30 APRIL 1910, Page 3

Bjornstjerne Bjornson, the celebrated Norwegian poet and dramatist, died in

Paris on Tuesday in his seventy-eighth year. Starting life as a journalist and teacher, he poured out an astonishing flood of novels, tales, poems, and dramas for fifty years, occasionally abandoning his literary labours for political and personal propaganda. He was a man of volcanic energy, immense physical vigour, profuse talent, and turbulent disposition, who constituted himself a sort of Norwegian public orator, and was constantly at odds with the authorities. His personal quarrel with King Oscar II. died down after the King had presented him with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1903, and although professing Republican views, he welcomed King Haakon on the separation of Norway from Sweden.