and the Christian faith in the days of Olaf the Holy; and, last
but by no means least, the collection of his "Poems and Songs."
Thus at the age of forty, Bjornson found himself with a dozen
books to his credit books which had stirred his fellow countrymen
as no other books had ever stirred them, arousing them to the
full consciousness of their own nature 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 Bjornson'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 Bjornson'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. Bjornson was too near
to his own country folk to commit such faults as these; he was