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 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 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.

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.