After Henrik Ibsen became a great man, a great artist, one of the most famous people in Europe, fans and scholars made their way to the places in Norway where he grew up to seek reminiscences. Michael Meyer, in his massive biography of Ibsen, records that one woman from Ibsen’s home town of Skien recalled seeing him, when he was a small boy, walking to school in the mornings, and what she remembered above all was that he often wore a red woolen cap. The snow on the banks of the path he walked would typically block the boy from sight, so that all she could see, from the window of her house, was the vivid color of the cap bouncing above the whiteness. Ibsen became the greatest dramatist of the nineteenth century, but to this woman he would always be, first and last, a small boy with a bright red cap on his head, walking to school through the snowy streets of a small Norwegian town.
