A few months after completing Den Bergtekne, Grieg set off on his travels once more. He had applied for another travelling scholarship in April 1877, which was at first turned down but granted one year later. The journeying began in October 1878, when he went to Cologne for a performance of his String Quartet, followed by other concerts in Germany. The winter was spent in Leipzig where for the first time he met Brahms, with whom he got on well. In the spring of 1879 Grieg gave two concerts during a number of weeks spent in Copenhagen and by the end of May he was back, by himself, in Hardanger. Here for the first time, as he wrote to Beyer, he felt lonely after all the social activity of the previous months. He gave two recitals in Bergen in the October of that year and then returned to Leipzig as the soloist in a performance of his Piano Concerto. In February 1880 he went back to Copenhagen for more concerts and, after four recitals in Christiania, the journeying ended in mid-April. He then went back to Bergen, where on 28 April he made a setting of a poem by Vinje, Tytebæret (The Wild Cranberry).

Den Bergtekne had been Grieg's first major exploration amongst the nonstandard forms of Norwegian, and in setting the poetry of Vinje and later Garborg, which used the literary form of country dialect, landsmål, he was to achieve great musical heights. Those who live in a country which has many dialects and accents but only one official language may find it difficult to appreciate the amount of strong feeling engendered by the language struggle, the målstrid, which took place in Norway in the mid-nineteenth century. The standard written language used at that time was almost purely Danish, although the pronunciation was not the same as that used in Denmark. Some writers, including Ibsen and Bjornson, wanted to ‘Norwegianize’ this existing language by making the written form correspond to the spoken sounds. Knud Knudsen (1812–95), a headmaster, furthering the work begun by Henrik Wergeland towards this end, also suggested Norwegian equivalents for many foreign words.