664 
THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN REVIEW 
ings, this time the story of a lad, Odin, who seems destined to redeem 
the strong old family which has fallen into degeneracy. In Make- 
believe Land , which is the best translation I can find, does not wholly 
convey the meaning of the original title I Eventyre (Olaf Norli, 1921) ; 
for the Eventyr is not only the imaginary country Odin creates for 
himself, where they come and talk to him, but it is also the future for 
which his dream-life is preparing him. When the story opens, Odin’s 
mother is leading him along a mountain path to the small gaard where 
he is to begin service as a herd’s-boy. “What are you thinking of?” she 
asks when he has been silent long. “I’m thinking that I’m only seven,” 
leplies Odin, and when he sees the shadow falling over his mother’s 
face, lie instantly squares his shoulders to show what a man he is. 
Theie is a homely, natural sweetness and tenderness in the story of this 
sturdy chap who makes his own decisions from the time he is seven and 
who instinctively rejects everything that would drag him down or 
make him not Odin. At fifteen he turns his back upon the offer of 
his relatives to send him to school, and chooses instead to go to his father 
who lives in a cottage in the mountains and is generally regarded as 
queer, for he preaches a strange, unworldly doctrine about renouncing 
things and turning the other cheek; he wears a beard like Christ’s and 
lives by carpentry, though even this work is not of the conventional 
kind, for he fashions strange articles which city folk call artistic, but at 
which the jieasants shake their heads. In Odin’s choice we may perhaps 
find something akin to the gospel preached by Hamsun, who rails at 
country boys working themselves down” into the white-handed pro¬ 
fessions. Bojer is still conventional enough to make his fisher lad into 
a school principal, but Huun keeps his peasant boy in his native environ¬ 
ment. It will be interesting to see how he develops the tale in the next 
volume to which this points the way—how Odin takes to carpentry and 
early Christian renunciation. As an account of a gifted child gradually 
awakening to the world and unconsciously forming himself for the 
future, I Eventyre is worthy to be mentioned with the first volume of 
Jean-Chi istophe and of Pellethe Conqueror. Olaf Duun is without 
doubt the most gifted writer who has used the landsmaal since Garborg 
published his tales of Jasderen, and his language, like Garborg’s, is 
full of poetic charm, lending itself easily to dialogue, while his nature 
descriptions have that wonderful fragrance as of birch and juniper 
which it seems nothing but landsmaal can convey. 
. While Duun and Garborg are easily read by any one who masters 
ordinary Norwegian, the same can not be said of Sjur Bygd. The 
Battlefield (Valplassen, Olaf Norli, 1921) is not only written in diffi¬ 
cult dialect, but the people are so primitive, so far removed from all 
familiar motives and standards, that I confess to reading it with some 
of the same baffled lack of comprehension that I always feel toward 
stories of Russian peasants. To illustrate what I mean, let me quote a 
