7 - “All the Past We Leave Behind”? Ole E. Rölvaag and the Immigrant Trilogy

Summary

One of the great and widely recognized works of modern American ethnic literature in a language apart from English was a trilogy originally written in Norwegian by O. E. Rölvaag. It consists of Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie (originally published as two separate novels I de dage, 1924, and Riket grundlœgges, 1925; Engl. both 1927), Peder Victorious: A Tale of the Pioneers Twenty Years Later (orig. Peder Seier, 1928, Engl. 1929), and Their Fathers’ God (orig. Den signede dag, 1931, Engl. 1931). Rölvaag’s work marked a high point of American literature, but also the beginning of the end of Norwegian-language writing in the United States, a rich body of works that includes not only Buslett and Dahl, but a long line of novelistic precursors. Singularly noteworthy among them is the beautifully melancholy (and social-reformist) novel En saloonkeepers datter (1887, Engl. A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter) by the Norwegian-born author Drude Krog Janson. The heroine of the novel’s title is the memorable character Astrid Holm, the daughter of a stern bourgeois businessman and a melancholy actress, who, after her mother’s death and the failure of her father’s business, follows him (with her much younger brothers) from Norway to Minnesota – where none of the Old World maxims seem to apply any more and where her new identity is simply that of A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter. The central part of the novel shows the heroine’s attempt to find her own way through different suitors, and, ultimately, as an ordained minister and close friend of a woman doctor.