(Act II. Sc. 6), with its jibe at Norwegian national vanity:
The cow gives cakes and the bullock mead,
Ask not if its taste be sour or sweet;
The main matter is, and you mustn't forget it,
It's all of it home-brewed.
Much more difficult is the interpretation of the Boyg,[1] that vague, shapeless, ubiquitous, inevitable, invulnerable Thing which Peer encounters in the following scene (Act II. Sc. 7). Ibsen found it in the folk-tale, and was attracted, no doubt, by the sheer uncanniness and eerieness of the idea. Neither can one doubt, however, that in his own mind he attributed to the monster some symbolic signification. Dr. Brandes would have us see in it the Spirit of Compromise—the same evil spirit which is assailed in Brand. The Swedish critic, Vasenius, interprets it as Peer Gynt's own consciousness of his inability to take a decisive step—to go through an obstacle in place of skirting round it. Herr Passarge reads in it a symbol of the mass of mankind, perpetuum immobile, opposing its sheer force of inertia to every forward movement.[2] This would make it nearly equivalent to "the compact majority"
- ↑ Deeming it unnecessary to trouble our readers with niceties of pronunciation, we have represented the "Böig" of the original by the more easily pronounceable "Boyg." The root-idea seems to be that of bending, of sinuousness; compare Norwegian böie, German biegen, to bend. In Aasmundstad's version of the Peer Gynt legends (see Note, p. xvii) when the Boyg names itself, Peer answers "Antel du æ rak hell bògjë, saa fæ du sleppe mé fram"—"Whether you are straight or crooked, you must let me pass." The German translator, both in the folk-tale and in the drama, renders "Böigen" by "der Krumme." So far as we are aware, the name occurs in no other folk-tale save that of Peer Gynt. It is not generic, but denotes an individual troll-monster.
- ↑ Dr. A. von Hanstein (Ibsen als Idealist, Leipzig, 1897, p. 67), states that Ibsen himself endorsed this interpretation; but I do not know on what evidence his statement is founded.
