cultural resources in henrik ibsen's early environment - Ibsen.net

Venstøp, a property he had bought in 1833. Henrik therefore had his home here in the
important years of childhood and youth from the age of 7 years until he was about 15. It
was not an unhappy time, despite the clouds which the economic shipwreck cast over the
family. His father was a respected man in Gjerpen, among other things he was elected as
a deputy in the parish executive committee and sat sometimes in court marshal Ernst
Løvenskiold's absence. He also had the means to be a host at festive gatherings both for
the parish association and Skien's shooting club, where he pursued his interest in hunting.
And for an aspiring poet the beautiful farm, nature and the whole parish milieu must have
been a well of valuable impressions, and from here also are drawn many of the themes in
his later writing: the dark loft with the maimed wild duck, the mill-race where the wife in
Rosmersholm drowns herself, the manor and its master, the chamberlain, and the miner
who breaks through down in the depths with his heavy hammer-blow.
Much has been explained where it concerns Henrik Ibsen's youth, but we have no
certain information about one important aspect of the poet's childhood, his first
attendance at school. It has therefore been an open field for speculation. It has been
maintained as a possibility, even as the most likely, that his father placed him in Fossum
Ironworks school. We can safely disregard this, however. This school as we know was
established for the children of the ironworks' people, although students from the
neighboring district also had access by exception when they lived in the vicinity of
Fossum. But what can otherwise be said positively about it, was that it was and remained
an almueskole; the children of the district's laborers and artisans, tenant farmers and
painters went here, but we find very few farmers among the parents, let alone wealthy
self-owned farmers. And still it was a good step up from there to the cultured class Knud
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