Other places to visit
On Hamarøy you will find three visitor attractions: The Hamsun Centre , Knut Hamsun's Childhood Home and Hamarøy Folk Museum . All three are part of Nordlandsmuseet , a foundation that manages 20 museum facilities in Salten.
The Hamsun Centre sells tickets to all three locations. You can also book tours and get information about events here.
In the summer it is Knut Hamsun's Childhood Home Open every day. The rest of the year there are no fixed opening hours, but you can book a tour. Hamarøy Folk Museum only opens during events.
Knut Hamsun's Childhood Home
Under the large peaks of the Hamsund farm in Hamarøy, guided tours are offered during the summer season. Over a cup of coffee in the living room, you will be given a vivid insight into Knut Hamsun's childhood and upbringing.
In the childhood home you are greeted by a guide who invites you to a story telling session around the table over a cup of coffee, and gives a tour of the house. Here you will hear about Hamsun's journey from his birthplace in Gudbrandsdalen, about his upbringing on Hamarøy and teenage life in Nordland, until he took the step out into the world at the age of nineteen to become a writer.
Opening hours
Knut Hamsun's Childhood Home has been open during the summer season 2026 and will reopen with regular opening hours in the summer of 2027. More information will be available in the spring.
Address
Arrival
The childhood home is located in Hamsund, 5 kilometers from The Hamsun Centre When you arrive in Hamsund, turn off at the signs for "Knut Hamsun". You will find a parking lot at the first exit on the left. From there it is a short walk up to Barndomshjemmet.
Ticket prices
You can buy an entrance ticket when you arrive at The Hamsun Centre or Knut Hamsun's Childhood Home We offer day passes for visits to both locations.
Entrance The Hamsun Centre : NOK 170 (NOK 130)
Entrance to the Children's Home: NOK 90 (NOK 70)
Day pass Barndomshjemmet + The Hamsun Centre : NOK 200 (NOK 160)
Discount prices apply to seniors/students/groups of over 15 people.
Children under 18 have free entry
Photo: Karoline OA Pettersen/VisitBodø
History
A visit to Hamsun's childhood home is an authentic experience of the author's childhood universe. Up the narrow staircase we find the old boy's room and Knut's peg with the letter "K" carved into it. In his mother Tora's room we get a closer look at her life. His mother suffered from a nervous illness and her condition was one of the reasons why Knut, at the age of 11, was sent away to live with his uncle Hans at Presteid.
In the living room where Father Peder's sewing machine still stands in the corner, the guests gather around the table for a coffee chat with stories from Knut Pedersen's childhood on the farm in Hamsund. The young boy who later traveled the world and took the name Knut Hamsun.
Through the tour you will become better acquainted with the environment and landscape of Knut Hamsun's childhood, and to which he often returned in his works and memoirs.
The visit is well-suited for families with children. The whole family can play in the carpentry workshop or in the craft loft where they can make letters and hang up their favorite words.
The summer Knut turned 3, the Pedersen family moved from Gudbrandsdalen to Hamarøy.
Every year on August 4, Hamsun's birthday, The Hamsun Centre day in the childhood home in Hamsund. This year, acting director Alvhild Dvergsdal gave the speech for the day, which was about Hamsun's relationship with his upbringing in Hamarøy.
What was Knut Hamsun's relationship to his home and the house in Hamsund where he lived from the age of 2 to 19? There are two main perspectives, firstly: Nordland and Hamarøy were experienced as a foreign place for Knud and the Pedersen family. They were farmers from Lom who had to break up from the family farm and move north when Hamsun was in his third year.
My home was entirely Gudbrandsdalen. We children learned the Saltværing dialect to perfection, but at home we never spoke anything but Gudbrandsdalen, it was our mother tongue. ("Me and Gudbrandsdalen," 1917)
In addition, Knud was sent away from home for periods as a boy, to his uncle Hans at Presteid, a stay that darkened the life of young Knud. Therefore, at the age of 19, he had to travel away, south, to modern areas, to realize himself as a writer and find his voice. While living and running the farm Skogheim at Oppeid in Hamarøy, he writes:
They have made me a Nordlander. I don't mind that, that's a good thing too. But I was neither born, baptized, confirmed nor married in Nordland. But I was in Nordland for many years in my childhood and now again for six years as an aging man. "I and Gudbrandsdalen," 1917).
But from the 20th century, another story about Hamsun's upbringing in the north emerged in the 50-60-year-old Hamsun. It is common to link it to the Caucasus journey and the national struggle against the dissolution of the union in 1905. He became more concerned with the values associated with pre-modern culture – and in his view, Northern Norway was still not very modernized. Memories from a pre-modern childhood and upbringing, nature, culture and social life are depicted by Hamsun as adventurous and distinctive, not without dark sides, just as fairy tales also have their trolls. And modern development is put in a critical light. This becomes the subject of a number of his books in the latter part of his writing career. It is precisely his upbringing in the north that now becomes part of a poetic identity for Hamsun himself and readers with a critical distance from modern life. In the preface to a German translation of Det Vilde Chor (1904) he writes:
I try to get far away from people and from all memories of modern life, I reserve myself for the days of my childhood, when I went and herded the creatures at home. It was then, my sense of nature was awakened - if I have any - I lived at least from a small child on grasslands, in the forest and in the mountains, and I met all the animals and all the birds, who then became my good friends for the rest of my life.
Coastal culture and the sea are emphasized as part of the landscape of childhood:
The sea is also part of the natural surroundings that I have grown up with since my fourth year. My home was by the Vestfjorden, which opens wide straight out to the Atlantic Ocean.
And therefore, Hamsun writes:
When I many times read depictions of nature in modern novels, it only fills me with reluctance, and I soon realize that this is only an acquired knowledge of nature and has nothing to do with a heartfelt and sacred sympathy with the forest and the vastness. (Letter to Heinrich Goebel, 1908).
Hamarøy Folk Museum
The old trading farm Breidablikk has been an important meeting place in the village since 1845. In 1980, Breidablikk became Hamarøy Folk Museum .
In the village garden you will find the farmhouse, a converted Nordland house from 1860, Kapellangården, Kramboden Antikvariat, a barn with an attached barn, a mortuary, a drying house and a loft for storing linen, and a storehouse.
The Hamsun Centre sometimes invites to literary banquets in the old living rooms of the farmhouse, and the pub "Teodor med brokk" in the bar room. The trading house is also used in connection with school outreach.
The buildings are not open to the public, but it is nice to wander around the yard.
Address
History of the museum
Breidablikk is an old trading farm from the mid-19th century. The farm has a history dating back to the Iron Age, but most of the houses that stand there today were built when a trader named Jens Pedersen took over the farm around 1845 and started trading in the farm's storehouse.
The trade developed rapidly throughout the 19th century to become an extensive business that included, among other things, its own shipping company, clothing and bakery. In connection with the barn, the merchant built a courthouse; a meeting room where local matters, court hearings, were held. The trade lasted until 1963, when the business was moved to where the Spar store is located today. The merchant family lived in the main house until the late 1960s, when the house was eventually rented out for residential purposes. In the 1970s, an initiative was taken to turn the facility into a museum, and Hamarøy Folk Museum was opened as a museum in 1980.