With his second tableau Mr. Craig is even more successful. It is the feast room in Gunnar's house. It is a boxed-in set, though it gives one the feeling of a spaciousness that on the very limited stage of the Imperial is surprising. A circular platform with a high seat at the back, and a long table with rough benches, railed in, make up an interior far from promising. A fire burns in a peculiar hearth in the centre, and there are raised places for the women. Outside it is dark. The stage manager contrived to get an extraordinary atmosphere of gloomy radiance in this barbaric apartment. He sent his light shivering from on high, and Miss Terry's Valkyr dress was a gorgeous blue when she stood in the hub of the room. All the light was tempered by a painter's perception of lovely hues. This scene has been admired very much. For many, however, the third act bore off the victory. A simple space of hall, a large casement, a dais, the whole flooded by daylight. Here the quality of light was of the purest, withal hard, as befitted a northern latitude.
In the last scene of all Mr. Craig wrestled with the darkness and obtained several effects, though none startling or novel.
The Vikings was first planned for verse—a Norse tragedy of fate in the Greek style. But the theme demanded a drastic, laconic prose, with nothing unessential, and, as Jaeger points out, without monologues, or lyric outbursts; the dialogue glows with passion, but the glow never becomes flame or gives out sparks; here are caustic wit and biting repartee, but the fighting is not carried on with light rapiers; we seem to be watching a battle for life and death with the short, heavy swords which the old Vikings used—hatred and love, friendship and vengeance, scorn and grief—all are as intense as the sagas themselves.
The dramatic poet has been reproached, as his biographer asserts, for "degrading the demi-gods" of the Völsung Saga into mere Norwegian and Icelandic Vikings of the age of Erik Blodöx—or Bloody Axe. Other critics, again, have commended him for making Vikings out of the Völsung Saga.
Be it as it may, the result is drama of an excellent sort; romantic drama if you will, yet informed by a certain realistic quality. Here again the woman is the wielder of the power, and not the man. Hjördis is the very incarnation of violence, of the lust of conquest, of hate, revenge. She would overthrow kingdoms to secure the man she loved, and that man is only a tool for her passionate ambitions.
The Vikings at Helgeland, then, is not exactly a dramatic paraphrase of the Völsung Saga. Ibsen absorbed the wisdom of the ancients of his race and made of them an organic work full of the old spirit, heroic, powerful, and informed with the harsh romance of the time. This play is not among his greatest, but it is none the less interesting as a connecting link of his youth and early manhood.
Let us follow the piece scene by scene, noting the easy grasp of character, the pithy dialogue, the atmosphere of repressed passion and ferocious cruelty. There are evidences of crude power from first to last. Upon the purple spotted rocks near the home of Gunnar Headman on the island of Helgeland—in the north of Norway—Sigurd comes up from his two war-ships which lie down in the misty cove. In the person of Oscar Asche—familiar to New York theatre-goers as the appalling Hebraic millionaire in Pinero's Iris—this Sigurd is a formidable warrior, with hair in two blond plaits, steel-spiked cap, and fighting harness.
He resembled Van Dyck's Siegmund as to girth, and with his big bare arms, his bracelets, sword, and heavy stride, he gave one the impression of clanking grandeur, of implacable phlegm. At once a row begins, for Oernulf of the Fjords, an Icelandic chieftain, bars the passage of the Viking. The pair fight. Fast from ship and cavern pour warriors, and Dagny, the wife of Sigurd. Then hostilities cease. In the young woman Oernulf recognizes a daughter wed without his consent by Sigurd; for this hero, after giving up Hjördis—the foster daughter of Oernulf—to Gunnar, marries Oernulf's real child, Dagny. As already indicated, this scene was managed with remarkable deftness at the Imperial. That sterling actor, Holman Clark, no stranger in America, as Oernulf, carried away the major honours in this stirring episode. His very mannerisms lent themselves to an amiable complicity with the lines and gestures. We soon learn from his words that he means to extort his pound of flesh from Gunnar for carrying off Hjördis. Sigurd placates him with presents, with assurances of esteem. Dagny pleads for forgiveness, and wins it.
Then enters Kara, the peasant, pursued by the house-carles of Hjördis, and her motive is sounded for the first time in this drama of thwarted love and hate. The wretched peasant has killed a subject of the Queen. She is revengeful. He pleads for his life and is promised protection. Hjördis soon appears. She looks like the traditional Valkyr and is armed with a lance. Her nature is expressed in the cold way she greets her foster sister, Dagny, though her face brightens at the sight of Sigurd.
Violently reproached by her foster father, Hjördis responds in kind. Let Gunnar be weak; let him renew his pact of friendship with Sigurd. She owes nothing to Oernulf. He has slain her real father in unfair fight—then she is called a wanton by the angry chieftain and her rage flames up so that the dark rocks upon which they all stand seem to be illumined. Kara, in the interim, has gone away muttering his vengeance; Hjördis, dissimulating, invites all to a great feast in Gunnar's house and departs. Sigurd would go. Dagny mistrusts. At last Sigurd tells his too-long-kept secret. It was he that slew the white bear and won the woman beloved of Gunnar. Dagny is amazed, and after being conjured by her husband to keep precious this story she promises. But she wistfully regards the ring upon her arm, the ring of Hjördis, plucked from her wrist by Sigurd (the ring of the Nibelungs!). Sigurd bids her hide it, for if Hjördis catches a glimpse of it the deception will be as plain as the round shield of the sun blazing on high. And then—woe to all! The curtains close.
Act II is devoted to the feast and the strange events which happened thereat. Ibsen's magic now begins to work. His psychologic bent is felt the moment after we see Dagny and Hjördis in conference. The mild wife of Sigurd wonders audibly at the other's depression. Why should she bemoan her fate with such a house, a fair and goodly abode? Hjördis turns fiercely upon her and replies, "Cage an eagle and it will bite at the wires, be they of iron or of gold." But has she not a little son, Egil? Better no son at all for a mother who is a wanton, a leman! She recalls with sullen wrath the words of Oernulf. In vain Dagny seeks to pacify her. The older woman is of the race of Titans. She tells with pride the story of the queen who took her son and sewed his kirtle fast to his flesh. So would she treat her Egil!
"Hjördis, Hjördis!" cries the tender-hearted listener. For this she is mocked. Hjördis further tortures her by asking if she has accompanied her husband into battle, into the halls of the mighty. "Didst thou not don harness and take up arms?" Dagny answers in the negative. Gunnar is extolled for his deed, a mighty deed as yet not excelled by Sigurd. The listener seems on the point of denying this Hjördis notes her agitation and presses her, but Dagny is faithful to her word; she keeps Sigurd's secret. Then in a burst, almost lyric, Hjördis confesses her love for combat to the sisters of Hilda, the terrible Valkyrs who fly in the sky, carrying dead warriors to Valhall. She loves, too, witchcraft, and would be a witch-wife astride of a whale and skim the storm waves. "Thou speakest shameful things," says the frightened Dagny, and is scoffed at for her timidity.
Gradually the feast begins. The warriors assemble. I cannot say that I admired their costumes, reminding me, as they did, of crazy-quilts. Sigurd and Gunnar enter arm in arm. Egil, the hope of Gunnar's house, has been sent away; his father feared the descent of Oernulf