Ingeborg Refling Hagen

Her writings and activities in support of the arts made her a significant cultural figure in Norway during much of the 20th century.

During the 1930s Hagen began to warn against the rise of fascism, along with other authors including Nordahl Grieg and Arnulf Øverland.

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 fully understand the actual danger.

[6] After the liberation of Norway in 1945, Hagen gradually built her own resistance trying to find a way to hinder fascism from rising again.

They read the classics, poets like Henrik Wergeland, Ibsen, Hans E. Kinck, Dante, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Dostoyevsky and others.

Suttungteatret was primarily aimed at drama that was neglected by institutional theaters and presented plays written by Norwegian authors including Henrik Wergeland and Hans E. Kinck among others.

In her autobiographical works she also describes her visions in many places, often prompted by hard pondering on philosophical problems occurring in literature.

She developed a clear feminist statement based on an interpretation of the Bible, especially Mother Mary and Eve, whom she often compared as female archetypes.

Much of her thinking in this respect derived from the fact that she herself had experienced what a defenseless child could suffer under the hands of a farmer's wife.

The vision of collecting all myths and stories in one universal system of thoughts was in a way her lifelong project, as she put it: "making an archive for those that are to follow, so that they can work further".

Hagen's philosophical outlook can most easily be spotted in her 1972 poem Guds Tuntre (The Courtyard Tree of God).

Here, she describes the Norse World Tree Yggdrasil as planted by God, and takes comfort in the mythic explanation when she gets "dizzy from hurrying thoughts".

Her youngest sister, Ragna Charlotte Joselin Hagen (1902–1960), and her husband, composer Eivind Groven (1901–77), were buried nearby.