THE VISIONARY
OR
PICTURES FROM NORDLAND
BY
JONAS LIE
TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN
BY JESSIE MUIR
WITH A PREFACE
AND
PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR
LONDON
HODDER BROTHERS
1894
PREFACE
Until a few years ago, Norway was an unknown country to mostEnglishmen. Occasionally a sportsman went there to kill salmon orto shoot reindeer, but the fjords, glaciers, mountains, andwaterfalls were quite beyond the reach of any but the mostventuresome travellers. Still less was it supposed that Norwaypossessed a modern school of poets and novelists. Wergeland,Welhaven, Munch, and Moe among the former, Björnson, Ibsen,Kjelland, and Lie among the latter, were, as far as Englishmen wereconcerned, "to fortune and to fame unknown." All this has beenchanged; sportsmen now complain that it becomes more difficultevery year to hire rivers. Tourists swarm over the country from theNaze to the North Cape. Ibsen's dramas are played in Londontheatres, and his novels, and those of Björnson and Lie, areread in Germany and in France, as well as in England andAmerica.
These three writers are of nearly the same age. Ibsen was bornin 1828, at Skien on the south-eastern coast of Norway;Björnson in the Dovrefjeld in 1832; and Lie at Eker, nearDrammen, in 1833. Five years after his son's birth, Lie's fatherwas appointed sheriff of Tromsö, which lies within the ArcticCircle, and young Jonas Lauritz Edemil Lie, to give him his fullname, spent six of the most impressionable years of his life atthat remote port. There he heard from the sailors many strangetales of romantic adventure and of hazardous escape from shipwreck,with the not uncommon result that he wished to be a sailor himself.He was, therefore, sent to the naval school at Fredriksværn;but his defective eyesight proved fatal to the realisation of hiswish and the idea of a seafaring life had to be given up. He wasremoved from Fredriksværn to the Latin School at Bergen, andin 1851 entered the University of Christiania, where he made theacquaintance of Ibsen and Björnson. He graduated in law in1857, and shortly afterwards began to practise at Konsvinger, alittle town in Hamar's Stift between Lake Miosen and the frontierof Sweden. Clients were not numerous or profitable at Konsvinger;Lie found time to write for the newspapers and became a frequentcontributor to some of the Christiania journals. Meantime, Ibsenand Björnson were becoming famous in Norway, and in 1865 Lie,perhaps in a spirit of emulation, decided to abandon law forliterature. His first venture was a volume of poems which appearedin 1866 and was not successful. During the four following years hedevoted himself almost exclusively to journalism, working hard andwithout much reward, but acquiring the pen of a ready writer andobtaining command of a style which has proved serviceable in hissubsequent career. In 1870 he published "The Visionary,"—"DenFremsynte"—of which a translation is now, for the first time,offered to English readers. In the following year he revisitedNordland and travelled into Finmark. Having obtained a smalltravelling pension from the Government, immediately after hisjourney to Nordland, he sought the greatest contrast he could findin Europe to the scenes of his childhood and started for Rome. Fora time he lived in North Germany, then he migrated to Bavaria,spending his winters in Paris. In 1882 he visited Norway for at