Part 1 Act 1 Scene 1 Summary

This part of the play tells the story of Peer Gynt's youth.

On a hillside near their farm, twenty-year-old Peer Gynt struggles to convince his elderly, frail mother Aase that the story he's telling, about how he went hunting and lost his gun, is the truth. She calls him a liar and then tells him to tell her again the story of what happened. In passionate poetic language, Peer tells her how he found a beautiful deer, shot and wounded him and then jumped on his back in order to slit its throat. He goes on to say that the deer wasn't as wounded as he thought it was and that it jumped up and ran with him across the countryside. Again in passionate language and with vivid images of soaring eagles, rushing air and gaping caverns that catch...