Growth of the Soil

Markens Grøde · Growth of the Soil · published 1917 · ISBN 9780143105107

Knut Hamsun — Knut Hamsun (1859 – 1952) — Norway, writing in Norwegian. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920.

“for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil” — The Nobel Committee citation

About Knut Hamsun

Norwegian novelist whose intense attention to irrational impulses and unstable inner life helped reshape modern prose. His literary influence is immense, though his political legacy remains deeply controversial because of his support for Nazi Germany late in life.

How it came to be

Hamsun wrote Markens Grøde in 1917, while Europe was tearing itself apart in the First World War. Three years later the Swedish Academy named this very book when it gave him the 1920 Nobel Prize — one of the rare citations to single out a title. W. J. Alexander Worster’s English translation carried it to the wider world in 1920. Hamsun’s later open support for Nazi Germany has cast a long shadow over the agrarian ideal the novel celebrates, and how far the two can be separated is still argued over.

Summary of Growth of the Soil

Isak, a taciturn man from nowhere in particular, walks north into the empty moorland of Norway, picks a patch of ground and begins to clear it. Inger — a woman with a harelip, and therefore hard to marry off — finds her way to him and stays. Out of those four hands rises the farm of Sellanraa: a roof, a first cow, a first harvest, children. Then the world Isak walked away from catches up with him: the law, a prison sentence, money, and a copper mine that turns the wilderness into a worksite.

Analysis & legacy

The sharpest way to read this book is beside Hunger, by the same author twenty-seven years earlier. Hunger is urban consciousness running a fever, its sentences jerking with every passing thought; Growth of the Soil is flat, slow, almost without interiority — Isak barely speaks, and Hamsun records labour rather than feeling: shifting a boulder, roofing a hut, buying the first cow. That patience is the source of the book’s weight, a near-biblical epic of a man holding on to land. But it is no simple hymn to rural life. The passage in which Inger kills her newborn daughter, born with the same harelip as her own, is then imprisoned in Trondheim and returns a different woman for having seen the city, is among the coldest things Hamsun ever wrote. Money and the mine arrive as corrosion: a quick prosperity, then wreckage left behind, and Isak’s two sons split — Eleseus goes to town and is spoiled by it, Sivert stays with the soil. The line between honouring labour and worshipping the soil is thin enough here that the author’s later politics cannot quite be kept out of the reading.

Themes: Soil and labour · Homesteading · Modernisation · Motherhood · Money and the mine

Rating: 4.4/5 from 10 ratings (Open Library).

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Frequently asked questions

What is Growth of the Soil about?

Isak, a taciturn man from nowhere in particular, walks north into the empty moorland of Norway, picks a patch of ground and begins to clear it. Inger — a woman with a harelip, and therefore hard to marry off — finds her way to him and stays. Out of those four hands rises the farm of Sellanraa: a…

Is Growth of the Soil worth reading?

On booknest, Growth of the Soil is rated 4.4/5 from 10 ratings on Open Library. The sharpest way to read this book is beside Hunger, by the same author twenty-seven years earlier. Hunger is urban consciousness running a fever, its sentences jerking with every passing thought; Growth of the Soil is…

When did Knut Hamsun win the Nobel Prize, and why?

Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920: “for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil”

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