The word Vikings in the title is a very free rendering of Hærmændene, which simply means “warriors.” As “warriors,” however, is a colourless word, and as Örnulf, Sigurd, and Gunnar all are, or have been, actually vikings, the substitution seemed justifiable. I would beg, however hopelessly, that “viking” should be pronounced so as to rhyme not with “liking” but with “seeking,” or at worst with “kicking.” Helgeland, it may be mentioned, is a province or district in the north of Norway.
Örnulf’s “drapa” and his snatches of verse are rhymed as well as alliterated in the original. I had the less hesitation in suppressing the rhyme, as it was actually foreign to the practice of the skalds.
THE PRETENDERS.
INTRODUCTION.
Six years elapsed between the composition of The Vikings and that of The Pretenders.[[3]] In the interval Ibsen wrote Love’s Comedy, and brought all the world of Norwegian philistinism, and (as we should now say) suburbanism, about his ears. Whereas hitherto his countrymen had ignored, they now execrated him. In his autobiographic letter of 1870, to Peter Hansen, he wrote: “The only person who at that time approved of the book was my wife.... My countrymen excommunicated me. All were against me. The fact that all were against me—that there was no longer any one outside my own family circle of whom I could say ‘He believes in me’—must, as you can easily see, have aroused a mood which found its outlet in The Pretenders.” It is to be noted that this was written during a period of estrangement from Björnson. I do not know what was Björnson’s attitude towards Love’s Comedy in particular; but there can be no doubt that, in general, he believed in and encouraged his brother poet, and employed his own growing influence in efforts to his advantage. In representing himself as standing quite alone, Ibsen probably forgets, for the moment, his relation to his great contemporary.
Yet the relation to Björnson lay at the root of the character-contrast on which The Pretenders is founded. Ibsen always insisted that each of his plays gave poetic form to some motive gathered from his own experience or observation; and this is very clearly true of the present play. Ever since Synnöve Solbakken had appeared in 1857, Björnson, the expansive, eloquent, lyrical Björnson, had been the darling child of fortune. He had gone from success to success unwearied. He was recognised throughout Scandinavia (in Denmark no less than in Norway) as the leader of the rising generation in almost every branch of imaginative literature. He was full, not only of inspiration and energy, but of serene self-confidence. Meanwhile Ibsen, nearly five years older than he, had been pursuing his slow and painful course of development in comparative obscurity, in humiliating poverty, and amid almost complete lack of appreciation. “Mr. Ibsen is a great cipher” (or “nullity”) wrote a critic in 1858; another, in 1863, laid it down that “Ibsen has a certain technical and artistic talent, but nothing of what can be called ‘genius.’” The scoffs of the critics, however, were not the sorest trials that he had to bear. What was hardest to contend against was the doubt as to his own poetic calling and election that constantly beset him. This doubt could not but be generated by the very tardiness of his mental growth. We see him again and again (in the case of Olaf Liliekrans, of The Vikings, of Love’s Comedy, and of The Pretenders itself), conceiving a plan and then abandoning it for years—no doubt because he found himself, in one respect or another, unripe for its execution. Every such experience must have involved for him days and weeks of fruitless effort and discouragement. To these moods of scepticism as to his own powers he gave expression in a series of poems (for the most part sonnets) published in 1859 under the title of In the Picture Gallery. In it he represents the “black elf” of doubt, whispering to him: “Your soul is like the dry bed of a mountain stream, in which the singing waters of poetry have ceased to flow. If a faint sound comes rustling down the empty channel, do not imagine that it portends the return of the waters—it is only the dry leaves eddying before the autumn wind, and pattering among the barren stones.” In those years of struggle and stress, of depressing criticism, and enervating self-criticism, he must often have compared his own lot and his own character with Björnson’s, and perhaps, too, wondered whether there were no means by which he could appropriate to himself some of his younger and more facile brother-poet’s kingly self-confidence. For this relation between two talents he partly found and partly invented a historic parallel in the relation between two rival pretenders to the Norwegian throne, Håkon Håkonsson and Skule Bårdsson.
Dr. Brandes, who has admirably expounded the personal element in the genesis of this play, compares Håkon-Björnson and Skule-Ibsen with the Aladdin and Nureddin of Oehlenschläger’s beautiful dramatic poem. Aladdin is the born genius, serene, light-hearted, a trifle shallow, who grasps the magic lamp with an unswerving confidence in his right to it. (“It is that which the Romans called ingenium” says Bishop Nicholas, “truly I am not strong in Latin; but ’twas called ingenium.”) Nureddin, on the other hand, is the far profounder, more penetrating, but sceptical and self-torturing spirit. When at last he seizes Aladdin’s lamp, as Skule annexes Håkon’s king’s thought, his knees tremble, and it drops from his grasp, just as the Genie is ready to obey him.
It is needless to cite the passages from the scenes between Skule and Bishop Nicholas in the second act, Skule and Håkon in the third, Skule and Jatgeir in the fourth, in which this element of personal symbolism is present. The reader will easily recognise them, while recognising at the same time that their dramatic appropriateness, their relevance to the historic situation as the poet viewed it, is never for a moment impaired. The underlying meaning is never allowed to distort or denaturalise the surface aspect of the picture.[[4]] The play may be read, understood, and fully appreciated, by a person for whom this underlying meaning has no existence. One does not point it out as an essential element in the work of art, or even as adding to its merit, but simply as affording a particularly clear instance of Ibsen’s method of interweaving “Wahrheit” with “Dichtung.”
So early as 1858, soon after the completion of The Vikings, Ibsen had been struck by the dramatic material in Håkon Håkonsson’s Saga, as related by Snorri Sturlasson’s nephew, Sturla Thordsson, and had sketched a play on the subject. At that time, however, he put the draft aside. It was only as the years went on, as he found himself “excommunicated” after Love’s Comedy, and as the contrast between Björnson’s fortune and his became ever more marked, that the figures of Skule and Håkon took more and more hold upon his imagination. In June 1863, he attended a “Festival of Song” at Bergen, and there met Björnson, who had been living abroad since 1860. Probably under the stimulus of this meeting he set to work upon The Pretenders immediately on his return to Christiania, and wrote it with almost incredible rapidity. The manuscript went to the printers in September; the book was published in October 1863 (though dated 1864), and the play was produced at the Christiania Theatre, under the author’s own supervision, on January 17, 1864. The production was notably successful; yet no one seems fully to have realised what it meant for Norwegian literature. Outside of Norway, at any rate, it awoke no echo. George Brandes declares that scarcely a score of copies of the play found their way to Denmark. Not until Ibsen had left Norway (April 1864) and had taken the Danish reading public by storm with Brand and Peer Gynt, did people go back upon The Pretenders and discover what an extraordinary achievement it was. In January 1871, it was produced at the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen, where Emil Poulsen found in Bishop Nicholas one of the great triumphs of his career. It was produced by the Meiningen Company and at the Munich Hoftheater in 1875, in Stockholm in 1879, at the Königliches Schauspielhaus, Berlin, and at the Vienna Burgtheater in 1891; and it has from time to time been acted at many other Scandinavian and German theatres. The character of Nicholas has fascinated many great actors: what a pity that it did not come in the way of Sir Henry Irving when he was at the height of his power! But of course no English actor-manager would dream of undertaking a character which dies in the middle of the third act.
Ibsen’s treatment of history in this play may be proposed as a model to other historic dramatists. Although he has invented a great deal, his inventions supplement rather than contradict the records. Chronology, indeed, he treats with considerable freedom, and at the same time with ingenious vagueness. The general impression one receives in reading the play is that the action covers a space of four or five years; as a matter of fact it covers twenty-two years, between the folkmote in Bergen, 1218, and Skule’s death, 1240. All the leading characters are historical; and although much is read into them which history does not warrant, there is little that history absolutely forbids us to conceive. The general features of the struggle between the two factions—Håkon’s Birkebeiner, or Birchlegs, and Skule’s Vargbælgs—are correctly enough reproduced. In his treatment of this period, the Norwegian historian, J. E. Sars, writing thirteen years after the appearance of The Pretenders, uses terms which might almost have been suggested by Ibsen’s play. “On the one side,” he says, “we find strength and certainty, on the other lameness and lack of confidence. The old Birchlegs[[5]] go to work openly and straightforwardly, like men who are immovably convinced of the justice of their cause, and unwaveringly assured of its ultimate victory. Skule’s adherents, on the other hand, are ever seeking by intrigues and chicanery to place stumbling-blocks in the way of their opponents’ enthusiasm.” Håkon represented Sverre’s ideal of a democratic kingship, independent of the oligarchy of bishops and barons. “He was,” says Sars, “reared in the firm conviction of his right to the Throne; he grew up among the veterans of his grandfather’s time, men imbued with Sverre’s principles, from whom he accepted them as a ready-made system, the realisation of which could only be a question of time. He stood from the first in a clear and straightforward position to which his whole personality corresponded.... He owed his chief strength to the repose and equilibrium of mind which distinguished him, and had its root in his unwavering sense of having right and the people’s will upon his side.” His great “king’s-thought,” however, seems to be an invention of the poet’s. Skule, on the other hand, represented the old nobility in its struggle against the new monarchy. “He was the centre of a hierarchic aristocratic party; but after its repeated defeats this party must have been lacking alike in number and in confidence.... It was clear from the first that his attempt to reawaken the old wars of the succession in Norway was undertaken in the spirit of the desperate gambler, who does not count the chances, but throws at random, in the blind hope that luck may befriend him.... Skule’s enterprise had thus no support in opinion or in any prevailing interest, and one defeat was sufficient to crush him.”