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It was while he was engaged in producing the plays of others that he brought out also his own 'Mistress Inger at Ostraat' , and the 'Vikings at Helgeland' , both of them actable and often acted. They are romanticist in temper, suggesting now Schiller and now Hugo.
The story was as follows: On Kvalholmen, in Helgeland, there lived a poor fisherman named Elias, with his wife Karen, who had formerly been servant at the minister's over at Alstadhaug. They had put up a cottage at Kvalholmen, and Elias was now in the Lofoten fishing-trade, working for daily wages. It was pretty evident that lonely Kvalholmen was haunted.
Here is Ibsen's favorite trick of unrequited self-sacrifice; it is Sigurd, in Gunnar's armor, who kills the mystical white bear, but it is Gunnar who reaps the advantage. It is only fair to say that there is more than this to applaud in The Vikings at Helgeland; it moves on a consistent and high level of austere romantic beauty. Mr.
His brother's wife, at Breidablik had written home to Helgeland trying to find a decent woman to help him, but nothing had come of it as yet. And in any case, it would mean his having to pay for the journey. Nay, 'twas a mean and wicked trick of Barbro to make away with the bit of a child and then run off herself.
He was started by two or three of Komag-Nils' stories, and wanted to show us that where he came from, down at Dönö near Ranen, in Helgeland, there were as many and as wonderful stories and boats, as with us in Nordland. The narrator was a little, quick-speaking fellow, who sat the whole time rocking backwards and forwards, and fidgetting upon the bench, while he talked.
His eyes became more and more glowing. "If I could guide you back to Helgeland," said he, "I could put you in the way of gaining your bread too. But you must pay me a little tax for it. In every seventh boat you build 'tis I who must put in the keel-board." Jack felt as if he were choking. He felt that the boat was dragging him into the very jaws of an abomination.
He might, perhaps, have got a woman from his own parts, from Helgeland, but that would have meant paying for her journey, besides wages. A costly business all round. Axel further told how he had taken over the inspection of the telegraph line, but rather wished he had left it alone. "That sort of thing's only fit for Brede and his like," said Geissler. "Ay, that's a true word," Axel admitted.
In every age, and among all people from the Parsee devotees and the Gosains of India to the Pantheism of Bruno, Spinoza, and New England's "Illuminati" nature has been apotheosized; and the heart of the blacksmith's untutored darling stirred with the same emotions of awe and adoration which thrilled the worshipers of Hertha, when the veiled chariot stood in Helgeland, and which made the groves and grottoes of Phrygia sacred to Dindymene.
Ibsen has gained, and for good, that master quality of translucent presentation without which all other stage gifts are shorn of their value. When we have, however, praised the limpidity of The Vikings at Helgeland, we have, in honesty, to make several reservations in our criticism of the author's choice of a subject.
Wells' blood-curdling story. The Vikings at Helgeland is a work of extraordinary violence and agitation. The personages bark at one another like seals and roar like sea-lions; they "cry for blood, like beasts at night."
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