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Remembering schoolteacher Eilert Wulff | Norway AD 1904

Norwegians

According to his obituary, published in the newspaper Nordkap on 28 October, Eilert Andreas Wulff was born in Kvæfjord, Troms, Norway, in 1874.

After completing his studies at Tromsø Lærerskole, a teacher’s college, in 1895, he was employed as a teacher at Skjervøy, where he stayed for two years.

During the following year, he completed further studies in the city of Trondheim, in preparation for a middle school exam (middelskolens avgangseksamen), which he completed in 1898.

On 15 August 1898, he was employed as a teacher at the Hammerfest Middelskole, a middle school, with added responsibilities also at the city’s primary school (folkeskolen), teaching gymnastics and carpentry.

Wulff was considered a friendly and first-class teacher, with the rare ability to ensure discipline in the classroom.

Eilert Wulff made many friends, and they shared in his family’s grief; he left us far too soon.

The funeral took place from the family home at noon on Saturday 29 October 1904.

Source: Nordkap 1904.10.28 page 2. Nasjonalbiblioteket nb.no | EGP.00022

Growth of the soil | Homesteading in the Norwegian mountains

Growth of the soil | Homesteading in the Norwegian mountains

,

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.

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