Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson

Origins and early years

Bjørnstjerne Martinius Bjørnson was born on 8 December 1832 at the farmstead of Bjørgan in Kvikne, a secluded village in the Østerdalen district, some distance south of Trondheim. He came of an old family of peasants: his father, Peder Bjørnson, was a pastor, and his mother, Inger Elise Nordraak, belonged to a family related to the composer Rikard Nordraak, with whom he would later collaborate. In 1837 his father was transferred to the parish of Nesset, outside Molde in Romsdal, and the writer spent his childhood in the Nesset Parsonage, in a scenic landscape that shaped his sensibility.

Education

After a few years of study in the neighbouring city of Molde, he was sent at the age of seventeen to Christiania to prepare for university, at the same school that had trained Ibsen, Lie and Vinje. He had been writing verses since the age of eleven and realized he wished to pursue poetry. He matriculated at the university in 1852 but soon left his studies to begin a career as a journalist focused on theatre criticism. He was also an avid reader: as a boy he had devoured the old sagas, the novels of Ingemann and Walter Scott, and the folk tales collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen. During a visit to Copenhagen he studied Jens Immanuel Baggesen and Adam Oehlenschläger.

Early successes: peasant tales and historical drama

In 1857 he published Synnøve Solbakken, the first of his peasant novels, followed by Arne (1858), En glad gut (1860) and Fiskerjenten (1868). These narratives, which portrayed the life of Norwegian farmers, are the most important examples of that genre in his output. Bjørnson wished, as he put it, to "create a new saga in the light of the peasant," and he believed this should be done not only in prose fiction but in national drama. The earliest such piece was Between the Battles, a one-act play set in the twelfth century, written in 1855 and staged in 1857. It was followed by Lame Hulda (1858) and King Sverre (1861). His most important poetic work of the period was the trilogy Sigurd Slembe, published in 1862.

Theatre management and travel

At the close of 1857 he was appointed director of the theatre at Bergen, a post he held for two years before returning to Christiania. From 1860 to 1863 he travelled widely across Europe. Early in 1865 he took over the management of the Christiania Theatre, where he staged his popular comedy The Newly Married and his romantic tragedy Mary Stuart in Scotland. In 1870 he published Poems and Songs and the epic cycle Arnljot Gelline, which contains the ode Bergliot, one of his finest lyric poems. Between 1864 and 1874 he was mainly occupied with politics and theatrical business, and this was the period of his most fiery propaganda as a radical agitator.

The turn to social drama

From 1874 to 1876 he lived abroad in voluntary exile, and in that peace he recovered his imaginative powers. His new departure as a dramatist began with A Bankruptcy and The Editor in 1874, social dramas of a strikingly modern and realistic cast. Leonarda (1879) provoked a violent controversy, and A Gauntlet (1883) met difficulties with managers and censors. In the autumn of 1883 he published Beyond Human Power, a mystical or symbolic drama about the abnormal features of religious excitement, which was not staged until 1899, when it achieved great success. His friendship with Edvard Grieg, with whom he shared an interest in Norwegian self-government, produced several songs set to music by the composer.

Politics, controversy and language

From his youth he admired Henrik Wergeland and became a vivid spokesman for the Norwegian left. His political opinions brought a charge of high treason, and he took refuge for a time in Germany, returning to Norway in 1882. He took a keen interest in the question of landsmål, the national Norwegian language as opposed to the Dano-Norwegian in which most Norwegian literature had been written. He experimented with it in at least one short story before 1860 but soon abandoned the effort and later regretted never mastering it. He opposed the extremes of the so-called "language strife" with vigour. In his last twenty years he wrote hundreds of articles for major European newspapers: he attacked the French justice system in the Dreyfus Affair, defended the right of Slovak children to learn their mother tongue, and took part in the debate on sexual morality, arguing that free love hindered the development of virtues such as self-restraint.

Final years and legacy

He was one of the original members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, on which he sat from 1901 to 1906, and in 1903 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Norwegian laureate. In 1905, when Norway was seeking to dissolve the forced union with Sweden, he largely remained silent, though he had earlier preached conciliation and moderation. He died on 26 April 1910 in Paris, where he had spent some winters, and was buried at home with every mark of honour. His legacy rests on the peasant novel, the social drama and his national poetry, and he is counted among the four great figures of Norwegian literature alongside Ibsen, Lie and Kielland.

Private life

In 1858 he married Karoline Reimers, with whom he had six children, five of whom survived to adulthood. Around 1860, while in Denmark, he began a relationship with Magda von Dolcke, which he maintained until reconciling with his wife at the end of 1861. In his early fifties he had an affair with the seventeen-year-old Guri Andersdotter, which produced a son, Anders Underdal. Karoline remained at Aulestad until her death in 1934.