Excerpt from Early Plays Catiline, the Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans Olaf Liljehrans, which was presented on the Bergen stage in 1857, marks the end of Ibsen's early romantic interest. The original idea for this play, which he had begun in 1850, he found in the folk-tale The Grouse in Justedal, about a girl who alone had survived the Black Death in an isolated village. Ibsen had with many others become interested in popular folk-tales ahd ballads. It was from Faye's Norwegian folk-tales (1844) that he took the story of The Grouse in Justedal. His interest was so great that he even turned collector. Twice during this period he petitioned for and received small university grants to enable him to travel and collect songs and leg ends still current among the people. Of the Seventy or eighty hitherto unpublished legends which he collected on the first'of these trips only a few have ever appeared in print; the results of his second trip are unknown. Ibsen had great faith in the availability of this medieval material for dramatic purposes; he even wrote an essay, The Heroic Ballad and Its Significance for Artistic Poetry. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.