Peer Gynt

Peer’s mother Åse raised her son alone after the death of her husband. She is alternately hard-hearted and entirely indulgent toward Peer, whose actions essentially destroy the life she had. The Gynts inherited wealth, but Peer’s father spent irresponsibly and all that is left of the estate is their property. When Peer runs away with Ingrid, the subsequent kidnapping charge leads the court to take their land and possessions. Åse sees through Peer’s lies but then allows him to convince her that they are true, as in his tale about the reindeer. She races after him to Ingrid’s wedding party to punish him severely for leaving her on the roof of the millhouse and ends up taking his side against villagers who mock him. She even defends him for kidnapping Ingrid, blaming the Devil instead of her son. At the end of Åse’s life, Peer risks his own to visit her. As she dies, his vivid fantasies are a comfort.

The village blacksmith, Aslak, is Peer’s enemy in his youth. The two have a history of violent altercations, in which it is never clear who started the conflict or who bested the other. At the wedding, Aslak leads the other youths in taunting and embarrassing Peer. But at the end of the play, they meet again, and their seemingly insurmountable struggle has been erased. Aslak greets Peer as a stranger, and when Peer asks: “Peer Gynt? Who was he?” (171), Aslak just refers to him as “family” (172). 

When Peer asks Solveig to dance at Ingrid’s wedding, he does so simply because she is the only woman who has not yet entered the party and been instructed to avoid him. Once she has gone inside, she quickly rejects him. But he becomes taken with an image of her, in which she is pious and pure. While searching for Peer after he runs off with Ingrid, she learns about him from Åse’s stories and becomes smitten as well. She becomes the incarnation of goodness in the play, waiting patiently for Peer to honor his promise to return. She is the keeper of Peer’s better and more honorable self, and Peer only has to return to her to find it. The example of Solveig also holds up sex as a corruptor, as Peer beds every other young woman he meets on his journey and then finds them wanting. Solveig is never “corrupted” in this way. Instead, she spends her whole life waiting for Peer.

Solveig’s father disapproves of Peer, agreeing to help find him after he runs off with Ingrid only to save his soul and bring him to the executioner. Peer suggests that Solveig’s father is a pastor. When Solveig runs away to be with Peer, she does so without his blessing, leaving her parents behind forever.

Solveig’s little sister arrives at the wedding party holding Solveig’s hand. Once Peer has been banished, Solveig sends Helga to Peer with a message (which she does not actually deliver). Peer offers her a silver button, which is likely only tin, in exchange for telling Solveig not to forget about him. Although she becomes frightened of Peer and runs away, Solveig confirms that she did pass on his message. 

Before Peer left to hunt reindeer, Ingrid was romantically interested in him. She is an heiress, set to inherit money and a farm. While he was gone, she agreed to marry Mads Moen instead. She has some reservations as she locks herself in the hayloft and refuses to come out for the wedding. Instead, she runs away with Peer. As she follows him through the woods, angry that he has apparently rejected her, Ingrid implies that they had sex. When he compares her to Solveig, who he describes as modest and shy, it becomes clear that this is why he no longer wants her. Although she does not appear onstage again, it is clear through other characters that she returned home safely. At the end of the play, when Peer returns to the village, she has died and apparently married Aslak, the blacksmith and Peer’s enemy. Ingrid is one of a line of women who stands as fantasies for Peer until they are attainable, after which he no longer wants them.

Peer describes Mads, who is engaged to marry Ingrid, as an “idiot” (39), to which Mads does show himself to be foolish and trusting. Even his father calls him a “dummy” (50) when Mads can’t solve the problem of Ingrid, who has locked herself in the hayloft. Mads, believing Peer’s fantastical claims about his supernatural abilities, offers Peer an ox in exchange for helping to extract her. Instead, Peer carries her off. At the end of the play, Mads refers to both Aslak (who marries Ingrid) and Peer as family since everyone in the village is like family. 

The three herd girls, or dairy maids, are lustfully calling out for trolls to come out of the mountains and join them in bed. Each had a mortal man who abandoned them. When Peer jumps in and offers himself, they accept gleefully, giving him alcohol and taking him inside. The herd girls represent a reoccurring trope in Norwegian folklore of mortal women seeking to have sex with trolls.  

The woman in green is a troll princess. Peer sees her after knocking himself unconscious and is instantly in love. She becomes pregnant with Peer’s baby and returns to haunt him just as he is about to start his life with Solveig, leading him to run away instead. The woman in green shows that power, beauty, and wealth are produced by language and discourse rather than absolute truths of the universe. As she tells Peer: “Nothing is what it seems. For example, when you come to my father’s palace, you probably won’t recognize it. You’ll think it’s a rubble-heap” (78). Her “steed” is a pig. Her clothing is grass and hay. But since her father calls himself a king and her a princess, Peer is willing to give up daylight to inherit their kingdom, even if it is underground.

The woman in green leads Peer to the Old Man of the Mountain, her father, who is the troll king. He rules over an underground kingdom and offers Peer the opportunity to marry his daughter and inherit the kingdom. The Old Man opens up Peer’s understanding of his identity by teaching him the troll motto: “Be true to yourself-ish” (81). The king identifies the “trollish” aspects of Peer’s nature, pointing out at the end of the play that Peer adopted and internalized the troll motto from the day he left the troll kingdom. A troll is undiscerning and unjudgmental. When Peer shows that he hasn’t fully abandoned his human nature, the Old Man tells him that he must have an operation to become a troll. This operation does nothing but scratch the eye, changing perception rather than anatomy. When Peer meets the Old Man at the end of the play, he tells Peer that his grandchild (Peer’s son) and great-grandchildren have turned him into a legend by telling everyone that he does not exist. This brings up the question of identity as socially imposed rather than essential. 

When Peer leaves the troll kingdom, he has impregnated the troll princess—the woman in green. When she returns, she is an old woman even though Peer is still a young man. The child she tows is an angry, grotesque brat. He is drinking from a beer bottle and hanging onto his mother’s skirt. When the woman tells Peer that it is his turn to raise their child, he spits at Peer, threatening: “I’ll chop your head off. Wait and see” (107). The woman praises the child, telling him: “When you grow up, you’ll be just like your Pa” (107). When Peer tries to send them away, she adds, “As the Devil said when his Ma thrashed him because his Pa got drunk, ‘it’s the pure what gets the blame’” (107-08). The feral child, who is half-human and half-troll, has a nature that is all-troll without his father’s human influence. The woman’s statement argues that when adults do evil deeds or make mistakes, it is the children who have no agency and therefore suffer. Ibsen himself impregnated a maid in his family’s house and then had no hand in raising the child. His relationships with his own family were also fraught with difficulties. The presence of the troll child comments on the generational nature of identity, and how abuse and hardship can be passed on.

Åse’s neighbor Kari stands by her friend after the judgement against Peer causes Åse to lose her home and belongings. Kari has a rigid view of religion and the law, which Åse has compromised for the sake of her love for her son. When Åse suggests that she can keep what the bailiff left, Kari reminds her that this would be stealing, which is a sin. Kari visits Åse in her final days, and Peer leaves her responsible for seeing to his mother’s funeral when he sets off on his journey. 

In Morocco, Peer entertains a group of friends: Cotton, Ballon, Eberkopf, and Trumpetblast. Peer is wealthy, and his friends flatter him as they drink his wine. However, they are offended when Peer tells them his plan to involve himself in the Greco-Turkish war by bolstering the Greeks and then assisting the Turks to put them down. They turn on him, stealing Peer’s yacht full of gold. They are punished, however, when the yacht explodes, presumably killing them all. 

In the original Danish text, the thieves’ lines were recitative, which is rhythmic sing-speaking. They sing that their fathers were thieves, so they are too, adding in a chorus: “To yourself be true!” (130). Although they steal riches from the Bedouin sheikh, they abandon what they took when they hear Peer approaches. This suggests that the act of stealing was a matter of generational identity rather than a need or desire to appropriate goods. 

In Morocco, Peer surrounds himself with a harem of dancing women and becomes smitten with Anitra. Like his Moroccan friends, she takes advantage of his wealth by praising him in exchange for jewels. Anitra feeds his romanticized image of Morocco. When Peer takes her flattery for affection and tries to run away with her, she protests, calling him an old man. Once she learns that he plans to take her a thousand miles away, she decides that the price is too high and runs off with his horse.

Begriffenfeldt finds Peer at the Sphinx. He crowns Peer the emperor of enlightenment, but there is a caveat. Enlightenment has become topsy-turvy due to what Begriffenfeldt describes as the expiration of Common Sense. As the play questions the lines between reality and fantasy, Begriffenfeldt raises the question as to the line between sanity and insanity. He assures Peer that the inmates are completely true to themselves, meaning that they are entirely self-absorbed. At the end of the scene, when Peer faints, Begriffenfeldt calls him “the emperor of self!” (157). 

The former guards of the madhouse are locked up, and the inmates are now the guards. Peer speaks to three (former) inmates: Huhu, Egyptian, and Hussein. Having been designated the emperor of the former madmen, Peer attempts to address their issues. Huhu is attempting to find something primal that has been covered and sanitized by language and social structures. He is trying to locate an essential sense of self. Peer suggests that Huhu go to Morocco and live with the orangutans. The Egyptian, who has a mummy on his back, has an identity problem relating to the limits of the body. When King Apis urinated in his grandfather’s field, the Egyptian claims that his urine was incorporated into the crops, which his family ate. By taking the king’s corporeal leftovers into his body, the Egyptian believes that he is also King Apis. However, no one will recognize him as King Apis. Peer suggests that if he kills himself, after some time he will look like the mummy on his back. Hussein has an identity crisis because he believes that he is a quill pen, but no one recognizes him has such because he needs sharpening. Begriffenfeldt hands him a knife, and he cuts his own throat in an attempt to sharpen himself. The madmen show the misfires that can occur in the pressure to know and be true to oneself.

When Peer travels back to Norway, he asks the Captain to remind him to tip the crew. However, he learns that all of the crew members have wives and children waiting for them, and he no longer wants to give them money because they have families and he doesn’t. Peer has traveled the world and become wealthy, but he resents the crew for having what he could have had with Solveig from the beginning. 

As a young man, Peer saw a boy in the forest chop off his own finger in order to avoid military service. As an old man, Peer listens to a priest eulogize the boy who grew to be an old man himself. Although the boy performed other heroic acts in his life, such as carrying his sons to school where there was no road, he was ashamed of his missing finger, which represented the way he compromised himself bodily out of fear. The priest argues that although some might call him a coward, the boy led a life that was valiant in his own way. He suggests that the boy was himself. He lived a quiet life, but “fought his own small war” (170).

Outside of Ingrid’s family farmhouse, old Peer meets two people from his youth, although they fail to recognize or acknowledge each other. The Man in Mourning (Aslak) and the Man in Grey (Mads Moen) are leaving Haegstad, where Ingrid’s belongings are being auctioned off because she has died. Although there was friction between Peer and the two men when they were younger, the older men remember Peer as family. They show how a person fades after death and how identity becomes imposed by memory.

After escaping the trolls, Peer meets the Great Bøyg in the mountains. It is pitch dark, so Peer can only hear him. In Norwegian folklore, the Bøyg is a beast that hinders travelers. In the play, the Bøyg serves as an obstacle for Peer, one he cannot fight. He teaches Peer the motto “go around” (90), which Peer continues to do from that moment on. Peer’s journey from outside the hut to inside with Solveig is hindered by the obstacle of the woman in green and her child. Rather than facing them, Peer leaves and travels the world in order to return to where he started.

Right before Peer’s ship hits an ice floe and sinks, he meets a Strange Passenger, who no one else sees. According to the crew, Peer is the only passenger. The Strange Passenger relishes the idea of death and corpses washing up on the beaches, and he asks Peer to give him his body after he dies. When the ship is sinking, Peer tries to identify the Strange Passenger. First, he believes he is the Devil, then an angel. The Strange Passenger talks about the “exhilaration terror brings” (168), suggesting perhaps that Peer is seeking danger rather than a comfortable life.

As a child, Peer used a casting ladle to melt tin into buttons. He would pretend that those buttons were silver coins. The Button Molder finds old Peer on the road and tells him that his life is coming to an end. Since Peer was neither particularly good nor particularly evil, he cannot go to heaven or hell. Instead, the Button Molder proposes to melt him down so that he can be reformed. For Peer, who has spent his life believing that he was being true to himself, this dissolution of self is more frightening than death. He allows Peer to attempt to prove that he was a unique being and true to himself, or even a sinner who deserves to go to hell. In the end, Peer hides himself in Solveig’s love, but the Button Molder promises that he will return.