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 Hegel, his publisher, with his plan for the play: it would be "a long dramatic poem, having as its principal a part-legendary, part-fictional character from Norwegian folklore during "recent" times. It will bear no resemblance to "Brand", and will contain no direct polemics or anything of that kind." He began to write "Peer Gynt" on 14 January, employing a far greater variety of metres in its rhymed verse than he had used in his previous verse plays "Brand" (written 1865) or "Love's Comedy" (written 1862). The first two acts were completed in Rome and the third in Casamicciola on the