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Updated: June 3, 2025
Ibsen's Vikings in Helgeland is, in kind, what Siegfried's Death was originally intended to be: that is, a heroic piece for the theatre, without the metaphysical or allegorical complications of The Ring. Indeed, the ultimate catastrophe of the Saga cannot by any perversion of ingenuity be adapted to the perfectly clear allegorical design of The Rhine Gold, The Valkyries, and Siegfried.
When the sun went below the sea-margin there lay before him on the skerry some mouldering linen rags and nought else. Calm was the sea, and in the clear Midsummer night there flew twelve cormorants out over the sea. A fishing-station, where fishermen assemble periodically. In Helgeland there was once a fisherman called Isaac.
While he was writing The Vikings at Helgeland, and courting Susannah Thoresen, Ibsen received what seemed a timely invitation to settle in Christiania as director of the Norwegian Theatre; he returned, thereupon, to the capital in the summer of 1857, after an absence of six years.
Axel Ström was nearest to Isak's land now, his next-door neighbour. A clever fellow, unmarried, he came from Helgeland. He had borrowed Isak's new harrow to break up his soil, and not till the second year had he set up a hayshed and a turf hut for himself and a couple of animals. He had called his place Maaneland, because it looked nice in the moonlight.
On Kvalholm, down in Helgeland, dwelt a poor fisherman, Elias by name, with his wife Karen, who had been in service at the parson's over at Alstad. They had built them a hut here, and he used to go out fishing by the day about the Lofotens. There could be very little doubt that the lonely Kvalholm was haunted.
The persons in The Vikings at Helgeland are so primitive that they scarcely appeal to our sense of reality. In spite of all the romantic color that the poet has lavished upon them, and the majestic sentiments which he has put into their mouths, we feel that the inhabitants of Helgeland must have regarded them as those of Surbiton regarded the beings who were shot down from Mars in Mr.
Although The Pretenders, a work of dignified and polished aloofness, was not completed until 1863, it really belongs to the earlier and more experimental section of Ibsen's works, and is so completely the outcome and the apex of his national studies that it has seemed best to consider it with The Vikings at Helgeland, in spite of its immense advance upon that drama.
Now, the Bailiff who ruled over all Helgeland in those days was an unjust man who laid heavy taxes upon the people, taking double weight and tale both of fish and of eider-down, nor was he less grasping with the tithes and grain dues. Wherever his fellows came they fleeced and flayed.
Ibsen, whose practice is always better than his theory, has given rather a confused account of the circumstances that led to the composition of his next play, The Vikings at Helgeland.
"I bought it for a brother of mine up in Helgeland." "Ho!" "Then I thought perhaps I'd half a mind to change with him, too." "Change with him would you?" "And perhaps how Barbro she'd like it better that way." "Ay, maybe," said Isak. They walk on for a good way in silence. Then says Axel: "They've been after me to take over that telegraph business." "The telegraph? H'm.
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