LITTLE EYOLF.
By Henrik Ibsen

Translated, With an Introduction, by William Archer


INTRODUCTION.

Little Eyolf was written in Christiania during 1894, and published
in Copenhagen on December 11 in that year. By this time Ibsen's
correspondence has become so scanty as to afford us no clue to what
may be called the biographical antecedents of the play. Even of
anecdotic history very little attaches to it. For only one of the
characters has a definite model been suggested. Ibsen himself told
his French translator, Count Prozor, that the original of the
Rat-Wife was "a little old woman who came to kill rats at the
school where he was educated. She carried a little dog in a bag,
and it was said that children had been drowned through following
her." This means that Ibsen did not himself adapt to his uses the
legend so familiar to us in Browning's _Pied Piper of Hamelin_, but
found it ready adapted by the popular imagination of his native
place, Skien. "This idea," Ibsen continued to Count Prozor, "was
just what I wanted for bringing about the disappearance of Little
Eyolf, in whom the infatuation [Note: The French word used by Count
Prozor is "infatuation." I can think of no other rendering for it;
but I do not quite know what it means as applied to Allmers and
Eyolf.] and the feebleness of his father reproduced, but
concentrated, exaggerated, as one often sees them in the son of
such a father." Dr. Elias tells us that a well-known lady-artist,
who in middle life suggested to him the figure of Lona Hessel, was