THE 
American-Scandinavian 
Review 
Volume X 
November, 1922 
Number 11 
Some Recent Norwegian Books 
By Hanna Astrup Larsen 
There is no one writing in Norway to-day who tells a story better 
than Johan Bojer, and Bojer has never told a better story than The 
Last Viking (Den siste Viking , Gyldendal, 1921). The name is 
theatrical; the book is not. And the name may be extenuated by the 
author’s desire to link his story of Norwegian fishermen with their 
historic antecedents. For many centuries past men have sailed and 
rowed in open boats from the length and breadth of northern Norway, 
often distances of hundreds of miles, to the winter fisheries at Lofoten, 
where thousands of men assemble for the annual great adventure of 
their lives. Their boats are patterned after the old viking craft, and 
the same restless spirit lives in them as in their forebears. Their 
heroism is no less because the stake for which they play with death 
is only the daily bread of a fisherman’s family and perhaps a mort¬ 
gaged home. 
The particular phase of the fisherman’s life which Bojer draws 
so sympathetically is already a thing of the past. Now the fishermen 
are “industrial laborers, they smoke cigarettes and belong to the union.” 
Yet the more picturesque time of sail and oar, before motor boats 
and labor unions, is not so distant but that the author himself took 
part in it as a lad when he “rowed to fishing,” as the phrase is. Quite 
naturally, therefore, he has told the story from the standpoint of a boy, 
Lars Myran, who at sixteen for the first time takes an oar in his 
father’s Lofoten boat. 
The first chapter strikes the note of the conflict between land and 
sea which is to draw Lars away. On the one side is his father, Kristaver, 
a splendid, virile figure, to whom the struggle with the elements, the 
joy of riding the waves in his own boat and taming it to his hand 
like a horse, is the breath of his nostrils. On the other is the mother, 
