NINA FRANG HØYUM: HAMSUNS' LIFE AND AUTHORITY

The place you come from is always beautiful, it is the feeling of homeland in a small way, the feeling of home. (Knut Hamsun, 1918)

Knut Hamsun was born as Knud Pedersen in Gudbrandsdalen on August 4, 1859. Three years later, the family moved to Hamarøy in Nordland. Hamarøy became Hamsun's childhood home. Here he grew up, and here his sense of home took root – a sense of patriotism in a small way.

Hamsun left Nordland at the age of twenty, but returned to Hamarøy as an established writer and lived for a time on the farm Skogheim, with his wife Marie and their children, from 1911 to 1917. The landscape and environment of Nordland became the source of a long series of stories.

ONE OF THE FIRST EUROPEAN MODERNISTS

But Hamsun was a wanderer on earth. With his literary pursuit of the unconscious soul, of "Wanderings of Thought and Feeling in the Blue", he would rise as one of the first great modernists in European literary history.

Hunger
His literary breakthrough came in 1890, with Hunger – a book that many consider to be one of the most important books in Norwegian and European literary history.

Still on the move
Hamsun's literary characters are restlessly wandering in life – existentially, socially, geographically. The wanderer is a central motif in his writings and perhaps one of the clearest expressions of Hamsun's modernity.

Hamsun himself was also constantly on the move; out of necessity or for the sake of adventure, with his roots in tow. Although his homeland was a source of great inspiration, from Pan (1894) to På jengrodde stier (1949), it was just as often the journey abroad – to Copenhagen, Kristiania, America, the Caucasus – that made him artistically productive.

The Farmer Hamsun
Sometimes the vagabond became just a farmer. In 1920, Hamsun received the Nobel Prize in Literature for The Harvest of the Field, a creation myth and a critique of civilization that, when it was published, was read as a gospel of peace, where people live in pure breeding and harmony with nature.

Germany and the war
In several articles before and during World War II, Hamsun supported the National Assembly and the German occupation forces in Norway. In the court settlement after the war, he was sentenced to pay a compensation sum of 325,000 kroner. Worse for Hamsun, however, was that in an attempt to avoid trial, he had first been placed under psychiatric observation and it was determined that he had “permanently impaired mental faculties.”

Debate about the role of the artist
Hamsun's sympathy with the occupying power during the war has long made Hamsun a national, cultural trauma. Hamsun's relevance therefore lies not only in his greatness as an artist, but also in the fact that he offers the public a continuing debate about the relationship between fiction and society, about the role of art and the artist.

Literary influence
Hamsun had an enormous influence on European and American literature; Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, and Isaac Bashevis Singer are among those who have expressed their debt to Hamsun's writing.

Hamsun is read today as one of the most masterful writers from the late 19th century. His tender depictions of love, his vitality and irony, satirical criticism of civilization, humorous depictions of folk life and enchanting wordplay have won him readers around the world.

Knut Hamsun died on February 19, 1952, in his home Nørholm near Grimstad.