and of its roots in their own heroic past. He had become the
voice of his people as no one had been before him, the singer of all
that was noble in Norwegian aspiration, the sympathetic delineator of
all that was essential in Norwegian Character. He had, in short,
created a national literature where none had before existed, and he was
still in his early prime.

The collected edition of Bjoernson's "Tales," published in 1872,
together with "The Bridal March," separately published in the following
year, gives us a complete representation of that phase of his genius
which is best known to the world at large. Here are five stories of
considerable length, and a number of slighter sketches, in which the
Norwegian peasant is portrayed with intimate and loving knowledge. The
peasant tale was no new thing in European literature, for the names of
Auerbach and George Sand, to say nothing of many others, at once come
to the mind. In Scandinavian literature, its chief representative had
been the Danish novelist, Blicher, who had written with insight and
charm of the peasantry of Jutland. But in the treatment of peasant
life by most of Bjoernson's predecessors there had been too much of the
_de haut en bas_ attitude; the peasant had been drawn from the outside,
viewed philosophically, and invested with artificial sentiment.
Bjoernson was too near to his own country folk to commit such faults as
these; he was himself of peasant stock, and all his boyhood life had
been spent in close association with men who wrested a scanty living
from an ungrateful soil. Although a poet by instinct, he was not
afraid of realism, and did not shrink from giving the brutal aspects of
peasant life a place upon his canvas. In emphasizing the
characteristics of reticence and _naivete_ he really discovered the
Norwegian peasant for literary purposes. Beneath the words spoken by
his characters we are constantly made to realize that there are depths
of feeling that remain unexpressed; whether from native pride or from a
sense of the inadequacy of mere words to set forth a critical moment of
life, his men and women are distinguished by the most laconic
utterance, yet their speech always has dramatic fitness and bears the
stamp of sincerity. Jaeger speaks of the manifold possibilities of
this laconic method in the following words:--

"It is as if the author purposely set in motion the reader's fancy and
feeling that they might do their own work. The