“Hærmændene paa Helgeland” is Ibsen’s first great drama; it has, indeed, been called the most perfect of his plays. The antique form and substance which he imposed upon himself compelled him to a severe self-restraint; the style also of the drama, which is in prose, is austerely simple and strong. Yet there is at the same time a curious and undisguised modern note about this work, and we feel throughout the presence of that spirit which gives life to Ibsen’s plays of to-day. The strong, passionate figure of Hjördis fills most of the field, however finely the lesser figures are moulded. She is the Brunhild of the ancient story, yet she is the same woman who is the heroine and the hero of all Ibsen’s social dramas; a strong and passionate woman, instinct with suppressed energy to which the natural outlets have been closed, and which is transformed into volcanic outbreaks of disaster. “A woman, a woman,” she says to Dagny, who is shocked at a remark about using the armour and weapons of a man, and mixing among men, “there is no one who knows what a woman can do.” Her father having been slain, she is brought as a young girl into the conqueror’s household. She finds a temporary satisfaction in the exercise of her physical strength. When the mild and honourable warrior Sigurd comes with his feeble friend Gunnar, both fall in love with her, and she, without speaking it, returns Sigurd’s love. She promises to give herself to him who can perform the greatest feat of strength, and Sigurd, by a ruse, wins her for his friend Gunnar, himself taking to wife the gentle Dagny. Henceforth there is something strange and incalculable in all the deeds of Hjördis, and a concentrated bitterness in her words. When afterwards she learns that Sigurd had once loved her, the proud and reserved woman offers in vain to put on helmet and breastplate and to follow him through the earth. “I have been homeless in the world from the day that you took another to wife. Ill was that deed of yours. All good gifts may a man give to his trothful friend,--all, but not the woman he holds dear. When he does that deed, he breaks the thread that the Norns have spun, and wastes two lives.” Hjördis is the woman of the social dramas, but it has not yet occurred to her that she has a life of her own.