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 legends 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unpublished legends" which he collected on the first of these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," urging its superior claims in contrast to that
of the saga material, to which he was himself shortly to turn.
The original play based on "The Grouse in Justedal" was left
unfinished. After the completion of _Lady Inger of Ostrat_
and _The Feast at Solhoug_ he came back to it, and taking a
suggestion from the ballad in Landstad's collection (1852-3) he
recast the whole play, substituted the ballad meter for the
iambic pentameters, and called the new version _Olaf
Liljekrans_. _Olaf Liljekrans_ indicates clearly a
decline in Ibsen's interest in pure romance. It is much more
satirical than _The Feast at Solhoug_, and marks a step in
the direction of those superb masterpieces of satire and romance,
_Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_. The play was twice presented
on the stage in Bergen with considerable success, but the critics
treated it harshly.

The relationship of the revised versions to the original versions
of Ibsen's early plays is interesting, and might, if
satisfactorily elucidated, throw considerable light on the
development of his genius. It is evident that he was in this
early period experimenting in metrical forms. He employed blank