The Best Icelandic Poet in Seven Hundred Years Farmed in Alberta

In 1927 Harper & Brothers published an American novel about Norwegian settlers in Dakota Territory. It sold, it was praised, it was set in American high schools for the next forty years, and it is still the only book of its kind most people can name.

Printed in the front of that first edition, before the reader reaches page one, is a question its introducer could not answer:

Does Rölvaag's work belong legitimately to Norwegian or to American literature? … Yet it was written in Norwegian, and gained its first recognition in Norway. Whatever we may decide, it has already become a part of Norwegian literature.

Lincoln Colcord wrote that in 1927. Ninety-nine years later nobody has answered him, and in the meantime an entire literature has quietly fallen down the gap he identified.

The book that got across, and how

Ole Edvart Rølvaag wrote the first volume of Giants in the Earth in September and October 1923. It was published in Oslo by Aschehoug as I de dage in 1924 and Riket grundlægges in 1925. The English edition of 1927 combined the two.

How it got into English is the part worth slowing down for. In his own acknowledgement Rølvaag credits Colcord as the man who “unified and literally rewrote the English text.” And Norwegian scholarship records, flatly, that Colcord var lite kyndig i norsk — he had little competence in Norwegian.

So the canonical English text of the great Norwegian-American novel is a rewrite, in English, by a man who could not read the original, produced at the author's elbow. Whatever that is, it is not a translation in the ordinary sense, and describing it as one obscures the only mechanism by which any of this literature ever reached an English-speaking reader.

The verdicts since have been symmetrical and unhelpful. Norwegian scholarship disclaims it: en amerikansk immigrantroman, ikke en norsk utvandrerroman — an American immigrant novel, not a Norwegian emigrant novel. The Norwegian national encyclopaedia files Rølvaag under a third heading, “norsk-amerikansk,” which is a polite way of saying neither department wants the paperwork. On the American side he has a chapter in the Cambridge History of American Literature, and Vernon Parrington introduced the 1929 edition.

Rølvaag made it across. He is also, essentially, the only one who did.

What was behind him

It is worth being concrete about the size of the readership that produced him, because the numbers are not small and they are not well known.

At its height, Norwegian America had over a million daily Norwegian speakers, more than three thousand congregations worshipping solely in Norwegian, and — in 1910 — around six hundred thousand households taking a Norwegian-language newspaper.

The Norwegian national encyclopaedia's assessment of what that produced is one sentence long and merciless: when mass emigration ended around the First World War, the Norwegian language in America was doomed to disappear; and of the whole body of Norwegian-American writing, only Rølvaag is still bought and read.

A novel called I Sit Alone

Waldemar Ager is the test case, and his story is almost too neat to print.

Ager edited a Norwegian-language weekly in Eau Claire, Wisconsin for thirty-eight years and wrote five novels in Norwegian. He was the movement's leading theorist of not assimilating — he argued, consistently and unfashionably, that Norwegian-Americans would be culturally poorer for giving up the language.

His last novel, Hundeøine (1929), was translated by Charles Wharton Stork and published by Harper & Brothers in 1931 under the title I Sit Alone.

In February 1933 Ager described it as “a complete failure so far as sales are concerned, and in spite of good reviews.” In November of the same year he was more precise, reporting what the publisher had told him: “they haven't sold a dozen copies in the past year.”

Fewer than twelve copies. In English — the language he had spent his career warning against — which was by then the only language in which anyone might have bought it.

The domestic evidence runs alongside. By 1926 Ager's own congregation had forty English Sunday-school classes against five in Norwegian. By 1929 it conducted no confirmations in Norwegian at all. His newspaper closed shortly after his death in 1941.

And there is one more detail, from the day he visited Rølvaag's study after his friend died in November 1931:

I had been in his upstairs study several times before, but this was the first time I had noticed he had my photograph, framed and under glass, on his wall. It was one of three photographs he had in the room. It was sad. Terribly sad.

Two men who between them constituted most of a national literature, with each other's pictures on the wall, and almost no one else.

The control case is in Alberta

Now the same experiment, run with a different language, and a completely different result.

Stephan G. Stephansson left Iceland in 1873, aged nineteen. Wisconsin, then North Dakota, then in 1889 a homestead near Markerville, Alberta, where he farmed until his death in 1927. He returned to Iceland exactly once, for four months in 1917, at the invitation of the Icelandic people. He wrote only in Icelandic. His collected poems, Andvökur — “Sleepless Nights” — were published in Winnipeg: volumes I–III in 1908–09, IV–V in 1923, VI posthumously in 1938.

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography records that in Iceland he “was regarded by many there as the best Icelandic poet to have emerged since the 13th century.”

Read that again with the geography attached. On one reasonable Icelandic account, the finest poet the language produced in seven hundred years spent his entire adult life on a farm in central Alberta, and Canada has essentially never noticed.

Iceland absorbed him completely. There is a reason, and it is not sentiment. Icelandic had a homeland small enough, literate enough and self-conscious enough to go and collect its people wherever they were. Norwegian-America's writers had a homeland too large to notice they were missing.

Icelandic North America has a closing date, too, and it is unusually precise. Lögberg-Heimskringla, the Winnipeg paper, carried its last Icelandic-language article in August 2000.

The Swede who did it the other way round

Before the pattern looks too much like fate, take the case that breaks it.

Vilhelm Moberg wrote the entire Emigrants tetralogy — the definitive literary account of Swedish emigration to America — in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, between 1949 and 1959. In Swedish. It has sold something like two million copies in Sweden, was voted the best Swedish book of the twentieth century in 1997 and the most important Swedish book of all time in 1998.

Same continent, same language problem, opposite outcome. The differences are worth naming because they are the whole mechanism: Moberg was a Swedish writer with a Swedish publisher and a Swedish readership who happened to be sitting in California, and he went home. Ager was an American writer with an American readership that was busy disappearing underneath him. The books are about the same migration. Only one of them had a country waiting for it.

Four thousand books

The Baltic half of this story is larger than most people expect and it ends differently.

Between 1944 and 2000, Estonian publishers, organisations and individuals in the West issued 4,040 book titles — 3,567 of them in Estonian. Literature accounted for 1,188 titles, the great majority by Estonian authors.

The publishing houses were real businesses. Orto was founded in Helsinki in 1944 by Andres Laur, moved to Vadstena in Sweden, then to Toronto, where it operated from 1951 until Laur's death in 1973, publishing 405 books in all. The Estonian Writers' Co-operative was founded in Lund in 1950 by August Gailit, Bernard Kangro, Valev Uibopuu and Enn Vallak, and lasted until 1994; it published Marie Under, Gustav Suits, Karl Ristikivi, August Mälk. Latvian exiles had Grāmatu Draugs in Brooklyn and the newspaper Laiks.

Anšlavs Eglītis fled Riga in October 1944 and settled in Los Angeles in 1950. From there he wrote more than fifty novels and short-story collections — in Latvian, published through Laiks in Brooklyn. Gunārs Saliņš came through a displaced persons camp to New Jersey and founded, with Linards Tauns, the Elles ķķis or “Hell's Kitchen” circle of Latvian poets in 1950s and 60s New York. Antanas Škėma wrote Balta drobulė (White Shroud), published in 1958, whose protagonist operates a lift in a New York hotel — the job Škėma himself held.

Here is what happened to them after 1991, and it is the sharpest contrast in this piece.

Eglītis was repatriated into Latvian culture: a National Theatre production of his work, a commemorative stamp in 2006, a monument in 2008. Saliņš was awarded the Order of the Three Stars in 2000 and a lifetime achievement award in 2006. Estonian émigré authors' papers — Under's, Suits's, Kangro's — were physically shipped back to the Estonian Literary Museum in Tartu from the 1990s onward. Škėma's novel was translated into English in 2018 by a Scottish press.

The mechanism is not mysterious. Baltic exile literature was written in the national language by people who understood themselves as holding the nation in temporary custody. When the nation came back in 1991 it needed those books — they were the un-Sovietised continuation of the canon, the fifty years the official literature had not been allowed to have.

Norway was never occupied out of its own literature. So it never had to go looking for the books it had left in Minnesota.

The scissors

Underneath all of this is a structural problem that has nothing to do with quality.

American literary studies is organised by language. Norwegian literary studies is organised by territory. A novel written in Norwegian in South Dakota fails both tests, and the two disciplines close on it like a pair of scissors.

Somebody did notice. Harvard's Longfellow Institute, founded by Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, was built precisely for the study of non-English American literatures. It produced The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (2000) and American Babel (2002), and a reprint series with Johns Hopkins — which in 2002 republished Drude Krog Janson's A Saloonkeeper's Daughter, a novel first published in Norwegian by a Minneapolis firm in 1887, edited by Orm Øverland and translated by Gerald Thorson. The press director's position was straightforward: this material “is American literature and should reach as wide an audience as possible.”

And then the detail that makes the whole essay.

When the project described the neglected heritage it was recovering, it listed the languages: Amerindian, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Welsh, Yiddish — and other languages.

No Nordic or Baltic language is named. The institution that had just republished a Norwegian-American novel did not list Norwegian when describing what it did. Even inside the rescue operation, this material is filed under “and other languages.”

Øverland's The Western Home, published in 1996, was described by its publisher as the first comprehensive history of any literature written and read in the United States in a language other than English. Nineteen ninety-six.

Who is actually paying

Ask who funds the recovery work and the pattern from the Baltic half repeats.

The National Library of Norway — not any American institution — maintains the 12,000-record Norwegian-American bibliography, has digitised around 1,400 Norwegian-American books and twenty-five newspaper titles from 1884 to 1992. The Árni Magnússon Institute funds the Icelandic emigrant work. Swedish foundations and the National Library of Sweden paid for the digitisation of 348 Swedish-American newspaper titles, over 1.3 million pages. The Norwegian-American Historical Association publishes the Ager translations out of Northfield, Minnesota, on a budget that would embarrass a mid-sized law firm.

The Longfellow Institute was the conspicuous American exception, and it wound down.

The objection, taken seriously

The honest counter-argument is that this literature is forgotten because it is not very good — sentimental, parochial, written by amateurs for a captive audience that had no alternatives.

It might be true. What is striking is that nobody appears to have said so on the record. I could not find a critic who has read the Norwegian-American corpus and delivered that verdict in print. Which is itself the point: to make the argument you would have to read several hundred novels in Norwegian, and the number of people who can and would is now very small.

The stronger objection is that “national literature” is simply the wrong container, and that this material should be read as regional, or religious, or as the literature of a migration rather than of a country. That is probably right. It is also not much comfort, because the money, the curricula, the reprint series and the university departments are all organised by nation, and a category that fits no institution does not get preserved by being conceptually superior.

Colcord asked his question in the front matter in 1927 and left it open. The uncomfortable answer, nearly a century on, is that the book belongs to whichever literature was willing to pay for a translator — and that Rølvaag's real advantage over everyone writing beside him was not talent. It was Colcord.

Quotations from Ager's letters and from Colcord's 1927 introduction were each confirmed against two independent sources. Several widely repeated claims about Giants in the Earth — that it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and that it won or was considered for a Pulitzer — could not be verified and are not made here; the 1951 Pulitzer went to Douglas Moore's opera of the same name, which is the likely source of the confusion.