The parentage of the poet has been traced back to a certain Danish
skipper, Peter Ibsen, who, in the beginning of the eighteenth century,
made his way over from Stege, the capital of the island of Moeen, and
became a citizen of Bergen. From that time forth the men of the family,
all following the sea in their youth, jovial men of a humorous
disposition, continued to haunt the coasts of Norway, marrying sinister
and taciturn wives, who, by the way, were always, it would seem, Danes
or Germans or Scotswomen, so that positively the poet had, after a
hundred years and more of Norwegian habitation, not one drop of pure
Norse blood to inherit from his parents. His grandfather, Henrik, was
wrecked in 1798 in his own ship, which went down with all souls lost on
Hesnaes, near Grimstad; this reef is the scene of Ibsen's animated poem
of Terje Viken. His father, Knud, who was born in 1797, married in 1825
a German, Marichen Cornelia Martie Altenburg, of the same town of Skien;
she was one year his senior, and the daughter of a merchant. It was in
1771 that the Ibsens, leaving Bergen, had settled in Skien, which was,
and still is, an important centre of the timber and shipping trades on
the south-east shore of the country.

It may be roughly said that Skien, in the Danish days, was a sort of
Poole or Dartmouth, existing solely for purposes of marine merchandise,
and depending for prosperity, and life itself, on the sea. Much of a
wire-drawn ingenuity has been conjectured about the probable strains of
heredity which met in Ibsen. It is not necessary to do more than to
recognize the slight but obstinate exoticism, which kept all his
forbears more or less foreigners still in their Norwegian home; and to
insist on the mixture of adventurousness and plain common sense which
marked their movements by sea and shore. The stock was intensely
provincial, intensely unambitious; it would be difficult to find
anywhere a specimen of the lower middle class more consistent than the