experiments with grand
scenes from the sagas, lifting them into a strong but not too heavy
frame. By a 'folk-play' I mean a play which should appeal to every
eye and every stage of culture, to each in its own way, and at the
performance of which all, for the time being, would experience the
joy of fellow-feeling. The common history of a people is best
available for this purpose--nay, it ought dramatically never to be
treated otherwise. The treatment must necessarily be simple and the
emotions predominant; it should be accompanied with music, and the
development should progress in clear groups....

"The old as well as the new historic folk literature will, with its
corresponding comic element, as I think, be a great gain to the
stage, and will preserve its connection with the people where this
has not already been lost--so that it be no longer a mere
institution for amusement, and that only to a single class. Unless
we take this view of our stage, it will lose its right to be
regarded as a national affair, and the best part of its purpose, to
unite while it lifts and makes us free, will be gradually assumed
by some other agency. Nor shall we ever get actors fit for anything
but trifles, unless we abandon our foreign French tendency as a
_leading_ one and substitute the national needs of our own people
in its place."

It would be interesting to note how the poet has attempted to solve a
problem so important and so difficult as this. In the first place, we
find in "Sigurd the Crusader" not a trace of a didactic purpose beyond
that of familiarizing the people with its own history, and this, as he
himself admits in the preface just quoted, is merely a secondary
consideration. He wishes to make all, irrespective of age, culture, and
social station, feel strongly the bond of their common nationality; and,
with this in view, he proceeds to unroll to them a panorama of simple
but striking situations, knit together by a plot or story which, without
the faintest tinge of sensationalism, appeals to those broadly human and
national sympathies which form the common mental basis of Norse
ignorance and Norse culture. He seizes the point in the saga where the
long-smouldering hostility between the royal brothers, Sigurd the
Crusader and Eystein, has broken into full blaze, and traces, in a
series of vigorously sketched scenes, the i