that he was working on a play about Olaf Trygvesson, an
historical novel, and a longer poem. He had begun _The
Warrior's Barrow_ while he was still at Grimstad, but this
early version, called _The Normans_, he revised on reaching
Christiania. In style and manner and even in subject-matter the
play echoes Oehlenschlaeger. Ibsen's vikings are, however, of a
fiercer type than Oehlenschlaeger's, and this treatment of viking
character was one of the things the critics, bred to
Oehlenschlaeger's romantic conception of more civilized vikings,
found fault with in Ibsen's play. The sketch fared better than
_Catiline_: it was thrice presented on the stage in
Christiania and was on the whole favorably reviewed. When Ibsen
became associated with the Bergen theater he undertook another
revision of the play, and in this version the play was presented
on the stage in 1854 and 1856. The final version was published
in the _Bergenske Blad_ in 1854, but no copy of this issue
has survived; the play remained inaccessible to the public until
1902, when it was included in a supplementary volume (Volume X)
to Ibsen's collected works. The earlier version remained in
manuscript form until it was printed in 1917 in _Scandinavian
Studies and Notes_ (Vol. IV, pp. 309-337).

_Olaf Liljekrans_, 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 and
ballads. It was from Faye's _Norwegian Folk-Tales_ (1844)
that he took the story of "The Grouse in Justedal." His interest