Early Plays — Catiline, the Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans

One of the most remarkable facts about Ibsen is the orderly development of his genius. He himself repeatedly maintained that his dramas were not mere isolated accidents. In the foreword to the readers in the popular edition of 1898 he urges the public to read his dramas in the same order in which he had written them, deplores the fact that his earlier works are less known and less understood than his later works, and insists that his writings taken as a whole constitute an organic unity. The three of his plays offered here for the first time in English translation will afford those not familiar with the original Norwegian some light on the early stages of his development.
Catiline, the earliest of Ibsen's plays, was written in 1849, while Ibsen was an apothecary's apprentice in Grimstad. It appeared in Christiania in the following spring under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme.
The Warrior's Barrow, Ibsen's second play, was finished in 1850 shortly after the publication of Catiline. Olaf Liljekrans, which was presented on the Bergen stage in 1857, marks the end of Ibsen's early romantic interest. The original idea for this play, which he had begun in 1850, he found in the folk-tale "The Grouse in Justedal," about a girl who alone had survived the Black Death in an isolated village.