Bjornson, Bjornstjerne, byern'son, byern'sherne (1832-), a Norwegian poet, dramatist, and novelist. He was born at Kvikne. He was educated at the University of Christiania and became a writer for periodicals. He has written powerful dramas and novels, but his stories of Norwegian peasant life, Arne, A Happy Boy, The Fisher Maiden, and Synnove Solbakken, are known and loved more widely than any of his other works. In his later writings he has shown himself "an advocate of extreme republicanism in politics and free thought in religion." Bankruptcy, The King, The Glove, Beyond his Strength, and The Editor may be mentioned among Bjornson's dramas. The Heritage of the Kurts and In God's Way are later novels. He is the greatest distinctively Norwegian writer of his day and his popularity among his countrymen is very great.--Americana. Bjornson shares with Ibsen the literary supremacy of Norway. The former is its hero and prophet as the latter is its judge.--Burton, Literary Likings. With his death will pass away the last of that immortal trio, Ibsen, Grieg, and Bjornson, who shed the luster of their genius on little Norway. With Bjornson will come to an end the remarkable golden age of Norwegian culture. Not that Norwegian culture is dead. By no means. But its vikings, the men who sallied forth on the seas of cultural adventure, when the national consciousness was beginning to wake after its long sleep, are gone. Bjornson is the last of the giants, and in some ways the greatest. To Norway, at any rate, he was the greatest, for he more than any other, was the personification of the nation, of its character, its aspirations, its ideals. Ibsen, the world knows better, because Ibsen, mighty Thor of Pessimism, hammered away at mankind in the mass, at human nature in its weakness, at the hopelessness of life because of that weakness. His hammer-strokes resounded around the globe. They appalled and fascinated the world. Bjornson was Ibsen's complete antithesis. He was ever the optimist, the hopeful, inspiring, fighting optimist. His gonfalon ever waved in the forefront of battle, but it was always Norway's battles and not the world's disputes that interested him most. He was first and foremost a patriot. After that he was a poet, a teller of folk tales, a writer of home plays, a red republican, a reformer. He wrote the inspiring song poem, "Yes, We Love This Land," which bursts from Norwegian throats on every national occasion. Impulsive, generous, candid and obstinate, he was the Boy of Norway who never grew up. Up to that very dark day when disease laid him low, he was full of the joy of life, of the juvenile spirit of enjoyment. Around his peasant's house on the hillside at Aulestad floated the flags of all nations. It was a veritable shrine in these latter days to which journeyed many visitors to Norway. They found it more than a shrine--a patriarchal family, with the silver-haired, frank, impulsive Bear-Star, Son of Bear, at its head, and his motherly, faithful old wife at his side.--Minneapolis Journal.