Ellen Rees Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo [email protected]

Homing in on Henrik Ibsen: Norway’s Three Ibsen Museums

When considering Norway’s literary canon, Henrik Ibsen looms largest and he is the only Norwegian writer to have an undisputed place in the world literary canon as well. His plays are staged around the globe, often supported by Norwegian government financing as part of a program of soft diplomacy with the aim of exporting Norwegian social values to so-called developing nations. Ibsen is thus a crucially important cultural figure both nationally and internationally, and there has been a concerted effort in Norway to disseminate both the works and their author as cultural commodities. In this paper, I want to analyze what Norway’s three separate Ibsen museums communicate about Ibsen as a canonical literary figure. The Oslo apartment, the farmhouse outside of Skien, and the apothecary’s shop in Grimstad have at times competed and at times collaborated in their presentation of the author. Now officially linked under the rubric “Ibsenmuseene i Norge,” they occupy a pivotal position in the dissemination of literary culture in Norway, and the Nordic countries more broadly through collaboration with “author museums” in Sweden and Denmark. Each Ibsen museum is marketed explicitly as a “home,” and each engages in a discourse of authenticity regarding Ibsen as an historical figure. I will investigate what the notion of “home” signifies in these three quite different constructions of the author. The study of literary museums is for the most part marginalized in the field of Nordic literature, at the same time that the Nordic countries are leaders in the field of museology. I thus draw on British scholarship on literary and heritage tourism for methodology and theory, such as the work of Nicola J. Watson.