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By Root 5311 0

Solveig enters with her family, and Peer is at once smitten: `How lovely! I've never seen anyone like her, with her eyes on the ground ... and the way she ... carried her prayer book wrapped in a kerchief'. But the incorrigible Peer still cannot resist trying to take the protesting bride off onto the mountainside and here, while she escapes from him, he meets a beautiful and mysterious Woman in Green. She takes him off into the subterranean palace of her father, `the Hall of the Mountain King'. Peer has in fact descended into the kingdom of the trolls, where he is told that `among us ... black looks like white and ugly like fair' (an echo of the magician's mirror in The Snow Queen, or the `dark sisters' in Macbeth -`fair is foul and foul is fair'). The Troll King and his court try to turn Peer into a troll. One old courtier tells him `Outside among men, where the skies are bright, there's a saying "Man, to thyself be true"But here among the trolls the saying runs "Troll, to thyself be - enough'' This is to be the theme of the whole story.

Taking the view that `one should fit in with the local ways, Peer agrees to undergo various rites which will turn him into a troll, but he finally baulks at an operation which will remove his clear sight forever. The younger trolls set on him, rather like the moment in Alice in Wonderland when Alice is set on by the playing cards, and he is only saved in the nick of time by the sound of distant church bells which scatter the trolls in disorder. Peer suddenly finds himself alone on the mountainside, and there follows a curious scene in which Peer has an exchange in the darkness with a mysterious voice. `Who are you?' asks Peer. `Myself' answers the voice, `can you say as much?' It is the shapeless Great Boyg, which tells Peer he has a long journey to go, and that he will have to `go round about. Peer returns to the world of men.

We next see him having built a hut in the forest and persuaded the lovely Solveig to abandon everything to come to live with him. All seems well: Peer says `My royal princess! I have found her and won her'. But then an aged troll woman enters, the Woman in Green grown old, leading Peer's son, and she tells him that he will not he left alone to enjoy his love with Solveig. `When you sit with that woman by the fire, when you're loving and want to embrace, I shall sit beside you and ask for my share.' When Peer angrily shouts at her `you nightmare from hell', she replies that he has only been trapped by his own `thoughts and desires'. He realises that his royal palace has crashed to the ground. A wall has grown up round Solveig, his `purest treasure, and there is now no way which passes straight to her. As the Boyg foretold, he will have to `go round about'. If only he could truly repent, everything might be all right, but there is no one in `this savage forest' to teach him how. He will have to leave Solveig. She promises that, however long it takes, she will wait for him. He goes off down the forest path, leaving her at the door of the hut, and, after the death of his mother, sets off `for the sea coast'.

When we next see Peer it is many years later. He has become middle-aged and enormously rich. He is sitting with four guests in Morocco and, in the expansively self-indulgent manner of a millionaire, asks them `What ought a man to be? Well, my short answer is Himself... a thing he cannot be when burdened with other people's woes'. He elaborates that the `self' is a mass of `fancies, cravings and desires, in short `what stirs inside my breast and makes me live my life as Me. We learn that Gynt has made his millions in a fairly disreputable fashion, trading in slaves, arms, Bibles, anything that would make a profit, and has become totally self-righteous (indeed shortly afterwards, after his guests have disagreed with him, he is delighted to see their yacht sunk, by a thunderbolt). But he is still inwardly troubled by what it really means to `be one's self'. In the desert he observes some lizards: `they bask in the sun and scuttle about with no worries at all. How