The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Visionary, by Jonas Lie

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Title: The Visionary
Pictures From Nordland

Author: Jonas Lie

Release Date: November 1, 2004 [EBook #13922]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE VISIONARY
OR
PICTURES FROM NORDLAND

BY
JONAS LIE

_TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN_
_BY JESSIE MUIR_

WITH A PREFACE
AND
PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR

LONDON.
HODDER BROTHERS
1894

* * * * *

PREFACE

Until a few years ago, Norway was an unknown country to most Englishmen.
Occasionally a sportsman went there to kill salmon or to shoot reindeer,
but the fjords, glaciers, mountains, and waterfalls were quite beyond
the reach of any but the most venturesome travellers. Still less was it
supposed that Norway possessed a modern school of poets and novelists.
Wergeland, Welhaven, Munch, and Moe among the former, Bjoernson, Ibsen,
Kjelland, and Lie among the latter, were, as far as Englishmen were
concerned, "to fortune and to fame unknown." All this has been changed;
sportsmen now complain that it becomes more difficult every year to hire
rivers. Tourists swarm over the country from the Naze to the North Cape.
Ibsen's dramas are played in London theatres, and his novels, and those
of Bjoernson and Lie, are read in Germany and in France, as well as in
England and America.

These three writers are of nearly the same age. Ibsen was born in 1828,
at Skien on the south-eastern coast of Norway; Bjoernson in the
Dovrefjeld in 1832; and Lie at Eker, near Drammen, in 1833. Five years
after his son's birth, Lie's father was appointed sheriff of Tromsoe,
which lies within the Arctic Circle, and young Jonas Lauritz Edemil Lie,
to give him his fu