Markens grøde Reading Order

Markens grøde (Growth of the Soil, 1917) by Knut Hamsun is the Norwegian novel that won Hamsun the Nobel Prize in 1920 and remains his most widely read work — a celebration of man's relationship to the land, to toil, and to the elemental forces of nature that Hamsun saw as the only authentic ground of human existence. Isak, a massive, slow-moving man, walks into an uninhabited valley in northern Norway and begins to clear land with his hands. He builds a turf hut, plows and sows, acquires animals, and eventually sends for a wife — Inger, a woman with a harelip who has been unable to find a husband elsewhere. From these two unprepossessing beginnings, over the course of decades, a farm called Sellanraa grows: fields, barns, children, neighbors, a small community. Hamsun's novel is polemical as well as pastoral: Markens grøde was written as a deliberate rebuke to modern urban civilization, to the restlessness and rootlessness that Hamsun saw destroying the Norwegian peasant culture he had grown up in. The novel's secondary characters — Inger, who goes to prison and returns with urban notions; the miner Brede who abandons his farm; the copper-mine operators who come and go — all represent the corrupting forces of modernity against which Isak and his son Sivert's patient cultivation stands as an alternative. The novel's celebration of peasant life as the only authentic existence is inseparable from Hamsun's political reactionism, which eventually led him to support the German occupation of Norway in 1940.