The örnstjerneBjönext fifteen years of Björnson's life were richly productive. Within a single year he had published "Arne," the second of his peasant idyls and perhaps the most remarkable of them all, and had also published two brief dramas, "Halte-Hulda" and the one already mentioned as the achievement of fourteen feverish days. 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, Björnson 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. He had, in short, created a national literature where none had before existed, and he was still in his early prime.
The collected edition of Björnson's "Tales," published in 1872, together with "The Bridal March," separately published in the following year, gives us a complete representation of that phase of his genius which is best known to the world at large. Here are five stories of considerable length, and a number of slighter sketches, in which the Norwegian peasant is portrayed with intimate and loving knowledge. The peasant tale was no new thing in European literature, for the names of Auerbach and George Sand, to say nothing of many others, at once come to the mind. In Scandinavian literature, its chief representative had been the Danish novelist, Blicher, who had written with insight and charm of the peasantry of Jutland. But in the treatment of peasant life by most of Björnson's predecessors there had been too much of the _de haut en bas_ attitude; the peasant had been drawn from the outside, viewed philosophically, and invested with artificial sentiment. Björnson was too near to his own country folk to commit such faults as these; he was himself of peasant stock, and all his boyhood life had been spent in close association with men who wrested a scanty living from an ungrateful soil. Although a poet by instinct, he was not afraid of realism, and did not shrink from giving the brutal aspects of peasant life a place upon his canvas. In emphasizing the characteristics of reticence and _naïveté_ he really discovered the Norwegian peasant for literary purposes. Beneath the words spoken by his characters we are constantly made to realize that there are depths of feeling that remain unexpressed; whether from native pride or from a sense of the inadequacy of mere words to set forth a critical moment of life, his men and women are distinguished by the most laconic utterance, yet their speech always has dramatic fitness and bears the stamp of sincerity. Jaeger speaks of the manifold possibilities of this laconic method in the following words:--