Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 2).djvu/13

 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*