“This book is by right indefeasible thine, Who in spirit art born of the Östråt line.” In _Lady Inger_ Ibsen has chosen a theme from the very darkest hour of Norwegian history. King Sverre’s democratic monarchy, dating from the beginning of the thirteenth century, had paralysed the old Norwegian nobility. One by one the great families died out, their possessions being concentrated in the hands of the few survivors, who regarded their wealth as a privilege unhampered by obligations. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, then, patriotism and public spirit were almost dead among the nobles, while the monarchy, before which the old aristocracy had fallen, was itself dead, or rather merged (since 1380) in the Crown of Denmark. The peasantry, too, had long ago lost all effective voice in political affairs; so that Norway lay prone and inert at the mercy of her Danish rulers. It is at the moment of deepest national degradation that Ibsen has placed his tragedy; and the degradation was, in fact, even deeper than he represents it, for the longings for freedom, the stirrings of revolt, which form the motive-power of the action, are invented, or at any rate idealised, by the poet. Fru Inger Ottisdatter Gyldenlöve was, in fact, the greatest personage of her day in Norway. She was the best-born, the wealthiest, and probably the ablest woman in the land. At the time when Ibsen wrote, little more than this seems to have been known of her; so that in making her the victim of a struggle between patriotic duty and maternal love, he was perhaps poetising in the absence of positive evidence, rather than in opposition to it. Subsequent research, unfortunately, has shown that Fru Inger was but little troubled with patriotic aspirations. She was a hard and grasping woman, ambitious of social power and predominance, but inaccessible, or nearly so, to national feeling. It was from sheer social ambition, and with no qualms of patriotic conscience, that she married her daughters to Danish noblemen. True, she lent some support to the insurrection of the so-called “Dale-junker,” a peasant who gave himself out as the heir of Sten Sture, a former regent of Sweden; but there is not a tittle of ground for making this pretender her son. He might, indeed, have become her son-in-law, for, speculating on his chances of success, she had betrothed one of her daughters to him. Thus the Fru Inger of Ibsen’s play is, in her character and circumstances, as much a creation of the poet’s as though no historic personage of that name had ever existed. Olaf Skaktavl, Nils Lykke, and Eline Gyldenlöve are also historic names; but with them, too, Ibsen has dealt with the utmost freedom. The real Nils Lykke was married in 1528 to the real Eline Gyldenlöve.