The
remaining product of the fifteen years includes two more prose
idyls, "A Happy Boy" and "The Fisher Maiden" (with a considerable
number of small pieces similar in character); three more plays
drawn from the treasury of old Norse history, "King Sverre,"
"Sigurd Slembe," and "Sigurd Jorsalfar"; a dramatic setting of
the story of "Mary Stuart in Scotland"; a little social comedy,
"The Newly Married Couple," which offers a foretaste of his later
exclusive preoccupation with modern life; "Arnljot Gelline," his
only long poem, a wild narrative of the clash between heathendom
and the Christian faith in the days of Olaf the Holy; and, last
but by no means least, the collection of his "Poems and Songs."
Thus at the age of forty, Bjornson found himself with a dozen
books to his credit books which had stirred his fellow countrymen
as no other books had ever stirred them, arousing them to the
full consciousness of their own nature and of its roots in their
own heroic past. He had become the voice of his people as no
one had been before him, the singer of all that was noble in
Norwegian aspiration, the sympathetic delineator of all that
was essential in Norwegian Character.
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