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absolute an abandonment of the material previously used.
Ibsen’s earlier recourse to saga and legend was rather the
expression of the romantic temperament than the result
of a racial mandate, and the figures of Catiline and Julian
the Apostate served his purpose quite as well as those
of the warriors of Halogaland. The latter half of his life
found him a romanticist turned realist, and that is all. Now
Björnson was also a romanticist turned realist, but his
romanticism was of the type which only a Norseman could
exhibit, and the realist that he afterwards became never
wholly lost those racial traits that made him throughout
his career preëminently the voice of his people, and made
the mention of his name equivalent to the hoisting of the
Norwegian flag. He could never be quite the cosmopolitan
that Ibsen became, because, however wide-spreading his
tree in its foliage, its roots were firmly planted in his
native soil, and the sap of its outermost ramifications welled
up from that sustaining source. However sophisticated his
work became, it never wholly lost the elements of naïveté
and raciness that marked the earlier manifestations of his
genius.
This work of Björnson’s first epoch (1857-1872) comprises
the peasant-tales, long and short, the five saga and
folk dramas, the collection of Poems and Songs, and the epic
cycle of Arnijot Gelline, now translated. Arnljot Gelline and
the saga-trilogy of Sigurd Slembe constitute Bjornson’s
highest achievement in his reconstruction of the heroic past of
Norway. The two works are closely akin. Each of them has
a protagonist whose presentation is a miracle of creative
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