Early Plays: Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans

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Ibsen's earliest plays — written before he developed the naturalist method that made him famous — belong to a Romantic-nationalist tradition: Catiline (1850) is a verse drama about the Roman conspirator, written when Ibsen was twenty-one; The Warrior's Barrow and Olaf Liljekrans are Norse historical romances. These works have primarily biographical and historical interest — they show the young Ibsen working within conventional Romantic forms before his mature innovations — but Catiline in particular has genuine dramatic energy, and scholars trace its themes of frustrated ambition forward through the entire subsequent career.