Peer Gynt Peer Gynt Peer Gynt (; ) is a five-act play in verse by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen published in 1867. Written in Danish—the common written language of Denmark and Norway in Ibsen's lifetime—it is one of the most widely performed Norwegian plays. Ibsen believed "Per Gynt", the Norwegian fairy tale on which the play is loosely based, to be rooted in fact, and several of the characters are modelled after Ibsen's own family, notably his parents Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg. He was also generally inspired by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen's collection of Norwegian fairy tales, published in 1845 ("Huldre-Eventyr
Peer Gynt Gynt represents the superior Germanic hero, struggling against implicitly Jewish "trolls". Ralph M. Engelman says, "Eckart meant his adaptation of Peer Gynt to represent a racial allegory in which the trolls and Great Boyg represented what [Otto] Weininger conceived to be the Jewish spirit." Eckart's version was one of the best attended productions of the age with more than 600 performances in Berlin alone. Eckart later helped to found the Nazi party. In 1938 German composer Werner Egk finished an opera based on the story. In 1948, the composer Harald Sæverud made a new score for the nynorsk-production at "the