As a young person growing up in Norway, my dream was to emigrate and become a homesteader somewhere in the North American wilderness. The problem was that I was born 100 years too late. An alternative escape was to read books and continue dreaming.
One of the books I read was Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil – Markens Grøde – the novel that earned him the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature. In the novel, we meet Isak, who creates his homestead kingdom somewhere in the Norwegian mountains.
When nearly one million Norwegians emigrated in the 1800s and early 1900s – primarily to North America – their ancestors had already been homesteading across the Norwegian landscape for thousands of years.
Recently, I reread Hamsun’s momentous novel, this time in English, translated by Sverre Lyngstad, who has translated several of Knut Hamsun’s books into English. The book had lost none of its glow. It remains a vital part of the journey of my life.
LA Dahlmann
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