Literary Text: An Ibsen Excerpt (Peer Gynt)

When you open Henrik Ibsen in the original, the first shock is not the poetry — it is the spelling. Nej for nei, gjør for gjør with a different vowel logic, paa for på, efter for etter, nu for nå, and nouns marching down the page with capital letters like German. None of this is a misprint, and none of it is wrong. Ibsen wrote in Dano-Norwegian Riksmål — the conservative, Danish-influenced written language that educated Norwegians used in the 19th century, decades before the spelling reforms of 1907 and 1917 pulled the written norm toward Norwegian speech. His texts sit at the conservative end of the Norwegian written continuum, and to read them you need a small key: a handful of regular sound-and-spelling correspondences that turn the archaic surface back into something a modern reader recognises. This page gives you that key, using the most famous opening lines in Norwegian drama.

The excerpt: the opening of Peer Gynt (1867)

This is the very start of the play. Åse, Peer's mother, has caught him spinning a tall tale about riding a reindeer buck along a knife-edge ridge, and she opens with a flat accusation. The text below is the original 1867 orthography, exactly as Ibsen published it.

Here is the same passage rendered into modern Bokmål, so you can see exactly what the spelling reforms changed and what they left alone:

Now the walkthrough — the regular correspondences that turn the 1867 surface into 2026 Bokmål.

Archaic spelling key: the regular correspondences

The single most important thing for an advanced reader is that these are not random. The 19th-century forms map onto modern ones by a small set of rules. Once you internalise the rules, you stop reading Ibsen letter by letter and start reading him fluently.

• aa → å. The digraph aa was the old way of writing the sound now spelled å (officially since 1917). So paa = på, Gaard = gård, Naa = nå, Aase = Åse. This is the highest-frequency rule in any pre-1917 text.
• Consonant clusters simplify. The Danish-leaning -dt hardens and simplifies to -t (sandt → sant), and the old neuter -t on -ig adjectives is dropped (evigt → evig), since modern -ig adjectives take no -t in the neuter.
• ej as a negator. ej is an old literary "not," replaced in modern Bokmål by ikke. Jeg gjør ej = jeg gjør ikke (det).
• Single vs. double consonants. Older orthography under-doubled: band → bann, bande → banne.
• Danish lexical items. ihob ("together," literally i hop) is Danish; modern Norwegian says sammen. Tvi survives as an interjection of disgust.

Capitalised nouns: the German-style convention

Look at Lid, Løvtrær, Gaard, Elv, Kværnehus, Side, Sommerdag, Tøv, Tant, Ord. Every common noun is capitalised, exactly as in German. This was standard Dano-Norwegian practice through the 19th century and was only abolished in the 1907 reform. It is purely orthographic — it tells you nothing about emphasis or proper-noun status. A learner who reads Ord ("word") as a name, or assumes the capital marks stress, is misreading the convention.

Archaic verb morphology and the lost plural agreement

Ibsen's Norwegian still carries traces of an older verb system. In the most conservative Dano-Norwegian, verbs agreed in number — a plural subject took a plural verb ending in -e (e.g. de have "they have," vi ere "we are"), and the past tense of weak verbs could appear in the -ede form (elskede "loved," kaldede "called"). Modern Bokmål has no person or number agreement at all: one form serves every subject (jeg er, du er, vi er, de er). When you meet have for har, ere for er, or -ede past tenses in a 19th-century text, you are looking at this dead agreement system. (See verbs/no-agreement for why modern Norwegian dropped it entirely.)

The formal address: De / Dem / Deres

Although Åse and Peer use intimate du (mother and son), 19th-century Riksmål drama is full of the polite second person De / Dem / Deres — capitalised, taking plural-style forms, exactly like German Sie or French vous. A servant addresses a master as De; strangers use De; intimacy and condescension use du. Modern Norwegian has almost entirely abandoned De; today even strangers and customers are addressed with du, and De survives only in very formal letters and to royalty (see register/polite-de). In Ibsen, the du/De switch is a live dramatic instrument — a character moving from De to du is crossing a social line.

The -et → -ede participle and the "softened" Danish look

Beyond the past tense, Dano-Norwegian past participles and adjectives often wear an extra -de that modern Bokmål has shed. Where today we write et elsket barn ("a beloved child"), the older text writes et elsket Barn or even the fuller elskede; where we write en kjent mann, the Danish-leaning form leans toward en bekjendt Mand. This "softened," consonant-heavy spelling — Mand for mann, Land for land, Vand for vann, bløde for bløte — is the Danish substrate showing through (see regional/danish-influence). The 1907 and 1917 reforms hardened these spellings to match Norwegian pronunciation: the soft Danish b, d, g became Norwegian p, t, k in many words (løbe → løpe, gade → gate, kage → kake).

How this differs from modern Bokmål, in one view

Cultural note: who Ibsen was, and why the language matters

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) is the most-performed playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and the founder of modern realist drama — Et dukkehjem ("A Doll's House"), Gengangere ("Ghosts"), En folkefiende ("An Enemy of the People"), Hedda Gabler. Peer Gynt (1867) is his great verse fantasia on Norwegian identity, the self-deceiving wanderer who must ask what it means to be "sig selv" ("oneself"). Crucially, Ibsen wrote in the Dano-Norwegian of his class and century: Norway had been in union with Denmark until 1814, and its written language was still essentially Danish with a Norwegian accent. The independent written norms — reformed Bokmål and the speech-based Nynorsk — were forged during and after Ibsen's lifetime (see regional/language-history). So reading Ibsen is reading a snapshot of the language mid-transformation: Norwegian in content and rhythm, Danish in spelling. That tension — a national poet writing in the old colonial orthography — is part of what makes him a linguistic monument as much as a literary one.

The annotation in place of "Common Mistakes": reading errors to avoid

Because this is an annotated literary text, the pitfalls are reading errors, not production errors. These are the four traps that catch English-speaking advanced learners.

Key takeaways

• Ibsen wrote in Dano-Norwegian Riksmål, the conservative end of the written continuum — not "wrong" Norwegian, but pre-reform Norwegian.
• The master key is aa → å (paa→på, Gaard→gård); after that, lower-case the nouns, harden Danish b/d/g to p/t/k, and convert any plural verb agreement (have→har, ere→er) and long -ede pasts to modern endings.
• Capitalised common nouns are orthographic, not semantic; ej is an archaic "not"; De/Dem/Deres is the polite-you that modern Norwegian has all but abandoned.
• Reading Ibsen well means holding the archaic-form key in your head so the 19th-century surface dissolves into the modern language underneath — connecting literature directly to the history of the language.