CATILINE

THE WARRIOR'S BARROW

OLAF LILJEKRANS

LIST OF FOUNDATION PUBLICATIONS

* * * * *


INTRODUCTION


One of the most remarkable facts about Ibsen is the orderly
development of his genius. He himself repeatedly maintained that
his dramas were not mere isolated accidents. In the foreword to
the readers in the popular edition of 1898 he urges the public to
read his dramas in the same order in which he had written them,
deplores the fact that his earlier works are less known and less
understood than his later works, and insists that his writings
taken as a whole constitute an organic unity. The three of his
plays offered here for the first time in English translation will
afford those not familiar with the original Norwegian some light
on the early stages of his development.

_Catiline_, the earliest of Ibsen's plays, was written in
1849, while Ibsen was an apothecary's apprentice in Grimstad. It
appeared in Christiania in the following spring under the
pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme. The revolutionary atmosphere of