verse in _Catiline_, in the original version of _The
Grouse in Justedal_, and even as late as 1853 in the revision
of _The Warrior's Barrow_. There can be no question but
that he was here following the Ochlenschlaeger tradition.
Unrhymed pentameter, however, did not seem to satisfy him. He
could with difficulty keep from falling into rhyme in
_Catiline_, and in the early version of _The Warrior's
Barrow_ he used rhymed pentameters. After the revision of
this play he threw aside blank verse altogether. "Iambic
pentameter," he says in the essay on the heroic ballad, "is by no
means the most suitable form for the treatment of ancient
Scandinavian material; this form of verse is altogether foreign
to our national meters, and it is surely through a national form
that the national material can find its fullest expression." The
folk-tale and the ballad gave him the suggestion he needed. In
_The Feast at Solhoug_ and the final version of _Olaf
Liljekrans_ he employed the ballad meter, and this form became
the basis for the verse in all his later metrical plays.

Six years intervened between _The Grouse in Justedal_ and
_Olaf Liljekrans_, and the revision in this case amounted
almost to the writing of a new play. Fredrik Paasche in his
study (_Olaf Liljekrans_, Christiania, 1909) discusses the
relation of _Olaf Liljekrans_ to the earlier form of the
play. Three years intervened between the first and final
versions of _The Warrior's Barrow_. Professor
A. M. Sturtevant maintains (_Journal of English and Germanic
Philology_, XII, 407 ff.) that although "the influence of
Ochlenschlaeger upon both versions of _The Warrior's Barrow_
is unmistakable," yet "the two versions differ so widely from