PREFACE.
Until a few years ago, Norway was an unknown country to most Englishmen.
Occasionally a sportsman went there to kill salmon or to shoot reindeer, but the fjords, glaciers, mountains, and waterfalls were quite beyond the reach of any but the most venturesome travellers.

Still less was it supposed that Norway possessed a modern school of poets and novelists.
Wergeland, Welhaven, Munch, and Moe among the former, Bjoernson, Ibsen, Kjelland, and Lie among the latter, were, as far as Englishmen were concerned, "to fortune and to fame unknown." All this has been changed; sportsmen now complain that it becomes more difficult every year to hire rivers.

Tourists swarm over the country from the Naze to the North Cape.
Ibsen's dramas are played in London theatres, and his novels, and those of Bjoernson and Lie, are read in Germany and in France, as well as in England and America.
These three writers are of nearly the same age.

Ibsen was born in 1828, at Skien on the south-eastern coast of Norway; Bjoernson in the Dovrefjeld in 1832; and Lie at Eker, near Drammen, in 1833.

Five years after his son's birth, Lie's father was appointed sheriff of Tromsoe, which lies within the Arctic Circle, and young Jonas Lauritz Edemil Lie, to give him his full name, spent six of the most impressionable years of his life at that remote port.