of the
islands. Both parties seek to use him for their purposes, but in the
end, although leadership is in his grasp, he tears himself away,
appalled by the revelation of crime and treachery in his surroundings.
In this section of the work we have the subtly conceived and
Hamlet-like figure of Earl Harald, in whose interest Frakark, a Norse
Lady Macbeth, plots the murder of Earl Paul, only to bring upon Harald
himself the terrible death that she has planned for his brother. Here,
also, we have the gracious maiden figure of Audhild, perhaps the
loveliest of all Bjoernson's delineations of womanhood, a figure worthy
to be ranked with the heroines of Shakespeare and Goethe, who remains
sweet and fragrant in our memory forever after. With the mutual love of
Sigurd and Audhild comes the one hour of sunshine in both their lives,
but the love is destined to end in a noble renunciation and to leave
only a hallowed memory in token of its brief existence.

Ten more years as a crusader and a wanderer over the face of the earth
pass by before we meet with Sigurd again in the third section of the
trilogy. But his resolution is taken. He has returned to his native
land, and will claim his own. The land is now ruled by Harald Gille,
who is, like Sigurd Slembe, an illegitimate son of Magnus Barfod, and
who, during the last senile years of Sigurd Jorsalfar's life, had won
the recognition that Sigurd Slembe might have won had he not missed the
chance, and been acknowledged as the king's brother. When the king
died, he left a son named Magnus, who should have been his successor,
but whom Harald Gille seized, blinded, and imprisoned that he might
himself occupy the throne. The five acts of this third section of the
trilogy cover the last two years of Sigurd Slembe's life, years during
which he seeks to gain his end, first by conciliation, and afterwards,
maddened by the base treachery of the king and his followers, by
assassination and violence. He has become a hard man, but, however
wild his schemes of revenge, and however desperate his measures, he
retains our sympathy to the end because we feel that circumstances have
made him the ravager of his country, and that his underlying motive all
along has not been a merely personal ambition, but an immense longing
to serve his people, and to rule them with justice and wisdom. The
final scene of all has a strange and solemn beauty. It is on the eve
of the battle in which Sigurd is to be