only long poem not dramatic in form.  This uneven and in passages extraordinarily beautiful work is a sort of epic in fifteen songs, difficult to read, yet simple enough in general outline.  Arnljot Gelline was a sort of freebooter of the eleventh century, whose fierce deeds were preserved in popular tradition.  The ‘Heimskringla’ tells us how, grown weary of his lawless life, he joined himself to Olaf the Holy, accepted baptism, and fell at Stiklestad righting for Christianity and the King.  From this suggestion, the imagination of the poet has worked out a series of episodes in Arnljot’s life, beginning with his capture of the fair Ingigerd—­whose father he slew, and who, struggling against her love, took refuge in a cloister—­and ending with the day of the portentous battle against the heathen.  It is all very impressive, and sometimes very subtle, while occasional sections, such as Ingigerd’s appeal for admission to the cloister, and Arnljot’s apostrophe to the sea, must be reckoned among the finest of Bjoernson’s inspirations.  Since 1870 Bjoernson has published little verse, although poems of an occasional character and incidental lyrics have now and then found their way into print.  ‘Lyset’ (The Light), a cantata, is the only recent example of any magnitude.

Bjoernson first became famous as the delineator of the Norwegian peasant.  He felt that the peasant is the lineal descendant of the man of the sagas, and that in him lies the real strength of the national character.  The story of ‘Synnoeve Solbakken’ (1857) was quickly followed by ‘Arne’ (1858), ‘En Glad Gut’ (A Happy Boy:  1860), and a number of small pieces in similar vein.  They were at once recognized both at home and abroad as something deeper and truer of their sort than had hitherto been achieved in the Scandinavian countries, and perhaps in Europe.  In their former aspect, they were a reaction from the conventional ideals hitherto dominant in Danish literature (which had set the pace for most of Bjoernson’s predecessors); and in their latter and wider aspect they were the Norwegian expression of the tendency that had produced the German and French peasant idyls of Auerbach and George Sand.  They embodied a return to Nature in a spirit that may, with a difference, be called Wordsworthian.  They substituted a real nineteenth-century pastoral for the sham pastoral of the eighteenth century.  They reproduced the simple style of the sagas, and reduced life to its primitive elements.  The stories of ‘Fiskerjenten’ (The Fisher Maiden:  1868), and ‘Brude Slaaten’ (The Bridal March:  1873), belong, on the whole, with this group; although they are differentiated by a touch of modernity from which a discerning critic might have prophesied something of the author’s coming development.  These stories have been translated into many languages, and have long been familiar to English readers.  It is worth noting that ‘Synnoeve Solbakken,’ the first of them all, appeared in English a year after the publication of the original, in a translation by Mary Howitt.  This fact seems to have escaped the bibliographers; which is not surprising, since the name of the author was not given upon the title-page, and the name of the story was metamorphosed into ’Trust and Trial.’