Giants in the Earth

Sarah and I are presently reading "Giants in the Earth" by O. E. Rolvaag. We started this book just a few days before we ended school for the year. I am about three-fourths of the way through, and Sarah is about one-third of the way through. So far, I think that I am enjoying the book more than she is. :) The prose of this book is sparse - similar to the lives of these Norwegian immigrants who are making a new life in the Dakota Territory. The two main characters are Per Hansa and his wife Beret, together with their children Ola, Store-Hans, and And-Ongen, and a baby on-the-way. The life of a pioneer energizes and invigorates Per Hansa, but to Beret the endless prairie is lonely, terrifying, unexplainable. There is a gradual sense of foreboding building as the book unfolds. I feel as though it will not have a happy ending. There are two more books that make up this trilogy ( all written originally in Norwegian). Although not autobiographical, O. E. Rolvaag did experience some of the same things as his characters. He was born in a fishing village in Norway, only five miles from the Arctic Circle. One of seven children, his father did not have great hopes for him; he had an older brother and sister considered much more intelligent and gifted. When he was a boy, his mother once asked him what he would like to be when he grew up. He answered "a poet". That must have seemed a strange answer for the poor son of a fisherman! As a boy and then teenager, he became a voracious reader, even reading aloud to the other fishermen in the village. Amazingly, his small village had a good library provided by the government ! An uncle in America eventually purchased a ticket for him to travel there, which he did at the age of 20. He worked as a farm hand and at several other jobs, but he felt that none of these things were the life for him. He then decided to go back to school in South Dakota, and received a high school diploma. He was accepted into St. Olaf College in Minnesota, and graduated from there with honors. After further education in Oslo, Norway, he became a professor at St. Olaf, and eventually the head of the Norwegian department. The library at St. Olaf is named after him! "Giants in the Earth" is only one of many other books that he wrote, though it is probably his most famous work. The title of the book comes from Genesis 6:4, and his dedication reads "To those of my people who took part in the great settling, to them and their generations I dedicate this narrative". We are those people!