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

VI. Jørgen Moe. "Indledning." Samling af Sange, Folkeviser og Stev.
Norske Almuedialekter. Christiania: P. T. Mallings Forlag, 1840.
Some of what is written in the following essay will not be easily understood by
English-speaking readers, since it has to do with styles of verse and folk poetry
unfamiliar outside of Norway. All the same, it has seemed worthwhile to include the
essay because of its intrinsic interest, and because its ideas appear to have influenced
Ibsen in the composition of some of the poems he wrote in 1849-50. He planned to
produce a series of folk songs at the time, but the only one of this series which
survives is “Møllergutten” (“The Miller Boy”), whose verses are actually lyrics. They
were to be set to the melody of a folk song, “Aa kjøre vatn aa kjøre ved” (“If you go
into the water you will get wet”). See H[ans] Eitrem, “Henrik Ibsen—Henrik
Wergeland,” Maal og Minne (Kristiania) 1910, 38-9.
The author of this essay was later to be the partner of Asbjørnsen in a large project of
collecting Norwegian folk tales: Peter Christen Asbjørnsen og Jørgen Moe. Norske
folkeeventyr. 2 nd ed. Christiania: J. Dahl, 1852.
If one assumes that the main requirement of a country's serious literature is that
it should reflect, in pure, refined images, the life of the people as it has existed as a
result of physical and historical conditions, it will hardly occur to anyone to deny that
what we call Norwegian poetry stands very low. Nor will anyone grope for long after
the reason: at the time "the lion was tamed by a poodle," it was natural that the
Norwegian Pegasus, displaced onto the Danish plains and mauled by German and
French, forgot its ancient flight from mountaintop to mountaintop. After the
separation from Denmark the political element consumed all the energy, and none of
that period's poetry-writing Northmen towered so much above his time that, liberated
from this one-sided struggle, he was able to lose himself in and express the home-and-
heart-life of the people,--except for just one, our splendid Maurits Hansen. But one
swallow--even a swallow with such a melodious breast--does not make a summer, and
the present subject therefore involves the unusual circumstance that our "art" poetry as
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