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Goethe and Ibsen's Button-Moulder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

A. E. Zucker
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Extract

Henrik Ibsen in his Peer Gynt has created a minor figure of absorbing interest—the Button-moulder—who enbodies the poet's ideas regarding immortality. He appears grim and macabre as, with his huge ladle, he comes to fetch Peer's soul, yet there is a sort of Mephistophelian humor in his tone:

      The Button-moulder
      Your grave is dug ready, your coffin bespoke.
      The worms in your body will live at their ease;
      But I have orders, without delay,
      On Master's behalf to fetch in your soul!
      Peer
      It can't be! Like this, without any warning—!
      The Button-moulder
      It's an old tradition at burials and births
      To appoint in secret the day of the feast,
      With no warning at all to the guest of honor.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 57 , Issue 4-Part1 , December 1942 , pp. 1101 - 1107
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1942

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References

Note 1 in page 1101 P. 235. Page references to Peer Gynt are to Archer's translation (New York, 1908).

Note 2 in page 1101 P. G. La Chesnais, Henrik Ibsen, Œuvres Complètes (Paris, no date—appeared 1938), viii, 64.

Note 3 in page 1101 Halvdan Koht, The Life of Ibsen (New York, 1931), ii, 31.

Note 4 in page 1102 Henrik Ibsen paa Ischia (Copenhagen, 1908), p. 212.

Note 5 in page 1102 A Commentary on Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (The Hague, 1917), pp. 313 ff. and much more explicitly, in an article, “The Caprices in Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt,” Edda, vii (1917), 258–285 (page citations refer to this article).

Note 6 in page 1103 The History of the Scandinavian Literatures, Various authors (New York, 1938), pp. 39 f.

Note 7 in page 1103 The Life of Ibsen (New York, 1931), ii, 36 f.

Note 8 in page 1104 Erinnerungen an Henrik Ibsen (Berlin: Fischer, 1907), pp. 66 and 73. See also A. Le Roy Andrews in JEGP, xiii, 238–246.

Note 9 in page 1104 Op. cit., ii. 83.

Note 10 in page 1104 Letters of Henrik Ibsen, Translated by John N. Lourvik and Mary Morison (New York, 1905), p. 208.

Note 11 in page 1105 Bergsoe, op. cit., p. 163.

Note 12 in page 1106 Faust, The Second Part (Boston, 1871), p. 431 (Note No. 126).

Note 13 in page 1107 Goethe's Stellung, zu Tod und Unsterblichkeit, Goethe Gesellschaft (Weimar, 1932), pp. 283 ff.

Note 14 in page 1107 Ibid., p. 285. Koch here refers the reader to Goethe's Werke i, 48, 109 f., Ueber die Verherrlichung der Helena.