We are working to upload thousands of newly digitized materials to the digital collections. We appreciate your patience during this process! Please contact the NAHA archivist if you have any questions.
In Norwegian, Længselens Baat (1921). This novel is the only one of Rølvaag’s novels in which a substantial portion of the action takes place in Norway. The Boat of Longing tells the story of a young immigrant’s life in Norway and in Minneapolis. The sections that take place in Norway are mystical and romantic, the sections that take place in urban America are harshly realistic. The novel emphasizes the relationship between art and cultural inheritance and points out that art does not easily thrive among the rootless and insecure. It is an indictment of an America that rejects and ignores the value and the very soul of the immigrant. It’s not strange that the story in this novel seems unfinished, for Rølvaag himself labeled it “Book One.” Unfortunately, he was never able to continue the story with a Book Two.
I De Dage--: Fortælling om Norske Nykommere i Amerika, 1924 (In those days—A story about Norwegian immigrants in America) I De Dage--: Riket Grundlægges, 1925 (In those days—Founding the kingdom)
These two volumes were translated as Giants in The Earth: A Saga of the Prairie (1927). Gants in the Earth follows a Norwegian pioneer family's struggles with the land and the elements of the Dakota Territory as they try to make a new life in America. The book is based partly on Rølvaag's personal experiences as an immigrant, and on the experiences of his wife’s family who had been immigrant homesteaders. The novel depicts snow storms, locusts, poverty, hunger, loneliness, homesickness, the difficulty of fitting into a new culture, and the estrangement of immigrant children who grow up in a new land.
The Eyes That Did Not See is chapter three. Peder Victorious, the sequel to Rølvaag's massiveGiants in the Earth, continues the saga of the Norwegian settlers in the Dakotas. Here again, years later, are all the sturdy pioneers of the earlier novel, Rølvaag's "vikings of the prairie"—Per Hansa's Beret and their children, Syvert Tönseten and Kjersti, and Sörine. The great struggle against the land itself has been won. Now there is to be a second struggle, a struggle to adapt, to become Americans.
The development of the Spring Creek settlement in these years is manifested in the rebellious growing up of Peder Victorious. Peder is a beautiful and moving novel of youth and youth's self-discovery. It is the story, too, of Beret's pain and dismay at the Americanization of her children, what Rølvaag described as the true tragedy of the immigrants, who made their children part of a world to which they themselves could never belong.
Out of the inevitable conflict between the first-generation American and his still Norwegian mother, Rølvaag built a powerful novel of personal growth, guilt, and victory.