THE CROP OF THE FIELD

"The long, long path over the marshes and into the forests, who has drawn it up? Man, the human being, the first to be here. There was no path before him. Then an animal or two followed the faint tracks over the moors and marshes and made them clearer, and then again an occasional skunk began to sniff out the path and walk it when he went from mountain to mountain and looked for his reindeer. Thus the path was made through the great common that no one owned, the untamed land."

1917

The Harvest of the Field (1917) is Hamsun's great agricultural epic. The novel tells the story of how the farm Sellanraa develops from a simple farmstead into a working farm.

Isak is the main character of the work, and the depiction of the wordless man's experience of work, love and old age is done with empathy and pathos. At Isak's side stands Inger, with whom he has two sons. The third child, a daughter, has a hare's tail like Inger herself, and she kills it at birth. When Inger returns to Sellanraa after her imprisonment in the city, the conflict between city and country becomes clear.

With its criticism of society and civilization, particularly directed at industrialization, urbanization, and the flattening of values, the novel struck a nerve in post-war Europe. Hamsun received the Nobel Prize in 1920 for The Harvest of the Field .