Bjornstjerne Bjornson

e certain that the hour had come. I packed up, went home, thought it all over, wrote and rewrote `Between the Battles' in a fortnight, and travelled to Copenhagen with the completed piece in my trunk; I would be a poet." He then set to writing "Synnöve Solbakken," published it in part as a newspaper serial, and then in book form, in the autumn of 1857. He had "commenced author" in good earnest.

The next fifteen years of Björnson's life were richly productive. Within a single year he had published "Arne," the second of his peasant idyls and perhaps the most remarkable of them all, and had also published two brief dramas, "Halte-Hulda" and the one already mentioned as the achievement of fourteen feverish days. The remaining product of the fifteen years includes two more prose idyls, "A Happy Boy" and "The Fisher Maiden" (with a considerable number of small pieces similar in character); three more plays drawn from the treasury of old Norse history, "King Sverre," "Sigurd Slembe," and "Sigur