Ingeborg Refling Hagen - Writing Career and Activism

Writing Career and Activism

She published her first books in the 1920s, and was soon regarded as a great talent. Her novels at the early stage were dark and expressionistic, based on her native environment, Hedmark. She was the first to make use of the local dialects from this part of Norway, thus inspiring Alf Prøysen.

She made a lyrical breakthrough in 1933, with a book of Immigrant poems, describing the immigrant's longing for home. This book became her greatest success.

During this time, Hagen supported the republicans in the Spanish civil war, and began to warn against the rise of fascism, along with authors like Nordahl Grieg and Arnulf Øverland. Earlier on, she had made a journey to Italy, and experienced a fascist rally, and a public speech given by Benito Mussolini. When she later used this experience in a novel, she was accused of exaggerations, as the Norwegian right-wing press at the time did not understand the actual danger.

Her political attitude led to active resistance during World War II, and she was arrested for opposing the Nazi regime late in 1942. She managed to get out of imprisonment by playing mad, and was released in 1944, living in isolation for the rest of the war - none other than her most trusted friends and family knew at the time that she in fact was quite sane. When the Germans turned their backs towards her, she revealed that her sick-bed was stuffed with books, and she taught her nurses while they tended her. After some months, the nurses showed remarkable insight in classical literature, and they became her devoted friends for the rest of her life.

In 1946 Hagen took part in the conference held by Eleanor Roosevelt, "The world we live in, the world we want", assembling women from all over the world, many of whom had participated in the war resistance.

From 1945 and on, Hagen gradually built her own "post-war resistance", trying to find a way to hinder fascism from rising again in Norway. This had begun while she was at hospital, and became the root of her cultural work for children, called "Suttung", rather a pedagogical principle than a movement. She gradually gathered teenagers and students around her, and read with them, and those that she taught, passed the knowledge on. They read the classics, poets like Henrik Wergeland, Ibsen, Hans E. Kinck, Dante, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Dostoyevsky and others. Further on, she studied William Shakespeare, the Greek playwrights and Homer, and folk-tales from all over the world.

The movement grew, and established in time a theatre for presentations of plays written by Henrik Wergeland and Hans E. Kinck among others. The theatre proved that Wergeland was in fact playable, and even an exciting and profound playwright.

Hagen tried to give Norwegians a better understanding of Henrik Wergeland, and therefore she established her known "flower feast" on his birthday - a celebration that is still held alive. The value of her work has been important to a number of Norwegian cultural personalities, and even for the younger members of the royal family.

Ingeborg Refling Hagen continued to write poems until she was almost 90 years, and her dark and dramatic side mellowed into a mild summer evening in her late production. She died in her bed in 1989, in fact in the very chamber in which she was born.