It is written in blank verse, with
occasional rhymes in the more impressive passages. Of dramatic interest
in the ordinary sense, there is but little. It is a series of more or
less animated scenes, from the period of the great civil war
(1130-1240), connected by the personality of Sverre. Under the mask,
however, of mediaeval history, the author preaches a political sermon to
his own contemporaries. Sverre, as the champion of the common people
against the tribal aristocracy, and the wily Bishop Nicholas as the
representative of the latter become, as it were, permanent forces, which
have continued their battle to the present day. There can be no doubt
that Bjoernson, whose sympathies are strongly democratic, permitted the
debate between the two to become needlessly didactic, and strained
historical verisimilitude by veiled allusions to contemporaneous
conditions. Greatly superior is his next drama, "Sigurd Slembe"[4]
(1862).
[4] An English version of "Sigurd Slembe" has been published by
William Morton Payne (Boston, 1888).
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