THE TROUGH OF THE WAVE

COPYRIGHT 1930 BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM Originally published as JUVIKINGAR Copyright 1927 by Olaf Norli Oslo MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

The scene of all Olav Duun’s stories is the district of Namdal, to the north of Trondhjem, where the author was born in 1876. And the central place in his production is held by this saga of THE PEOPLE OF JUVIK, in six volumes, of which the present is the first.

In order to place these Juvikings in their proper perspective, it must be remembered that there is no trace of a feudal system in Norway, no aristocracy or landed gentry, and that it is only recently that the country has become to some extent industrialized; the “old families” are the odelsbönder, peasant freeholders whose land has descended from father to son, in many cases for centuries. These families are the bearers of tradition, they constitute the real Norway. Below them are the smallholders, who pay them rent for their crofts, furnish the hired labour, and are objects of charity in hard times.

Though each volume of THE PEOPLE OF JUVIK is a complete story in itself, the whole series may be likened to one of the old Icelandic family histories, such as the Sturlunga Saga and many others. Duun has here [vi] traced the fortunes of the Juvik race through four generations, from the beginning of the nineteenth century (in THE TROUGH OF THE WAVE we hear faint echoes of the Napoleonic wars) down to our own day, with the introduction of modern industry (fostered by the Great War) and its attendant labour troubles. In old Per Anders the last of the old-timers disappears, and with his sons the family lies for a time in the trough of the wave. It mounts to the crest again with Anders in the second volume, and in the third we have the story of his children. The fourth, fifth, and sixth all deal with one generation, in the person of Odin, an irregular offshoot of the Juvikings, in whom some of their best characteristics finally bear fruit. All through we are made aware of the changing influences of the times, the slow death of old customs and superstitions, and the persistent pride

of race. The clan feeling, ironically enough, is strongest in the weak and well-meaning Per, the first of the family to leave the old home.

This is not the place to discuss the linguistic conflict which has agitated Norway for the last two generations, but it may be explained that Duun does not write in the riksmaal, the ordinary Norwegian language as used by Ibsen, Hamsun, Undset, and all those authors whose names are familiar abroad—the language sometimes known as Dano-Norwegian, though it is becoming less [vii] like Danish every day—but prefers the landsmaal, or popular language, which is a synthesis of Norwegian country dialects, directly descended from Old Norse and as free as may be from foreign influence. This is a language in its shirt-sleeves, in Duun’s case strongly coloured by the local dialect, and the tales he has to tell gain an added atmosphere from the rustic and imaginative speech he uses. His narrative style closely resembles that of the sagas: plain matter-of-fact, lighted up by flashes of fancy. Perhaps the only “modern” note is to be found in the vivid glimpses he gives us of weather and natural surroundings: highly original they

strike us, with the peasant’s unsophisticated personification of the elements, of earth, sky, and sea, mountain, forest, and brook. The racy intimacy of his dialect, full of hints and half-obscured allusions, is naturally the despair of the translator who has to make it intelligible to a foreign and heterogeneous public.

Some readers may be glad of a few hints on the pronunciation of Norwegian names. J is sounded as y (“Yoo-veek”); skj (and sk before i) as sh; kj has a soft sound, something like English ch, but not so explosive; aa is the English oa in “boat,” “oar”; Norwegian y is like French u or German ü; the other vowels have their usual Continental values (as in German); and final e is never mute.

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In this translation the terminations of some place-names have been anglicized; e.g., -ness for -nes, -voe for -vaag (voe is the Shetland form of the Norse word, which means a bay or creek, often a minor inlet of the main fiord). It is true that one is led into some slight inconsistencies by this method, but perhaps these may be excused on the plea of convenience.

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CHAPTER I IN OLD DAYS

The first Juviking they can tell us about came from the south, from Sparbu or Stod or wherever it was. His name was Per.

He had been married, it was said, and had had house and land, and he brought his mother with him. What had driven him out the Lord only knew. He leased a croft under Liness.

One day the Liness man came and claimed more work of him than he was bound to do by agreement. Per just looked at him. Come he did not. That evening his old mother hobbled up to the farm, wanted to see the mistress herself. “Do ye know what they be saying among the neighbours?” she asked. “They say my rascal’s to wed your darling—God forgive me, they do say so.” At Liness they had but one daughter. Next day the Liness man came and gave them notice; he let them have the rough of his tongue. Per went back with him, and when they came to the birch copse just below the farm, he set upon his landlord, knelt on him and went over him so that you’d have pitied the [4] man. Liness took it and said nothing, he was big enough for that; he dragged himself home with blood in his tracks. They used to repeat a saying of Per’s from that time. “I took and set about him a wee bit; I hadn’t a heart for aught else.” Liness sent his wife down with a message that he could have Mærit, seeing how things were. Per said no, thanks, not for

him. Mærit herself was down, and came back crying; but Per pitched his traps into the boat and rowed off. He was no dirty cottar body, he’d let them know that!

He settled down in Juvik. There had been a croft there from old time, and this he bought for his own of the Ommundstrand man and paid for it in labour. The way of it was that he put up a new house for the man, felled and drew the timber one winter and built it up the next. Folk said to one another in the countryside that they had never seen a man work before. New houses sprang up at Juvik too, and the land came into better shape, as though of itself.

Juvik lies right out on the fiord, but it lies snugly, looking east and sheltered from sea and storms. Nobody had noticed till now that it lay there, much less that it lay like that.

One fine day Mærit came there with her boy, and she stayed. “You’d better bide here now,” he is said to have told her; “you can take mother’s place, she [5] dropped off last year.” Nobody had heard of that—when was she carried?⁠[1]—“Carried? No, she’s lying down the hill yonder. Better ground to lie in you won’t find.”—They never got married, but he and Mærit lived long and well and had many children. Nobody interfered with them, and they never worried about anybody either.

[1] “Carried”—to the churchyard.

The eldest son took the farm, but not much else is known about him. They stayed at home, all the boys, and cleared Juvik from the hills right down to the sea.

One of the next Juvikings was called Anders. They were called Per and Anders turn and turn about. This one was nicknamed Bear Anders. The bear was making trouble out east, on Mo Fell. Anders came over there with his ax, they tell you, and went into the forest. It was black dark autumn weather, and he lay down all by himself beside the bait—it was a crofter woman’s only cow, the bear had killed it in the bog. Two nights he lay there waiting. The third day he came back with the bear’s skin over his shoulder, and after that they called him Bear Anders. They wanted to know how it happened—for Anders was a quiet sort of a man to talk to. “Well,” said Anders, and thought a bit; “he came, and so I knocked him dead.” It was no child’s play lifting his bear-ax, when he left it in the porch, [6] going into church. Not that they were great churchgoers, the Juvikings; there was a saying in the parish that God’s word and Lapps’ gann⁠[2] didn’t bite on them.

[2] Gann—sorcery.

The son of this Bear Anders was called Big Per. Of him the story goes that one day when he was in the forest the Ommundstrand man went through the ice on Finnstad water with his sledge. Per had a feeling of it and ran down. He pulled out both man and horse. For that he got his daughter and as much land and forest as he liked to ask for; and the Juvikings were not shy of asking. They each had their own version of the story, though; the Ommundstrand man told it this way: “That was a bit of a pull, Per. Will you take my daughter, or will you not?” Per laughed on hearing this: “Oh, no, I had to duck him and duck him again before I got him soft enough for me.” For that matter, folk believed what they chose to believe: that Per had driven horse and man through the ice himself; if not he was no Juviking.—But be that as it may, from that day the Juvikings were a different race. Such a wedding was held that it was hard to find anyone who hadn’t been at it; for the Ommundstrand folk were kin to all the best families on both sides of the fiord; and there were new

houses at Juvik, full of all sorts, and there was a power [7] of food and riches that made folk stare; its glories were talked of far and wide.

And the Juvikings were talked of no matter where they went. They were a big family, and giants too, most all of them. They clung together like bramble-bushes. Stout fellows to look at, but, however it was, they were very apt to stay unmarried, barring the eldest, and he liked to look far afield before he made his choice. He generally took her by force, in a high-handed way; there were many tales about that.

Greedy Per was one of the last of the old-time men. He sailed south, right down to the Trondheim country, looking for a wife. She came of big people, they said, and he would hardly have got her by fair means. He was the only one of them who took much to the sea; he sailed up and down the coast, trading and the like. He was not the eldest, that was how it was. But then his brother died, and Per got the farm. Then he turned out a miser and a grasper, a real Greedy Per; by and by he became a rich man. It is told of him that he used to steal both nets and herring in the fiord, he took everything that swam, they said; but on land he was as honest as a man could be. When he was growing old he went round the fiord from house to house and restored what he had stolen. He could get no peace—in his boat-house, he said; and yours shall be yours and not mine. [8] They thought no less of him after that day. For nobody believed he was afraid of the dark; it wasn’t in his boat-house the trouble was. And stolen goods are heavy, when you have to take them back. Of course

there were ghosts at Juvik as in other places, it wasn’t always comfortable to be in service there; but Per and the other Juvikings never seemed to notice anything; they were cold folks.

His son was called Anders. He was quieter in his ways than most of the Juvik men. He was just as old when he took over, folk thought, as his father when he gave up. But he was a shrewd and kindly man, and a great one to work. He paced off the bounds between Ommundstrand and Juvik and put up a boundary fence, marking off for himself the whole peninsula, straight across and right down to the point, and settled a lot of crofters on his land. He paid out his brothers with big money, and they went to other parts.

Anders had but one son, and his name was Per Anders. This was the gamest of them all and a wild fellow in his youth. It was he who defied Lapp gann. There was a gann Lapp going about the neighbourhood, called Nils Gadabout. Folk were so scared of him, they gave him the best they had. He looked in at Juvik one day, and there he got all he asked for, and more too. As he was going he clasped his hands and blessed man and beast, [9] byre and barn, house and land. Per Anders stood by with a grin on his face.—“Can you gann?” he said. The Lapp tried to get out, but Per Anders stood in his way: “Can you gann, I ask, you Lapp devil? You’re to answer when I speak to you. Heh?” His mother begged and besought him to let the man alone, and the servants stole away, pale and weak in the knees, for it took less than that to make Nils Gadabout put a curse on you; more than one had found that out.—“You’re a young man,” said the Lapp gently; “but remember, she’s old, that has the power.”—“Now you’re to try your gann on me, or you won’t get off with a whole skin!

Make my bones rot away till I drop! Take the hair off my head, as you did to the Björland wife—will you obey me! Come here with your gann-bag!” and Per Anders snatched the sack from the Lapp and emptied it. They turned away, every one of them; cold shivers ran down their backs. The father, Anders, stood looking on calmly and absently as usual, as if it didn’t concern him. Then Per Anders took the Lapp and his bag and carried them outside, shook him as you would shake out a coat. But he took all his food away west to the crofts, for there was always somebody that went hungry.—Then the Lapp fellow got up on a big rock and let loose curses and evil upon Per Anders till the air was blue all round him. It was enough to make your hair [10] stand on end: Per Anders’s legs were to shrivel up, the flesh would rot from his bones, his cattle would drop before they were properly born—in thirteen days his farm would be burnt down—a-i, a-i, a-i, oh! Per Anders clapped himself on the backside and went off. The crofter wives were glad to get the food, and Per

Anders lived as before. Gann didn’t bite on him.

Per Anders was to be found wherever there was dancing, in the parish and far outside it, and then he made it lively. There was always such fun where he went, though he might be among strangers; he was so full of notions. But they had to mind themselves: he was pretty ready with his fists too.

His wife he brought from a long way inland. He took a fancy to a girl at the fair, and next day he went to her home and told them he wanted her. Her father banged the table when he heard it, for he was one of the biggest farmers in those parts. “It shan’t be!” he said. “Ah, but I wanted her so badly,” said Per Anders.—“You? You lousy clod-hopper from the sea-shore! Do you think you’ll feed my daughter on sour herrings?”—“I wanted her so badly. And now tell me one thing: will you have money or a thrashing?” Per Anders clapped his pocket-book on the table so that they all gave a jump—there was a pan of milk on the table and the milk spurted up to the ceiling. Nobody in that house [11] had banged on the table like that before, nor with such a pocket-book either.—“So you’d better come, Ane,” he said, and she put her clothes straight and came. But still the Juviking wasn’t satisfied. “Tell me,” he said; “do you let your daughter go from home like a beggar?” No, that wasn’t the idea either; the man had thought

it over and led out two fine cows, produced silver and other heirlooms. “Ay, ay,” said Per Anders, “and now you can take and lead your cows in again, and put up your trash, I have more than enough at home. And now you take a Christian farewell of your daughter, for, by my soul, you’ll have to take care I don’t make a cripple of you!” That is how it went, they say. And he didn’t leave the place that day, nor the next either; there was such a fuss made over that son-in-law that it was a sight to see. The man was never tired of talking of it as long as he lived: “No, that Per Anders, the one who’s married to our Ane, he has money, he has.—No, that table there, it’s never been the same since; he gave it a bang of his fist, the one that’s married Ane, and that was enough.—Farm?” he would say; “oh no, this farm’s nothing to Juvik, where our Ane’s married.”

Per Anders settled down after these doings. He put up new houses at Juvik—nobody had ever seen the like: a dwelling-house in two storeys, with a kitchen and other newfangled notions, a stable apart, and a byre apart. [12] They said Ane tried to get him to pull down the old house while he was about it, but there he said stop. “If we had a fire some day, we’d be glad of it,” he said.—After that he stuck to his land, cleared the last bit of it, and drained every spot that was soft. He took up the farm in his hands and finished it.

“They won’t do so badly, those that come after me,” he said. Though he was not much given to talking. He had three sons, Anders and Jens and Per; and three daughters, Ane and Aasel and Beret. Anders died young.

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CHAPTER II LUCY LONG NIGHT⁠[3]

1

They couldn’t make it out, the womenfolk: what had come over the old man today? He dodged in and out of doors, and up on to the mound, time and again; he forgot to bring in the wood for them, and forgot to scold because they hadn’t dried it as they ought; it was what you might call a peaceful house. They kept an eye on him wherever he went, in or out—perhaps he knew something after all? It weighed on their spirits after a while.

[3] The Eve of St. Lucy, December 12–13, was reckoned under Old Style as the longest night of the year, and the folk-lore associated with this date survived the change to New Style in 1700.

The thing was, they had fooled him properly the day before, they had done just what they liked behind his back; he had been in the woods all day, and they had been out and about. This was the way of it: one day the wife from Ommundstrand had come down in a great hurry and told them they had seen a glare over Juvik farm; they had been up at midnight to see after a cow, [14] and then there was a great blaze behind the hills, straight up from Juvik; it frightened them so they could hardly stand, but then they waked the man and all set off as fast as they could go, each with a bucket of water. But when they got to the top of the hill and looked out, there was Juvik farm in black darkness, as peaceful as could be; the houses lay there in the moonlight and hadn’t heard a word of any fire. Ay, and then they knew what it was: they’d seen a warning! Just the same as was seen over Haaberg, the time there was a fire there; but then it was only the smithy and one storehouse that burnt, for those folk had taken care to send gifts in good time to the church and alms for the poor. And over

Skarsvoe, before the fire there, and over Vanvik and many other places; and where they hadn’t paid any heed to the warning, the fire broke out. They had seen it again and again: in blackest autumn nights, in moonlit winter nights—all around was dreary and dead, and right over the doomed farm a great living flame shot up to the sky, as uncanny a sight as you could see.—So it was that the Ommundstrand wife had to come over and get Ane by herself, for she wouldn’t say a word of this to Per Anders; he was known for a rank unbeliever and cared for nothing but what had happened.—So yesterday they had gone out west, the womenfolk, to the crofters, each with a good basket-load; they had carried [15] off a sight of good food, and luck was with them, the old man was in the woods, and the boys too. For all that, they had run as if they’d stolen baskets and all, taking the shortest cut and never stopping a moment. But Per Anders was a sly fox; he didn’t believe in anything, but he knew everything; that was his way.