Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson

Bjørnstjerne Martinius Bjørnson was born in 1832 at Kvikne, a remote parish in the Østerdalen district where his father was pastor; when he was four the family moved to Nesset, near Molde, and the fjord landscape of Romsdal shaped his childhood. He prepared for university at Heltberg’s school in Christiania, which also trained Ibsen, and from 1852 turned to journalism and drama criticism.

The peasant tales that made his name, Synnøve Solbakken (1857), Arne (1858) and A Happy Boy (1860), brought the speech and inner life of rural Norway into literature with a new plainness and dignity, while saga dramas such as Sigurd Slembe (1862) sought a usable national past. He directed theatres in Bergen and Christiania and, from the mid-1870s, turned to contemporary social drama: A Bankruptcy and The Editor examined commerce and the press, and Beyond Our Power (1883) explored religious exaltation with startling force. His poem Ja, vi elsker dette landet became Norway’s national anthem, and Grieg set several of his texts.

Bjørnson was as much a public figure as a writer: a republican and radical speaker throughout Scandinavia, an early defender of Dreyfus, an advocate for the language rights of Slovak children, and a founding member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. In 1903 he became the first Norwegian to receive the literature prize. He died in Paris, where he had long spent his winters, in April 1910, and a Norwegian warship carried his body home. With Ibsen, Jonas Lie and Alexander Kielland he is counted among the four great Norwegian writers of his century.