s; and a year later, in Tvedestrand, he established the
Tvedestrand Post. This experience as county editor and printer had
qualified him for newspaper work, and in 1877 he became connected with
the Aftenbladet of Christiania. The same year he founded the
Fedraheimen, "a weekly paper for the Norse people." This was really
the beginning of his literary career, although besides his early
enterprises in journalism he had as a student contributed occasional
articles to the newspapers, and had already published his first book,
a critical essay on Ibsen's 'Emperor and Galilean.'

The attempt made by Ivar Aasen to establish in Norway a national
language through a normalization of the peasant dialects, found in
Garborg one of its warmest supporters. Discarding Danish as a literary
medium, he advocated the use of the strong Norse, and the Fedraheimen
appeared as the organ of the new movement. Garborg wrote a book upon
the subject in the year after the establishment of his journal, and
ever since, by precept and practice, he has been the chief
propagandist of the new speech.

His first novel, 'En Fritenkjar' (A Freethinker), appeared anonymously
in the Fedraheimen in 1878. The subject of the story was one of the
vital questions of the day, the conflict between iron-bound dogmatism
and rational thought; a theme now threadbare with much handling, but
then startlingly new. The author's early training and his own
environment of intolerant theology supplied material for the story.
The hero of the tale, the man who dared to think for himself, was
looked upon as a criminal, to be ranked with house-breakers and
thieves. The ostracism which he brought upon himself was but the just
punishment for his crimes. The Freethinker, treated as a moral leper,
is driven from his home and goes abroad to expiate his sin of
unorthodoxy. In later years he returns to his native land, to find
most of his acquaintances dead. Of his family only one still lives,
and that is his son, who has become a clergyman!

Garborg's second romance, 'Bondestudentar' (Peasant Students) (1883),
deals with a problem no less real. In Norway, although there is no
rank of nobility, class distinctions are nevertheless strongly marked;
and in this novel his pen is directed against the evils which result
from the inordinate striving of the lower orders for a position to
which they are unfitted both by nature and circumstances. This book,
again, is to a degree autobiographical;