NORDLAND

Which?	Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun (1917)
What?	Spectacular Norwegian wilderness where quiet heroes might prevail

A SIP of water from a purling stream. A handful of bilberries. A lichen-crusted log on which to briefly rest. The land provides. Steadily, invisibly, the ripe soil below nurtures the spruce and pine, the tiny ferns and cow mushrooms, the paint-splatter of wildflowers. A hare bounds across the grass, a grouse sputters from the heathers, the forest gently soughs, but otherwise all is quiet. This place is now. But it could be then. Or – with hope, with care – tomorrow. A timeless place of simplicity and awe …

The county of Nordland encompasses more than a third of Norway, but only around 5 per cent of its people. Even today, this feels like pioneer country. A landscape of coastal mountains, narrow fjords and pine, birch and aspen; a region of Sami people, old superstitions, northern lights and midnight sun. The world in which Knut Hamsun was shaped.

Hamsun was born in 1859 to peasant farmers in central Norway. But his childhood was spent in Hamarøy, north of the Arctic Circle, where he worked on his uncle’s farm. He didn’t go to school until he was nine years old. The land was his early education. And the land is the lead character in his masterpiece, Markens Grøde – Growth of the Soil.

This 1917 novel follows the quietly courageous endeavours of Isak, a strong, monosyllabic farmer-settler, and his wife Inger, a woman with a harelip and ‘good, heavy hands’. To begin, Isak sets out alone, seeking ‘a place, a patch of ground’. On his chosen plot he chops, hoes and sows, building a home with nought but sweat and brawn – an understated hero. With the passing of the seasons, he meets Inger, has children, lives a life of ‘little happenings and big, all in their turn’. There are some black moments – not least infanticide – but there is also an evocation of rural life in all its uncomplicated beauty.

Growth of the Soil was a hit. In 1920, Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, chiefly for this saga of strife and struggle. It encapsulated the life of pioneering Norwegian homesteaders at the beginning of the 20th century. Norway only gained full independence in 1905; Hamsun’s tale of a man claiming his place was nation-building fiction from an author with a love of agrarian society, homeland and blood-and-soil nature.

These beliefs had a darker consequence. They chimed closely with the ethos of Nazi Germany, and Hamsun became an outspoken supporter of Adolf Hitler and National Union Party leader Vidkun Quisling, who collaborated with the Nazis after they occupied Norway in 1940. Hamsun even gifted his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels. This has muddied the author’s legacy. Some scholars laud him as the best of a generation, even the ‘father of modern literature’, but, no matter how great the work, many cannot forgive his wartime stance.

Because of this, it wasn’t until 2009 – on the 150th anniversary of his birth – that one of Norway’s greatest novelists was commemorated in a significant way. The striking Knut Hamsun Centre, which draws architectural inspiration from the region’s stave churches, sod roofs and rugged mountains, sits in the village of Presteid in Hamarøy, on the banks of the Glimma River. It’s not without controversy. But it offers an exploration of both the writer’s words and world views. And the view from the tower, over the countryside that inspired the writer, is undeniably splendid.

Also, there’s nothing controversial about the soul of Norway’s Nordland – the land itself, the soil of Isak and Inger. Exploring its hills, fjords and forests lies outside politics. Indeed, it’s pleasingly democratic: the Norwegian law of allemannsrett (Everyman’s right) grants any individual permission to hike, camp and forage on another’s land, as long as they do so respectfully. So you can head into the wilderness and claim, for one night at least, a land of your own.