116 
THE AMERICAN-SC AN DIN A VI AN REVIEW 
adopted her sister’s son and gave him all of 
Dyrendal on his wedding day, to be banished 
by him from the great house and driven, final¬ 
ly, into the winter night, the hope of sons 
forgotten, Dyrendal lost, vengeance futile, 
and age upon them. 
This is a Lear of the fjords, a Lear with 
more of the furrowed soil in it and but little 
less of kingly dignity. The name of Dyrendal 
rings through the story. It was the kingdom 
they fought for, threw away, and coveted. It 
was Dyrendal that gave and took away 
wealth, good cheer, and honor. The yellow 
title of the American version, God and 
Woman, implies none of this. 
There may be Norwegian critics who look 
somewhat scornfully on Johan Bojer’s fame 
outside of his own country, but they can 
not realize that Bojer sketches for the out- 
lander a picture of Norway that can be ac¬ 
cepted as convincingly real. There are crowd¬ 
ed and noisy fairs, mock political meetings in 
the kitchen at Dyrendal, and earnest meetings 
in the church-yard; there is the potato field 
with jesting planters and the hay field with 
its rival mowers; there are rough Christmas 
pranks, and, in the old wooden church, hymn¬ 
singing that would put life even into the apos¬ 
tles carved above the altar. If there is one 
unreal person in the book, it is, unfortunately, 
an American; and if there is one more real 
than Martha, stronger, more humanly contra¬ 
dictory, and more steadfast, it is Hans, master 
of Dyrendal. J. C. 
Brief Notes 
Norwegian critics have not words strong 
enough to praise the second part of Sigrid 
Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter which ap¬ 
peared before Christmas. It deals with the 
married life of the heroine and is framed on 
a broader historical basis than the first vol¬ 
ume, which described Kristin’s girlhood. Pro¬ 
fessor Paasche, the historian, thinks it is one 
of the great events in modern Norwegian lit¬ 
erature. C. J. Hambro, writing in Morgen - 
bladet, asks whether it would not be proper 
that the Nobel Prize should be given to one 
who, like Fru Undset, is still at the height of 
her productive power. 
A Scandinavian volume has been added to 
the Children of Other Lands series published 
by Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, of Boston. Dr. 
John O. Hall is the author of When I JVas 
a Boy in Norway, which has just appeared. 
It deals entertainingly with such varied 
subjects as trolls, popular education, skiing, 
Ibsen, the custom of confirmation, the peasant 
dances, and, of course, the midnight sun. Al¬ 
together Dr. Hall has managed to crowd a 
great deal of information into 254 pages and 
to present it very attractively. 
In connection with the annual exhibition of 
the American Society of Miniature Painters 
at the Arden Gallery, New York, the past 
autumn, there was exhibited a collection of 
Rorstrand porcelains by Mrs. George Oakley 
Totten, jr. (Vicken von Post). These charm¬ 
ing and exquisitely modeled sculptures fully 
justifies the vogue the artist has enjoyed in 
her native Sweden, as well as London and 
the American cities in which she has shown 
her figurines since her arrival here last spring. 
J. Lars Hoftrup, a contributing artist to 
the American Painters of Swedish Descent 
Exhibition in 1920, has, during last Novem¬ 
ber and December, shown a collection of 
twenty-eight paintings, landscapes of the im¬ 
pressionistic school in the Malcolm Gallery, 
New York. 
Dr. Thorbjorn Gaarder, director of the bio¬ 
chemical laboratory at the Bergen Museum, is 
now in this country studying chemical and 
bio-chemical laboratories at American insti¬ 
tutions with a view to planning a new labora¬ 
tory building in Bergen, to be ready for the 
hundredth anniversary of the Museum, in 
1925. Dr. Gaarder is impressed with the ex¬ 
cellence of American equipment for scientific 
research. 
Norwegian Immigrant Contributions to 
America’s Making, published on the occasion 
of the America’s Making exposition in New 
York, can be obtained from the editor, Mr. 
Harry Sundby-Hansen at the office of the 
Foreign Language Information Service, 15 
West 37th Street, New York. It is a book 
containing much information not hitherto 
available in English and is worth much more 
than the small price. 
