The Project Gutenberg EBook of Three Comedies, by Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

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Title: Three Comedies

Author: Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

Commentator: R. Farquharson Sharp

Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7366]
Posting Date: August 11, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE COMEDIES ***

Produced by Nicole Apostola

THREE COMEDIES

By Bjoernstjerne M. Bjoernson

INTRODUCTION

BJORNSTJERNE BJORNSON--poet, dramatist, novelist, and politician, and
the most notable figure in contemporary Norwegian history--was born, in
December 1832, at Kvikne in the north of Norway. His father was pastor
at Kvikne, a remote village in the Oesterdal district, some sixty miles
south of Trondhiem; a lonely spot, whose atmosphere and surroundings
Bjoernson afterwards described in one of his short sketches ("Blakken").
The pastor's house lay so high up on the "fjeld" that corn would not
grow on its meadows, where the relentless northern winter seemed to
begin so early and end so late. The Oesterdal folk were a wild, turbulent
lot in those days--so much so, that his predecessor (who had never
ventured into the church without his pistol in his pocket) had
eventually run away and flatly refused to return, with the result that
the district was pastorless for some years until the elder Bjoernson came
to it.

It was in surroundings such as this, and with scarcely any playfellows,
that Bjornstjerne Bjornson spent the first six years of his life; and
the sturdy independence of his nature may have owed something to the
unaccommodating life of his earliest days, just as the poetical
impulse that was so strong in his developed character probably had its
beginnings in the impressions of beauty he received in the years that
immediately followed. For, when he was six, a welcome change came. His
father was transferred to the tranquil pastorate of Naes, at the mouth
of the Romsdal, one of the fairest spots in Norway. Here Bjornson spent
the rest of his childhood, in surroundings of beauty and peacefulness,
going to school first at Molde and afterwards at Christiania, to pass
on later to the Christiania Univers