Norway had, in 1850, been independent of Denmark for thirty-six years.
During the greater part of that time the fiery excitements of a struggle
for politic existence had fairly exhausted her mental resources, and had
left her powerless to inaugurate a national literature. Meanwhile, there
was no such discontinuity in the literary and scientific relations of
the two countries as that which had broken their constitutional union. A
tremendous effort was made by certain patriots to discover the basis of
an entirely independent intellectual life, something that should start
like the phoenix from the ashes of the old regime, and should offer no
likeness with what continued to flourish south of the Skagarak. But all
the efforts of the University of Christiania were vain to prevent the
cultivated classes from looking to Copenhagen as their centre of light.
Such authors as there were, and they were few indeed, followed humbly in
the footsteps of their Danish brethren.

Patriotic historians of literature are not always to be trusted, and
those who study native handbooks of Norwegian criticism must be on their
guard when these deal with the three poets who "inaugurated in song the
young liberties of Norway." The writings of the three celebrated lyric
patriots, Schwach, Bjerregaard and Hansen, will not bear to have the
blaze of European experience cast upon them; their tapers dwindle to
sparks in the light of day. They gratified the vanity of the first
generation after 1815, but they deserve no record in the chronicles of
poetic art. If Ibsen ever read these rhymes of circumstance, it must
have been to treat them with contempt.

Twenty years after the Union, however, and in Ibsen's early childhood,
an event occurred which was unique in the history of Norwegian
literature, and the consequences of which were far-reaching. As is often
the case in countries where the art of verse is as yet little exercised,