Having the man, we
are able to trace the germs of his being in the past of his race and his
country; but, with all our science we have not yet acquired the
ingenuity to predict the man--to deduce him _a priori_ from the tangle
of determining causes which enveloped his birth. It seems beautifully
appropriate in the Elder Edda that the god-descended hero Helge the
Voelsung should be born amid gloom and terror in a storm which shakes the
house, while the Norns--the goddesses of fate--proclaim in the tempest
his tempestuous career. Equally satisfactory it appears to have the
modern champion of Norway--the typical modern Norseman--born on the
bleak and wild Dovre Mountain,[1] where there is winter eight months of
the year and cold weather during the remaining four. The parish of
Kvikne, in Oesterdalen, where his father, the Reverend Peder Bjoernson,
held a living, had a bad reputation on account of the unruly ferocity
and brutal violence of the inhabitants. One of the Reverend Peder
Bjoernson's recent predecessors never went into his pulpit, unarmed; and
another fled for his life.
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