GRIEG, (JOHAN) NORDAHL BRUN

born Nov. 1, 1902, Bergen, Nor. died Dec. 2, 1943, over Berlin lyric poet, dramatist, and novelist; a socially committed writer whose resistance to the Germans during the occupation of Norway and whose death in World War II made him a hero of postwar Norway. Grieg studied at King Frederick's University, Kristiania (now Oslo), and at Oxford and spent some time at sea. His first books were the sea poems Rundt Kap det Gode Haab (1922; Around the Cape of Good Hope, 1979), influenced by Kipling, and the novel Skibet gaar videre (1924; The Ship Sails On, 1927), which deals realistically with the sailor's life. In spite of his cosmopolitan outlook, he was strongly nationalistic, and his love for Norway was expressed in the poems Norge i vre hjerter (1929; Norway in Our Hearts). After publishing six highly personal essays on Keats, Shelley, Byron, Rupert Brooke, C.H. Sorley, and Wilfred Owen, De unge dde (1932; The Young Dead Ones), he spent two years in Moscow (193234), where he turned Communist. Russian theatre and especially the techniques of the cinema inspired his most powerful social play, Vr re og vr makt (1935; Our Power and Our Glory), denouncing profit-seeking owners of the Norwegian merchant fleet in World War I. Nederlaget (1937; The Defeat, 1944), a play dealing with the Paris Commune of 1870, was inspired by the Republican defeat in the Spanish Civil War. When Germany occupied Norway, Grieg escaped to Britain with the Norwegian government-in-exile and in his war poems (Eng. trans., 1944) and radio talks became the leading voice of free Norway. He also participated in the war actively and was killed in an Allied bombing raid over Berlin.