What is Growth of the Soil about?

Growth of the Soil is about Isak, a settler who walks into 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 follows the farm and its family over decades, contrasting the simple, rooted life with the encroachment of modernity.

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

Knut Hamsun received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920 for his body of work, but Growth of the Soil was particularly cited. The Nobel Committee highlighted the novel's epic portrayal of the fundamental life and its poetic power. Three years after a devastating world war, the novel's vision of rootedness and endurance appealed to European audiences.

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 speaks little and reflects rarely. He acts. Hamsun presents him as an ideal – not because he is clever, but because he is genuine and rooted.

Who is Geissler in Growth of the Soil?

Geissler is a former sheriff turned wanderer and businessman who appears periodically in the novel. He is partially sympathetic and partially unsettling – a representative of capitalism's and modernity's encroachment into the simple life Isak represents. He is one of the novel's most ambiguous figures.

Growth of the Soil – Summary and Analysis (Hamsun, 1917)

A complete summary and analysis of Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun – the Nobel Prize novel. Characters, themes, the critique of modernity, and how to read it today.

Summary

Growth of the Soil (1917) is an epic novel by Knut Hamsun in two parts.

Part One

A man walks into untouched wilderness in northern Norway. He clears trees, lays stone and begins to cultivate the land. He is silent, enduring and industrious. The novel’s first sentence sets the programme: “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 without ceremony. Two people who need each other, beginning to build something. The farm Sellanraa grows. They cultivate the land, keep animals, have children: first Eleseus, then Sivert.

Inger kills her newborn child, fearing it will inherit her harelip. She is convicted and sentenced to serve time in Trondheim. During her time there she encounters a different world – city life, education, new habits of mind. She comes back to Sellanraa changed: more self-assured in a new way, differently shaped than the woman who left.

Isak has not changed. He is exactly who he was.

Part Two

The farm continues. Eleseus, the elder son, eventually leaves for the city and struggles to find his footing. Sivert, the younger, stays on the farm and takes over his father’s work. Hamsun’s value system is not concealed: Sivert is the right choice; Eleseus represents a kind of loss.

Engineers and mining companies arrive in the district, assessing the land for its resources. Geissler, the former sheriff who appears and disappears throughout the novel, ultimately helps Isak navigate these incursions. The market arrives – begins to price and evaluate what Isak built with his hands. The novel is alert to this transition.

Isak grows old. The farm persists.

The characters

Isak – the novel’s moral and physical centre. He is not a psychologically complex character in the way of Hamsun’s earlier protagonists; he is an archetype. Silent, enduring, fundamentally himself. He does not understand the city’s logic and does not need to. Hamsun does not sentimentalise him – Isak is no hero – but presents him as a person who has found his place and does not leave it.

Inger – the novel’s most layered character. The harelip defined her in childhood: she learned to speak and laugh to conceal it. The shame drove her to kill the child. During her time away she genuinely changes. When she returns, the relationship with Isak is different. She is not ruined, only altered in a way the farm cannot easily accommodate.

Eleseus – the elder son: restless, drawn to the city, unable to root himself. He represents the modern project in Hamsun’s value system, and Hamsun allows it to fail.

Sivert – the younger son: steady, inheriting his father’s way of being in the world. His continuity is presented as the right choice without being stated as such.

Geissler – the former sheriff: ambiguous, partly comic, partly serious. He understands the market’s logic and uses it, but also acts on Isak’s behalf. He represents the modern world’s intrusion without being simply its villain.

Oline – the neighbour who reports Inger’s crime. She is the community’s informal control mechanism: not evil in a theatrical sense, but a person who remembers others’ failures and uses them.

Themes

The value of land and labour – the novel’s central argument. Isak’s life is presented not as toil but as meaning. It is in working the land that life is most fully lived. Hamsun writes against a world that increasingly measures value in money, status and movement.

Critique of modernity and civilisation – urbanisation, capitalism and the ideology of progress are presented as forces that remove people from something essential. This is not subtle: Eleseus represents the modern project, and he fails. The engineers and mining companies represent the market’s arrival, and it is not welcome.

Rootedness against restlessness – the novel’s axis. Isak is rooted. Inger temporarily loses her rootedness in contact with city culture and finds it again. Eleseus never recovers his. Hamsun is not neutral.

Guilt and reconciliation – Inger’s killing of the child, her sentence and her return are not a subplot. They are what makes the novel more than an idyll. She carries this, and she comes back.

The Nobel Prize – context and controversy

The Nobel Committee awarded Hamsun the prize in 1920, three years after the novel was published – unusually quickly. The committee cited its portrayal of “the fundamental life” and its epic power. After the First World War, European audiences were drawn to a novel that offered a vision of stability and endurance.

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 ended, remains one of the most disturbing episodes in literary history.

The question of how to read Growth of the Soil in this light is genuine. The novel’s idealisation of peasant life, its scepticism towards modernity and democracy, and its valorisation of rootedness over movement can be linked to the political currents that Hamsun later endorsed. But the novel was written in 1917, twenty years before those events, and it can be read as a humanist argument about labour and the land – an argument about what human beings need – without reducing it to political ideology. It cannot be read in complete ignorance of what came later, but it should not be collapsed into it.

Analysis

Growth of the Soil represents a different Hamsun from the modernist pioneer of Hunger (1890) and Pan (1894). Where those novels are compressed, intense and experimental, this is broad, slow and epic. The prose is calmer and more patient than anything Hamsun had written before.

The irony is that Hamsun the modernist – who in Hunger introduced stream-of-consciousness technique to European prose – produced his most celebrated work in an entirely different mode. Both impulses spring from the same source: an unease with the modern world. In Hunger that unease turns inward, into the fragmented consciousness of an isolated individual. In Growth of the Soil it turns outward, into a vision of what might be stable and enduring.

The tension between these two Hamsuns – the psychological modernist and the back-to-the-land romantic – is what makes him a more complicated figure than either his champions or his critics typically allow.