The People of Juvik

Duun wrote in Landsmål, an amalgam of peasant dialects that developed into Nynorsk, one of the official languages of Norway.

Among those influenced by his work was Nobel Prize winning author Sigrid Undset, who considered Duun to be Norway's greatest writer.

The story opens in the first years of the nineteenth century with Per Anders, the last of the old-timers, one who fears neither man nor devil and laughs at the superstitions of his womenfolk.

Anders is in love with Massi Liness, but when she marries his friend Ola Engdal, he takes as his wife, Solvi, a girl of Lapp blood and a former sweetheart of Petter.

The neighbors put this down to Lapp sorcery, and Anders has sufficient belief in this to turn Solvi out of his house and pack her and their child off to her father’s cabin.

But he succeeds in putting it out of his mind; the farm prospers; after Engdal’s early death Anders marries Massi and they have a large family.

In middle age Anders’s sight begins to fail; he tries a remedy of his own — hot tar — and becomes totally blind.

Per, the hope of the family, dies young; Jens, the second son, shows the roving tendency of his namesake of two generations back and goes to America.

Ola has been courting Andrea Ween, Arthur’s sister, in a half-hearted way; piqued by his backwardness she throws him over and accepts his nephew Peder.

In the middle of the festivities Petter plays a last prank on his blind brother and it results in the death of Anders.

Ola Haaberg, the parish clerk, had always been looking for “him who should come,” a scion of the race who should inherit the virtues of the old Juvikings and as it were justify the whole family.

He is the illegitimate son of Aasel’s daughter Elen, by one Otte Setran, a joiner by trade, who emigrates to America before the boy is born.

When he is seven years old his mother marries a farmer named Iver Vennestad, and Odin is put out to serve as herd-boy on a small holding called Kjelvik.

Now there are certain secrets in Bendek’s life which are best let alone, and when Odin stumbles upon one of these the old man flies into a rage and turns him out of the house on a stormy Christmas night.

Otte Setran, who has been carrying on his trade in the neighborhood, is suspected of having set fire to his cottage for the insurance money, whereupon Odin, whose instinct always prompts him to take the loser’s part, volunteers to go and live with him.

In the last scene of this book Odin is overtaken by a storm while rowing a girl called Ingri Arnesen across the fjord.

This penultimate book in the saga of the Juvikings finds Odin a little grown up, out of his "fairyland", but still in the midst of youth and innocence.

Odin at first wants to fight for their happiness, but Astri gives up on their chances and actually encourages the older couple to marry.

In the face of this devastating turn of events, Odin leaves the farm at Haaberg and joins his old sometimes friend, sometimes enemy, Lauris, at sea.

Meanwhile, Aasel, the eldest living Juviking, wonders what to do with Haaberg since none of her grandchildren show promise of producing a satisfying heir.

The Storm (I stormen), published in Norway in 1923 and in America in 1935, covers the later life, and eventually death, of Odin Setran.

Facing things like labor strikes, dissatisfied shareholders, and the ambition of men like Lauris and Engelbert Olsen, Odin works to keep the factory on an even keel.

The series ends when Anders, Odin's eldest son, takes his mother home after the funeral ale.