of the twelfth century. He was a son of King Magnus Barfod,
and, although of illegitimate birth, might legally make this
claim. The secret of his birth has been kept from him until
he has come to manhood, and the revelation of this secret by
his mother is made in the first section of the trilogy, which
is a single act, written in blank verse. Recognizing the futility
of urging his birthright at this time, he starts off to win
fame as a crusader, the sort of fame that haloed Sigurd
Jorsalfar, then king of Norway. The remainder of the work is
in prose, and was, in fact, written before this poetical prologue.
The second section, in three acts, deals with an episode in the
Orkneys, five years later. Sigurd has not even then journeyed
to the Holy Land, but he has wandered elsewhere afar, thwarted
ambition and the sense of injustice ever gnawing at his heart.
He becomes entangled in a feudal quarrel concerning the rule 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 Bjornson'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