Growth of the Soil (Markens Grøde)

Author: Knut Hamsun | Published: 1917 | Language: Norwegian (translated)

Summary

Growth of the Soil is the novel for which Knut Hamsun received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. It follows Isak, a solitary Norwegian settler who chooses an isolated patch of wilderness in the Norwegian interior, clears it, builds a farm, and gradually creates a homestead of increasing prosperity and self-sufficiency. His wife Inger arrives; children are born; Isak’s farm becomes Sellanraa—a working, growing organism of fields, livestock, and buildings. Against the story of Isak’s patient, competent labor, Hamsun sets the corrupting influence of modernity: a mining settlement nearby brings money, transience, and the discontents of industrial capitalism; Isak and Inger’s children are tempted by the city; a local merchant’s fortunes rise and fall with commerce’s volatility. Isak remains, works, and endures.

The novel is simultaneously a love poem to agricultural life and a deeply ideological text: Hamsun was explicitly arguing against industrialization, urbanization, and the rootlessness of modern life, and for a return to the land as the foundation of genuine human existence. The prose is unhurried, epic in its patience, biblical in its cadences—the opening paragraph, describing Isak walking through the wilderness, has the quality of creation myth: “The long, long road over the moors and up into the forest—who trod it into being first of all? Man, a human being, the first that came here.” The novel treats farming not as economic activity but as the deepest form of engagement between human beings and the earth.

Hamsun’s celebration of rootedness and contempt for modern urban rootlessness makes the novel philosophically rich and historically troubling: Hamsun was a collaborator with the Nazi occupation of Norway during WWII, welcomed Hitler’s invasion, and wrote in defense of German occupation. His Nobel Prize was subsequently treated as an embarrassment by the Norwegian cultural establishment, and reading Growth of the Soil in the context of his later politics reveals how the novel’s anti-modernism, anti-urbanism, and celebration of the peasant as the foundation of national character connects to the ideological genealogy of fascist agrarianism. This does not simplify the novel; it complicates it, and it requires a difficult kind of reading.

Critical Takeaways

  • Nobel Prize and agrarian ideology: Hamsun received the Nobel Prize specifically for Growth of the Soil; the Nobel Committee’s citation praised its “monumental work about the life of Norwegian peasants.” The agrarian ideology that made the novel attractive to the committee also made it attractive to Nazi ideologues.
  • Hamsun and Nazism: The relationship between Hamsun’s literary values—anti-modernism, anti-urbanism, celebration of peasant life and national rootedness—and his political trajectory toward Nazi collaboration is one of the most disturbing case studies in the ideological freight of literary aesthetics.
  • Prose style: The novel’s prose is among the most distinctive in European literature—slow, deliberate, oral in quality, full of the rhythms of seasonal work. Its influence on subsequent Nordic literature was significant.
  • The pastoral tradition: Growth of the Soil belongs to the European pastoral tradition but radicalized it: where conventional pastoral idealizes rural life from an urban vantage point, Hamsun writes from inside rural life with ideological conviction.
  • Reading under the shadow: The question of whether and how Hamsun’s politics should affect the reading of his fiction is one of the defining cases in the debate about the relationship between an author’s life and their work.

My Takeaways

  1. The novel’s celebration of patient, competent, generative labor—Isak clearing land, building, growing, creating—is genuinely moving and philosophically important. The value of making something durable from nothing, year by year, is real.
  2. The ideological shadow over the novel requires active reading: the same qualities that make Isak heroic in Hamsun’s vision—rootedness, simplicity, contempt for modernity—connect directly to the agrarian nationalism that underpinned European fascism.
  3. The tension between finding the novel beautiful and finding its ideological genealogy repellent is a genuinely difficult aesthetic and ethical problem that I have not resolved. Both things are true simultaneously.
  4. The prose style—slow, epic, patient as the labor it describes—is formally suited to its content in a way that few novels achieve. The style is the argument: you cannot rush this novel any more than you can rush a harvest.

Footnotes