I would beg, however hopelessly, that “viking” should be pronounced so as to rhyme not with “liking” but with “seeking,” or at worst with “kicking.” Helgeland, it may be mentioned, is a province or district in the north of Norway.

Örnulf’s “drapa” and his snatches of verse are rhymed as well as alliterated in the original. I had the less hesitation in suppressing the rhyme, as it was actually foreign to the practice of the skalds.

THE PRETENDERS.

INTRODUCTION.

Six years elapsed between the composition of The Vikings and that of The Pretenders.[^[3]] In the interval Ibsen wrote Love’s Comedy, and brought all the world of Norwegian philistinism, and (as we should now say) suburbanism, about his ears. Whereas hitherto his countrymen had ignored, they now execrated him. In his autobiographic letter of 1870, to Peter Hansen, he wrote: “The only person who at that time approved of the book was my wife.... My countrymen excommunicated me. All were against me. The fact that all were against me—that there was no longer any one outside my own 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.” It is to be noted that this was written during a period of estrangement from Björnson. I do not know what was Björnson’s attitude towards Love’s Comedy in particular; but there can be no doubt that, in general, he believed in and encouraged his brother poet, and employed his own growing influence in efforts to his advantage. In representing himself as standing quite alone, Ibsen probably forgets, for the moment, his relation to his great contemporary.

Yet the relation to Björnson lay at the root of the character-contrast on which The Pretenders is founded. Ibsen always insisted that each of his plays gave poetic form to some motive gathered from his own experience or observation; and this is very clearly true of the present play. Ever since Synnöve Solbakken had appeared in 1857, Björnson, the expansive, eloquent, lyrical Björnson, had been the darling child of fortune. He had gone from success to success unwearied. He was recognised throughout Scandinavia (in Denmark no less than in Norway) as the leader of the rising generation in almost every branch of imaginative literature. He was full, not only of inspiration and energy, but of serene self-confidence. Meanwhile Ibsen, nearly five years older than he, had been pursuing his slow and painful course of development in comparative obscurity, in humiliating poverty, and amid almost complete lack of appreciation. “Mr. Ibsen is a great cipher” (or “nullity”) wrote a critic in 1858; another, in 1863, laid it down that “Ibsen has a certain technical and artistic talent, but nothing of what can be called ‘genius.’” The scoffs of the critics, however, were not the sorest trials that he had to bear. What was hardest to contend against was the doubt as to his own poetic calling and election that constantly beset him. This doubt could not but be generated by the very tardiness of his mental growth. We see him again and again (in the case of Olaf Liliekrans, of The Vikings, of Love’s Comedy, and of The Pretenders itself), conceiving a plan and then abandoning it for years—no doubt because he found himself, in one respect or another, unripe for its execution. Every such experience must have involved for him days and weeks of fruitless effort and discouragement. To these moods of scepticism as to his own powers he gave expression in a series of poems (for the most part sonnets) published in 1859 under the title of In the Picture Gallery. In it he represents the “black elf” of doubt, whispering to him: “Your soul is like the dry bed of a mountain stream, in which the singing waters of poetry have ceased to flow. If a faint sound comes rustling down the empty channel, do not imagine that it portends the return of the waters—it is only the dry leaves eddying before the autumn wind, and pattering among the barren stones.” In those years of struggle and stress, of depressing criticism, and enervating self-criticism, he must often have compared his own lot and his own character with Björnson’s, and perhaps, too, wondered whether there were no means by which he could appropriate to himself some of his younger and more facile brother-poet’s kingly self-confidence. For this relation between two talents he partly found and partly invented a historic parallel in the relation between two rival pretenders to the Norwegian throne, Håkon Håkonsson and Skule Bårdsson.

Dr. Brandes, who has admirably expounded the personal element in the genesis of this play, compares Håkon-Björnson and Skule-Ibsen with the Aladdin and Nureddin of Oehlenschläger’s beautiful dramatic poem. Aladdin is the born genius, serene, light-hearted, a trifle shallow, who grasps the magic lamp with an unswerving confidence in his right to it. (“It is that which the Romans called ingenium” says Bishop Nicholas, “truly I am not strong in Latin; but ’twas called ingenium.”) Nureddin, on the other hand, is the far profounder, more penetrating, but sceptical and self-torturing spirit. When at last he seizes Aladdin’s lamp, as Skule annexes Håkon’s king’s thought, his knees tremble, and it drops from his grasp, just as the Genie is ready to obey him.

It is needless to cite the passages from the scenes between Skule and Bishop Nicholas in the second act, Skule and Håkon in the third, Skule and Jatgeir in the fourth, in which this element of personal symbolism is present. The reader will easily recognise them, while recognising at the same time that their dramatic appropriateness, their relevance to the historic situation as the poet viewed it, is never for a moment impaired. The underlying meaning is never allowed to distort or denaturalise the surface aspect of the picture.[^[4]] The play may be read, understood, and fully appreciated, by a person for whom this underlying meaning has no existence. One does not point it out as an essential element in the work of art, or even as adding to its merit, but simply as affording a particularly clear instance of Ibsen’s method of interweaving “Wahrheit” with “Dichtung.”

So early as 1858, soon after the completion of The Vikings, Ibsen had been struck by the dramatic material in Håkon Håkonsson’s Saga, as related by Snorri Sturlasson’s nephew, Sturla Thordsson, and had sketched a play on the subject. At that time, however, he put the draft aside. It was only as the years went on, as he found himself “excommunicated” after Love’s Comedy, and as the contrast between Björnson’s fortune and his became ever more marked, that the figures of Skule and Håkon took more and more hold upon his imagination. In June 1863, he attended a “Festival of Song” at Bergen, and there met Björnson, who had been living abroad since 1860. Probably under the stimulus of this meeting he set to work upon The Pretenders immediately on his return to Christiania, and wrote it with almost incredible rapidity. The manuscript went to the printers in September; the book was published in October 1863 (though dated 1864), and the play was produced at the Christiania Theatre, under the author’s own supervision, on January 17, 1864. The production was notably successful; yet no one seems fully to have realised what it meant for Norwegian literature. Outside of Norway, at any rate, it awoke no echo. George Brandes declares that scarcely a score of copies of the play found their way to Denmark. Not until Ibsen had left Norway (April 1864) and had taken the Danish reading public by storm with Brand and Peer Gynt, did people go back upon The Pretenders and discover what an extraordinary achievement it was. In January 1871, it was produced at the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen, where Emil Poulsen found in Bishop Nicholas one of the great triumphs of his career. It was produced by the Meiningen Company and at the Munich Hoftheater in 1875, in Stockholm in 1879, at the Königliches Schauspielhaus, Berlin, and at the Vienna Burgtheater in 1891; and it has from time to time been acted at many other Scandinavian and German theatres. The character of Nicholas has fascinated many great actors: what a pity that it did not come in the way of Sir Henry Irving when he was at the height of his power! But of course no English actor-manager would dream of undertaking a character which dies in the middle of the third act.

Ibsen’s treatment of history in this play may be proposed as a model to other historic dramatists. Although he has invented a great deal, his inventions supplement rather than contradict the records. Chronology, indeed, he treats with considerable freedom, and at the same time with ingenious vagueness. The general impression one receives in reading the play is that the action covers a space of four or five years; as a matter of fact it covers twenty-two years, between the folkmote in Bergen, 1218, and Skule’s death, 1240. All the leading characters are historical; and although much is read into them which history does not warrant, there is little that history absolutely forbids us to conceive. The general features of the struggle between the two factions—Håkon’s Birkebeiner, or Birchlegs, and Skule’s Vargbælgs—are correctly enough reproduced. In his treatment of this period, the Norwegian historian, J. E. Sars, writing thirteen years after the appearance of The Pretenders, uses terms which might almost have been suggested by Ibsen’s play. “On the one side,” he says, “we find strength and certainty, on the other lameness and lack of confidence. The old Birchlegs[^[5]] go to work openly and straightforwardly, like men who are immovably convinced of the justice of their cause, and unwaveringly assured of its ultimate victory. Skule’s adherents, on the other hand, are ever seeking by intrigues and chicanery to place stumbling-blocks in the way of their opponents’ enthusiasm.” Håkon represented Sverre’s ideal of a democratic kingship, independent of the oligarchy of bishops and barons. “He was,” says Sars, “reared in the firm conviction of his right to the Throne; he grew up among the veterans of his grandfather’s time, men imbued with Sverre’s principles, from whom he accepted them as a ready-made system, the realisation of which could only be a question of time. He stood from the first in a clear and straightforward position to which his whole personality corresponded.... He owed his chief strength to the repose and equilibrium of mind which distinguished him, and had its root in his unwavering sense of having right and the people’s will upon his side.” His great “king’s-thought,” however, seems to be an invention of the poet’s. Skule, on the other hand, represented the old nobility in its struggle against the new monarchy. “He was the centre of a hierarchic aristocratic party; but after its repeated defeats this party must have been lacking alike in number and in confidence.... It was clear from the first that his attempt to reawaken the old wars of the succession in Norway was undertaken in the spirit of the desperate gambler, who does not count the chances, but throws at random, in the blind hope that luck may befriend him.... Skule’s enterprise had thus no support in opinion or in any prevailing interest, and one defeat was sufficient to crush him.”

In the character of Bishop Nicholas, too, Ibsen has widened and deepened his historical material rather than poetised with a free hand. “Bishop Nicholas,” says Sars, “represented rather the aristocracy ... than the cloth to which he belonged. He had begun his career as a worldly chieftain, and, as such, taken part in Magnus Erlingsson’s struggles with Sverre; and although he must have had some tincture of letters, since he could contrive to be elected a bishop ... there is no lack of indications that his spiritual lore was not of the deepest. During his long participation in the civil broils, both under Sverre and later, we see in him a man to whose character any sort of religious or ecclesiastical enthusiasm must have been foreign, his leading motives being personal ambition and vengefulness rather than any care for general interests—a cold and calculating nature, shrewd but petty and without any impetus, of whom Håkon Håkonsson, in delivering his funeral speech ... could find nothing better to say than that he had not his equal in worldly wisdom (veraldar vit).” I cannot find that the Bishop played any such prominent part in the struggle between the King and the Earl as Ibsen assigns to him, and the only foundation for the great death-bed scene seems to be the following passage from Håkon Håkonsson’s Saga, Cap. 138: “As Bishop Nicholas at that time lay very sick, he sent a messenger to the King praying him to come to him. The King had on this expedition seized certain letters, from which he gathered that the Bishop had not been true to him. With this he upbraided him, and the Bishop, confessing it, prayed the King to forgive him. The King replied that he did so willingly, for God’s sake; and as he could discern that the Bishop lay near to death, he abode with him until God called him from the world.”

In the introduction to The Vikings at Helgeland I have suggested that in that play Ibsen had reached imaginative and technical maturity, but was as yet intellectually immature. The six years that elapsed between The Vikings and The Pretenders placed him at the height of his intellectual power. We have only to compare Skule, Håkon, and Bishop Nicholas with Gunnar, Sigurd, and Örnulf to feel that we have passed from nobly-designed and more or less animated waxworks to complex and profoundly-studied human beings. There is no Hiördis in The Pretenders, and the female character-drawing is still controlled by purely romantic ideals;[^[6]] but how exquisitely human is Margrete in comparison with the almost entirely conventional Dagny! The criticism of life, too, which in The Vikings is purely sentimental, here becomes intense and searching. The only point of superiority in The Vikings—if it be a point of superiority—is purely technical. The action of the earlier play is concentrated and rounded. It has all the “unity,” or “unities,” that a rational criticism can possibly demand. In a word, it is, in form as well as essence, an ideal tragedy. The Pretenders, on the other hand, is a chronicle-play, far more close-knit than Shakespeare’s or Schiller’s works in that kind, but, nevertheless, what Aristotle would call “episodic” in its construction. The weaving of the plot, however, is quite masterly, betokening an effort of invention and adjustment incomparably greater than that which went to the making of The Vikings. It was doubtless his training in the school of French intrigue that enabled Ibsen to depict with such astonishing vigour that master wire-puller, Bishop Nicholas. This form of technical dexterity he was afterwards to outgrow and bring into disrepute. But from The Vikings to Pillars of Society he practised, whenever he was writing primarily for the stage, the methods of the “well-made play”; and in everything but concentration, which the very nature of the subject excluded, The Pretenders is thoroughly “well-made.”

With this play, though the Scandinavian criticism of 1864 seems to have been far from suspecting the fact, Ibsen took his place among the great dramatists of the world. In wealth of characterisation, complexity and nobility of emotion, and depth of spiritual insight, it stands high among the masterpieces of romantic drama. It would be hard to name a more vigorous character-projection than that of Bishop Nicholas, or any one dramatic invention more superbly inspired than the old man’s death scene, with the triumphant completion of his perpetuum mobile. But even if the Bishop were entirely omitted, the play would not be Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. The characters of Håkon and Skule, and the struggle between them, would still make one of the greatest historic dramas in literature.

It has not been generally noticed, I think, that Ibsen found in Björnson’s King Sverre, published in 1861, a study of Bishop Nicholas in his younger days. The play, as a whole, is a poor one, and does not appear in the collected edition of Björnson’s works; but there is distinct merit in the drawing of the Bishop’s character. Furthermore, it ought to be remembered that The Pretenders was not the first work, or even the first great work, of its class in Norwegian literature. In 1862, Björnson had published his splendid trilogy of Sigurd Slembe, which, though more fluid and uneven than The Pretenders, contains several passages of almost Shakespearean power. It was certainly greater than anything Ibsen had done up to that date. Ibsen reviewed it on its appearance, in terms of unmixed praise, yet, as one cannot but feel, rather over-cautiously.

If anything could excuse the coolness of Norwegian criticism towards The Pretenders, it was the great and flagrant artistic blemish of the Ghost Scene in the last act. This outburst of prophetico-topical satire is a sheer excrescence on the play, indefensible, but, at the same time, fortunately negligible. It is, however, of interest as a symptom of Ibsen’s mood in the last months before he left Norway, and also as one of the links in that chain which binds all his works together. Just as Skule’s attempt to plagiarise Håkon’s king’s-thought points backwards to Gunnar’s moral lapse in taking advantage of the fraud on Hiördis, so the ironic rhymes of the Bagler-Bishop’s ghost point forwards to the lyric indignation and irony of Brand and Peer Gynt.

W. A.

[1]. Though he himself wrote no more plays in the key of The Feast at Solhoug, the “accommodating prosody” of the ballads had doubtless its influence on the metres of Peer Gynt.

[2]. Correspondence, Letter 74.

[3]. The original title Kongsemnerne might be more literally translated “The Scions of Royalty.” It is rendered by Brandes in German “Königsmaterie,” or “the stuff from which kings are made.”

[4]. This remark does not apply, of course, to the satiric “parabasis” uttered by the Bishop’s ghost in the fifth act. That is a totally different matter.

[5]. The followers of Håkon’s grandfather, King Sverre. See Note, p. 125.

[6]. On page [277] will be found a reference to Brandes’s Ibsen and Björnson; but I may as well give here the substance of the passage. In the original form of the play, three speeches of Ingeborg’s, in her scene with Skule, ran as follows: “It is man’s right to forget,” “It is woman’s happiness to remember,” and “To have to sacrifice all and be forgotten, that is woman’s saga.” It was only on Brandes’s remonstrance that Ibsen substituted the present form of these speeches, in which they became, not the generalised expression of an ideal, but merely utterances of Ingeborg’s individual character.

THE
VIKINGS AT HELGELAND

(1858)

CHARACTERS.

• Örnulf of the Fiords, an Icelandic Chieftain.
• Sigurd the Strong, a Sea-King.
• Gunnar Headman,[^[7]] a rich yeoman of Helgeland.
• Thorolf, Örnulf’s youngest son.
• Dagny, Örnulf’s daughter.
• Hiördis, his foster-daughter.
• Kåre the Peasant, a Helgeland-man.
• Egil, Gunnar’s son, four years old.
• Örnulf’s six older Sons.
• Örnulf’s and Sigurd’s Men.
• Guests, house-carls, serving-maids, outlaws, etc.

The action takes place in the time of Erik Blood-axe (about 933 A.D.) at, and in the neighbourhood of, Gunnar’s house, on the island of Helgeland, in the north of Norway.

Pronunciation of Names: Helgeland=Helgheland; Örnulf=Örnoolf; Sigurd=Sigoord; Gunnar=Goonnar; Thorolf=Toorolf; Hiördis=Yördeess; Kåre=Koarë; Egil=Ayghil. The letter “ö” as in German.

THE

VIKINGS AT HELGELAND.

PLAY IN FOUR ACTS.

ACT FIRST.

A rocky coast, running precipitously down to the sea at the back. To the left, a boat-house; to the right, rocks and pinewoods. The masts of two warships can be seen down in the cove. Far out to the right, the sea, dotted with reefs and skerries, on which the surf is running high; it is a stormy snow-grey winter-day.

Sigurd comes up from the ships; he is clad in a white tunic with a silver belt, a blue cloak, cross-gartered hose, untanned brogues, and a steel cap; at his side hangs a short sword. Örnulf comes in sight immediately afterwards, high up among the rocks, clad in a dark lamb-skin tunic with a breastplate and greaves, woollen stockings, and untanned brogues; over his shoulders he has a cloak of brown frieze, with the hood drawn over his steel cap, so that his face is partly hidden. He is very tall and massively built, with a long white beard, but is somewhat bowed by age; his weapons are a round shield, sword, and spear.

Sigurd enters first, looks around, sees the boat-shed, goes quickly up to it, and tries to burst open the door.

Örnulf.

[Appears among the rocks, starts on seeing Sigurd, seems to recognise him, descends and cries:] Give place, Viking!

Sigurd.

[Turns, lays his hand on his sword, and answers:] ’Twere the first time if I did!

Örnulf.

Thou shalt and must! I need the shelter for my stiff-frozen men.

Sigurd.

And I for a weary woman!

Örnulf.

My men are worth more than thy women!

Sigurd.

Then must outlaws be highly prized in Helgeland!

Örnulf.

[Raising his spear.] Thou shalt pay dear for that word!

Sigurd.

[Drawing his sword.] Now will it go ill with thee, old man!

[Örnulf rushes upon him; Sigurd defends himself.

Dagny and some of Sigurd’s men come up from the strand; Örnulf’s six sons appear on the rocks to the right.

Dagny.

[Who is a little in front, clad in a red kirtle, blue cloak, and fur hood, calls down to the ships:] Up, all Sigurd’s men! My husband is fighting with a stranger!

Örnulf’s Sons.

Help! Help for our father! [They descend.

Sigurd.

[To his men.] Hold! I can master him alone!

Örnulf.

[To his sons.] Let me fight in peace! [Rushes in upon Sigurd.] I will see thy blood!

Sigurd.

First see thine own!

[Wounds him in the arm so that his spear falls.

Örnulf.

A stout stroke, Viking!

Swift the sword thou swingest,

keen thy blows and biting;

Sigurd’s self, the Stalwart,

stood before thee shame-struck.

Sigurd.

[Smiling.] Then were his shame his glory!

Örnulf’s Sons.

[With a cry of wonder.] Sigurd himself! Sigurd the Strong!

Örnulf.

But sharper was thy stroke that night thou didst bear away Dagny, my daughter.

[Casts his hood back.

Sigurd and his Men.

Örnulf of the Fiords!

Dagny.

[Glad, yet uneasy.] My father and my brothers.

Sigurd.

Stand thou behind me.

Örnulf.

Nay, no need. [Approaching Sigurd.] I no sooner saw thee than I knew thee, and therefore I stirred the strife; I was fain to prove the fame that tells of thee as the stoutest man of his hands in Norway. Hereafter let peace be between us.

Sigurd.

Best if so it could be.

Örnulf.

Here is my hand. Thou art a warrior indeed; stouter strokes than these has old Örnulf never given or taken.

Sigurd.

[Seizes his outstretched hand.] Let them be the last strokes given and taken between us two; and be thou thyself the judge in the matter between us. Art willing?

Örnulf.

That am I, and straightway shall the quarrel be healed. [To the others.] Be the matter, then, known to all. Five winters ago came Sigurd and Gunnar Headman as vikings to Iceland; they lay in harbour close under my homestead. Then Gunnar, by force and craft, carried away my foster-daughter, Hiördis; but thou, Sigurd, didst take Dagny, my own child, and sailed with her over the sea. For that I now doom thee to pay three hundred pieces of silver, and thereby shall thy misdeed be atoned.

Sigurd.

Fair is thy judgment, Örnulf; the three hundred pieces will I pay, and add thereto a silken cloak fringed with gold. ’Tis a gift from King Æthelstan of England, and better has no Icelander yet borne.

Dagny.

Well said, my brave husband; and my father, I thank thee. Now at last is my mind at ease.

[She presses her father’s and brothers’ hands, and talks low to them.

Örnulf.

Then thus stands the troth between us; and from this day shall Dagny be to the full as honourably regarded as though she had been lawfully betrothed to thee, with the good will of her kin.

Sigurd.

And in me canst thou trust, as in one of thine own blood.

Arnulf.

That I doubt not, and will forthwith prove thy friendship.

Sigurd.

Ready shalt thou find me; say, what dost thou crave?

Örnulf.

Thy help in rede and deed. I have sailed hither to Helgeland to seek out Gunnar Headman and call him to account for the carrying away of Hiördis.

Sigurd.

[Surprised.] Gunnar!

Dagny.

[In the same tone.] And Hiördis—where are they?

Örnulf.

In Gunnar’s homestead, I trow.

Sigurd.

And it is——?

Örnulf.

Not many bow-shots hence; did ye not know?

Sigurd.

[With suppressed emotion.] No, truly I have had scant tidings of Gunnar since we sailed from Iceland together. While I have wandered far and wide and served many outland kings, Gunnar has stayed at home. We made the land here at daydawn, storm-driven. I knew, indeed, that Gunnar’s homestead lay here in the north, but——

Dagny.

[To Örnulf.] So that errand has brought thee hither?

Örnulf.

That and no other. [To Sigurd.] Our meeting is the work of the Mighty Ones above; they willed it so. Had I wished to find thee, little knew I where to seek.

Sigurd.

[Thoughtfully.] True, true!—But concerning Gunnar—tell me, Örnulf, art thou minded to go sharply to work, with all thy might, be it for good or ill?

Örnulf.

That must I. Listen, Sigurd, for thus it stands: Last summer I rode to the Council where many honourable men were met. When the Council-days were over, I sat in the hall and drank with the men of my shire, and the talk fell upon the carrying-away of the women; scornful words they gave me, because for all these years I had let that wrong rest unavenged. Then, in my wrath, I swore to sail to Norway, seek out Gunnar, and crave reckoning or revenge, and never again to set foot in Iceland till my claim was made good.

Sigurd.

Ay, ay, since so it stands, I see well that if need be the matter must be pressed home.

Örnulf.

It must; but I shall not crave overmuch, and Gunnar has the fame of an honourable man. I am glad, too, that I set forth on this quest; the time lay heavy on me in Iceland; out upon the blue waters had I grown old and grey, and meseemed that I must fare forth once again before I——; well well—Bergthora, my good wife, was dead these many years; my elder sons sailed on viking-ventures summer by summer; and since Thorolf was growing up——

Dagny.

[Joyfully.] Thorolf is with thee? Where is he?

Örnulf.

On board the ship. [Points towards the background, to the right.] Scarce shalt thou know the boy again, so stout and strong and fair has he grown. He will be a mighty warrior, Sigurd; one day he will equal thee.

Dagny.

[Smiling.] I see it is now as ever: Thorolf stands nearest thy heart.

Örnulf.

He is the youngest, and like his mother; therefore it is.

Sigurd.

But tell me—thy errand to Gunnar—thinkest thou to-day——?

Örnulf.

Rather to-day than to-morrow. Fair amends will content me; should Gunnar say me nay, then must he abide what may follow.

Kåre the Peasant enters hastily from the right; he is clad in a grey frieze cloak and low-brimmed felt hat; he carries in his hand a broken fence-rail.

Kåre.

Well met, Vikings!

Örnulf.

Vikings are seldom well met.

Kåre.

If ye be honourable men, ye will grant me refuge among you; Gunnar Headman’s house-carls are hunting me to slay me.

Örnulf.

Gunnar’s?

Sigurd.

Then hast thou done him some wrong!

Kåre.

I have done myself right. Our cattle grazed together upon an island, hard by the coast; Gunnar’s men carried off my best oxen, and one of them flouted me for a thrall. Then I raised my sword against him and slew him.

Örnulf.

That was a lawful deed.

Kåre.

But this morning his men came in arms against me. By good hap I heard of their coming, and fled; but my foemen are on my tracks, and short shrift can I look for at their hands.

Sigurd.

Ill can I believe thee, peasant! In bygone days I knew Gunnar as I know myself, and this I wot, that never did he wrong to a peaceful man.

Kåre.

Gunnar has no part in this wrong-doing; he is in the southland; nay, it is Hiördis his wife——

Dagny.

Hiördis!

Örnulf.

[To himself.] Ay, ay, ’tis like her!

Kåre.

I offered Gunnar amends for the thrall, and he was willing; but then came Hiördis, and egged her husband on with many scornful words, and hindered the peace. Since then has Gunnar gone to the south, and to-day——

Sigurd.

[Looking out to the left.] Here comes a band of wayfarers towards the north. Is it not——?

Kåre.

It is Gunnar himself!

Örnulf.

Be of good heart; I trow I can make peace between you.

Gunnar Headman, with several men, enters from the left. He is in peaceful attire, wearing a brown tunic, cross-gartered hose, a blue mantle, and a broad hat; he has no weapon but a small axe.

Gunnar.

[Stops in surprise and uncertainty on seeing the knot of men.] Örnulf of the Fiords! Yes, surely——!

Örnulf.

Thou seest aright.

Gunnar.

[Approaching.] Then peace and welcome to thee in my land, if thou come in peace.

Örnulf.

If thy will be as mine, there shall be no strife between us.

Sigurd.

[Standing forward.] Well met, Gunnar!

Gunnar.

[Gladly.] Sigurd—foster-brother! [Shakes his hand.] Now truly, since thou art here, I know that Örnulf comes in peace. [To Örnulf.] Give me thy hand, greybeard! Thy errand here in the north is lightly guessed: it concerns Hiördis, thy foster-daughter.

Örnulf.

As thou sayest; great wrong was done me when thou didst bear her away from Iceland without my will.

Gunnar.

Thy claim is rightful; what the youth has marred, the man must mend. Long have I looked for thee, Örnulf, for this cause; and if amends content thee, we shall soon be at one.

Sigurd.

So deem I too. Örnulf will not press thee over hard.

Gunnar.

[Warmly.] Nay, Örnulf, didst thou crave her full worth, all my goods were not enough!

Örnulf.

I shall go by law and usage, be sure of that. But now another matter. [Pointing to Kåre.] Seest thou yonder man?

Gunnar.

Kåre! [To Örnulf.] Thou knowest, then, that there is a strife between us?

Örnulf.

Thy men have stolen his cattle, and theft must be atoned.

Gunnar.

Murder no less; he has slain my thrall.

Kåre.

Because he flouted me.

Gunnar.

I have offered thee terms of peace.

Kåre.

But Hiördis had no mind to that, and this morning, whilst thou wert gone, she fell upon me and now hunts me to my death.

Gunnar.

[Angrily.] Sayest thou true? Has she——?

Kåre.

True, every word.

Örnulf.

Therefore the peasant besought me to stand by him, and that will I do.

Gunnar.

[After a moment’s thought.] Thou hast dealt honourably with me, Örnulf; therefore it is fit that I should yield to thy will. Hear then, Kåre: I am willing to let the slaying of the thrall and the wrongs done toward thee quit each other.

Kåre.

[Gives Gunnar his hand.] It is a good offer; I am content.

Örnulf.

And he shall have peace for thee and thine?

Gunnar.

Peace shall he have, both at home and where soever he may go.

Sigurd.

[Pointing to the right.] See yonder!

Gunnar.

[Disturbed.] It is Hiördis!

Örnulf.

With armed men!

Kåre.

She is seeking me!

Hiördis enters, with a troop of house-carls. She is clad in black, wearing a kirtle, cloak, and hood; the men are armed with swords and axes; she herself carries a light spear.

Hiördis

[Stops on entering.] We meet here in force, meseems.

Dagny.