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The Boyg. Playwright Henrik Ibsen is to the Norse what Playwright William Shakespeare is to the British. In his play Peer Gynt, Ibsen's hero, a rustic, wastrel Hamlet, tussles furiously but unsuccessfully with an unseen presence called the Boyg, which may be construed as Peer Gynt's conscience, his better self. The Boyg is also construed as a dominant power in the Norse soul, an ingrained instinct for decency and conservatism against which immorality or forces for change cannot prevail. On many lips last week as the Falkenhorst talons closed on lower Norway was the question whether a combination of dismay at the Allies' ineptitude, plus the Gestapo, which promptly moved in led by Gauleiter Terboven (TIME, May 6), plus the treachery of quislings, would eventually result in destruction of the Boyg, extermination of the Norse as a people with a soul of their own, their subjugation as helots of the German people.
Not many hours before the Nazi flag rose over Åndalsnes, Norway's King Haakon fled aboard a British man-of-war out of Molde, the port at the sea end of Romsdal Fjord. Some reports said he would go to Great Britain, as did his Foreign Minister Halvdan Koht, while calling back over his shoulder to his countrymen to resist to the last. But Norse loyalists insisted that their King would take his stand and maintain his Government in one of the three northern provinces yet left to him: Nordland, Troms, Finnmark. Upon his attitude and whereabouts, or those of his son, Crown Prince Olav, depended the immediate fate of Norway's Boyg and the completeness of the Falkenhorst conquest.
*The Norse were singularly unable or reluctant to dynamite major communication lines as they retreated. Not one of 178 tunnels on the railroad between Bergen and Oslo was closed. In one place the Germans actually fought their way through a tunnel three miles long.