PEER GYNT - The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen Vol. 04 (of 11)

The publication of Brand, in March 1866, brought Ibsen fame (in Scandinavia) and relieved him from the immediate pressure of poverty. Two months later the Storthing voted him a yearly “poet-pension” of £90; and with this sum, as he wrote to the Minister who had been mainly instrumental in furthering his claim, he felt “his future assured,” so that he could henceforth “devote himself without hindrance to his calling.”

The summer of 1866 Ibsen spent at Frascati, in the Palazzo Gratiosi, where he lived “most comfortably and cheaply.” He found Frascati and Tusculum viii“indescribably delightful.” From the windows of his study he could see Soracte, “rising isolated and beautiful from the level of the immense plain ... the battlefield where the chief engagement in the world’s history took place.” So he writes in a letter to Paul Botten-Hansen, and immediately afterwards proceeds: