What is Growth of the Soil about?

Growth of the Soil is about the settler Isak, who walks into an untouched wilderness in northern Norway and clears land from nothing. He builds the farm Sellanraa, takes a wife named Inger, and creates a self-sufficient life. The novel is a hymn to work, nature and simple living – and a critique of modern society's estrangement from the land.

Why did Hamsun receive the Nobel Prize for Growth of the Soil?

Knut Hamsun received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920 for his body of work as a whole, but Growth of the Soil was particularly highlighted. The Nobel Committee emphasised the novel's epic power and its portrait of simple, rooted life. Written after the First World War, it spoke to audiences seeking meaning in something stable and enduring.

Who is Isak in Growth of the Soil?

Isak is the novel's central figure and an archetype: a silent, enduring settler who clears land and builds something lasting with his hands. He is not an intellectual hero – he speaks little and rarely reflects explicitly. He acts. Hamsun presents him as an ideal: a person in harmony with soil and seasons.

Is Growth of the Soil a controversial novel?

The novel has been read in the light of Hamsun's Nazi sympathies during the Second World War, and its idealisation of peasant life and scepticism towards modernity have been linked to reactionary political currents. Literarily, it is a work of high quality. The debate about separating the work from the author's later choices remains alive.

What does Sellanraa symbolise?

Sellanraa symbolises rootedness, labour and a life in harmony with nature. The farm grows from nothing through Isak's and Inger's work and functions as a counter-image to the modern world of estrangement and restlessness.

Growth of the Soil – Knut Hamsun (1917)

Growth of the Soil (1917) is the novel Hamsun received the Nobel Prize in Literature for. About the settler Isak, work, nature and the encroachment of modernity.

In brief

Growth of the Soil (1917) is the novel Knut Hamsun received the Nobel Prize in Literature for in 1920, in recognition of his body of work as a whole. It follows the settler Isak, who walks into an untouched wilderness in northern Norway and clears land from nothing – and explores what the simple, rooted life means against the advance of modernity.

The novel is not an idyll without conflicts. It contains serious events, guilt and reconciliation, and a sustained tension between two ways of living: the earthbound and the modern. But its fundamental perspective is clear: Hamsun writes for the land, for labour, for the quiet and the lasting.

Growth of the Soil is a different work from Hamsun’s modernist breakthrough Hunger (1890). Where Hunger is driven by stream-of-consciousness and psychological dissolution, this is an epic novel with time, space and patience as its sustaining elements.

What happens?

A man walks into an untouched wilderness in northern Norway. He clears trees, lays stone and begins to cultivate the land. He is silent, enduring and hard-working – presented as an almost primordial figure. The novel’s opening words are programmatic: “A man walks through the forest, clearing the land.”

After a while Inger arrives – a woman with a harelip who has had a difficult life. She sits down beside Isak. No wedding ceremony, no formality. Two people who need each other and begin to build something. The farm Sellanraa grows. They cultivate the land, keep animals, have children.

But the novel is not simply a hymn. Inger kills her newborn child because she fears it will inherit her harelip. She is convicted and sent to Trondheim to serve her sentence. In the city she is changed – she adopts fashion, new social habits and values from urban life. She comes home a different person.

The tension between the simple life and the temptations of modernity is one of the novel’s central conflicts. The two sons – Sivert and Eleseus – represent two paths: Sivert stays on the farm and continues his father’s way of life, while Eleseus leaves for America and the city. Eleseus is presented as the less successful of the two in the novel’s value system. Leaving the land is a loss, not progress.

Geissler, a wanderer and businessman who appears periodically, can be read as a representative of capitalism’s and modernity’s encroachment – the market beginning to assess and price what Isak has built with his hands.

Key facts


Author	Knut Hamsun
Published	1917
Form	Novel (prose)
Structure	Two parts
Genre	Epic novel, critique of modernity
Setting	Wilderness in northern Norway, early twentieth century
Nobel Prize	Hamsun received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920

The characters

Isak is the novel’s centre and an ideal. Strong, silent, grounded in work and nature. He speaks little and rarely reflects explicitly – he acts. Isak is not a psychologically complex character in Hamsun’s modernist sense; he is something else: an archetype, a person in harmony with soil and seasons.

Inger is Isak’s wife and the novel’s most layered character. She carries guilt – the child’s death – and undergoes a real transformation during her time away. Hamsun portrays her with depth: she is not merely a counterforce to Isak but a person with her own inner life.

Sivert is the younger son – the man of continuity. He stays on the farm and takes over his father’s work. His choice is presented without comment, but the novel leaves no doubt: this is the right path.

Eleseus is the older son – the man of restlessness. He goes to America and the city, seeking something else. He represents the modern project, and Hamsun allows it to fail.

Geissler is ambiguous and fascinating: a wanderer who knows the world and the logic of markets. He is not evil, but he represents a different understanding of what land and labour are worth.

Themes

The value of nature and work is the novel’s central philosophical idea. Isak clears, digs, plants and harvests – and this is presented not as toil but as meaning. It is in working the land that life is most fully lived.

Civilisation-criticism and scepticism towards modernity runs as a quiet current beneath the action. Urbanisation, capitalism and the ideology of progress are presented as forces that remove human beings from something essential.

Rootedness against restlessness is the axis of the novel’s tension. Isak and Sivert are rooted. Inger loses her rootedness in contact with city culture and finds it again. Eleseus never recovers his. Hamsun is not neutral: the book can be read as an argument for staying in place.

Guilt and reconciliation is the novel’s darkest thread. Inger’s killing of the child, the sentence and the serving of it are not a subplot – they are what makes the novel more than an idyll. Hamsun lets Inger carry this, and lets her come back.

Hamsun and the Nobel Prize

The Nobel Committee’s decision in 1920 to award Hamsun the prize, citing especially Growth of the Soil, was coherent with its literary values of the time: the novel’s epic scope, its portrait of endurance and rootedness, and its prose made it an obvious choice in a year when Europe was still recovering from the First World War.

In retrospect the decision is complicated by Hamsun’s pro-Nazi stance during the German occupation of Norway (1940–1945). His admiration for Hitler, expressed even after the war, remains one of the most disturbing cases in literary history. The question of how to read Growth of the Soil in light of what followed – its idealisation of peasant life, its critique of modernity – is a genuine one. The novel was written in 1917, twenty years before those events, and it can be read as a humanist hymn to labour and nature without reference to the ideology Hamsun later endorsed. But it cannot entirely be read without awareness of it either.