From myth to reality
It is necessary to go back to the distant times when inscriptions were engraved in the stone, so deeply that we are lucky to be able to discern them even if their meaning escapes us in part. It was luck, again, that led to the discovery of the Eggja stone in 1917, during agricultural work on the farm, located in the municipality of Sogndal, which gave it its name. Dated from the 8th century, the inscription that appears on it - the longest known in old futhark, nearly 200 runes - is still open to many interpretations, and the curious will be able to compare it with the other runic texts listed on the Rundata database created online in 1993 by the Swedish University of Uppsala. A century later, the man who is considered the first Norwegian writer did not only leave his mark on literary memory, he was also elevated to the rank of deity by inspiring, it is said, the figure of Bragi, son of Odin and god of poetry. In any case, Bragi Boddason is the oldest "scalde" (poet) whose texts have come down to us, the most famous being his poem Ragnarsdrápa dedicated to Ragnar Lodbrók, a Scandinavian king - mythical or historical - who took power around 750. Thus, while court poets wrote praises to the glory of their sovereign, like Hornklofi in the ninth century or Eyvindr Skáldaspillir in the tenth century, others went back through the generations by mixing epics and mythological stories. The "royal sagas" include at least theYnglingatal (" The Counting of the Ynglingar ") and the Haustlöng (" Autumn Length ") of Thjódólf of Hvínir, theÁgrip af Nóregskonungasögum (12th century), the legendary Saga of St. Olaf (12th century, but based on an earlier text now lost) and, finally, the Fagrskinna (13th century). The Icelandic poet and intellectual Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) collected some of these founding texts, those concerning the Kings of Norway were compiled in the so-called Heimskringla saga
This Middle Ages proved to be decidedly abundant, as seems to confirm the beautiful reception of the Hirdskraa, a collection of laws governing the "hird", a sort of informal royal guard, which could have appeared abstruse. It is especially the number of texts written by religious people which does not cease to progress, Christianity has indeed progressively conquered Norway from the end of the eleventh century, which moreover will gradually sound the death knell of the ancient beliefs. However, theHistoria Norwegiæ of the priest-savant Sæmundr Sigfússon (1056-1133), who will himself become a legendary character by appearing later in various tales, contains the rare description of a shamanic ceremony of the Sami, this indigenous people of the Great North. His chronology of the Norwegian kings certainly inspired the Benedictine monk Theodoricus Monachus for his own work
More spiritual, in a way at the crossroads between the old world and the new, the Draumkvæde describes the mystical visions of Olav Asteson during thirteen nights from Christmas to Epiphany. This reverie, which is estimated to have originated around 1200 in the County of Telemark, was not written down until the 19th century by Rudolf Steiner (to be discovered in French under the title Messages de Noël), which demonstrates the importance and durability of the oral tradition. Finally, The Royal Mirror (circa 1250) is considered the founding text of Norwegian literature. This work, anonymous but sometimes attributed to Einar Gunnarsson, archbishop of Nidaros, is written in the form of a dialogue between a father and his son, it contains the fabulous sum of knowledge of the time, while giving a precious description of it. The Open Mind editions gave a French translation in 1997. The effervescence, the national identity, and even the language, will however be doomed to painfully wither during long centuries because Norway will fall under the domination of Denmark at the end of the XIVth
The Renaissance
In the sixteenth century, a few rare texts evoked daily life, such as the Diary kept by the pastor Absalon Perderssøn Beyer from 1552 to 1572, but the fact that he eventually abandoned Latin in favor of Danish was undoubtedly an admission of his abandonment in the face of the yoke that weighed on Norway. This same melancholy can be found in the works of Peder Claussøn Friis (1545-1614), also a man of faith, who gave a Danish translation of the Heimskringla and set about describing his country, as close as possible to its geography, but also to its habits and customs, in Norrigis Bescriffuelse. He perhaps hoped for a certain national revival, although he did not seek to have his works published during his lifetime, contenting himself with distributing copies to a few privileged people who, fortunately, were able to preserve them. While it is noteworthy that for the first time a woman was able to make a living from her writing and that Siælens Sang-Offer was constantly being republished, it is telling that Dorothe Engelbretsdotter (1634-1716) was criticized for her excessive use of the dialect of Bergen, her native town, a criticism that Absalon Perderssøn Beyer had also suffered from. Petter Dass (ca. 1647-1707) cleverly violated this prohibition by evoking in The Trumpet of Nordland - his description in verse of the northern region that would become his most famous work - several hundred species of animals or plants for which Danish did not have the adequate vocabulary, so rigor justified violating the required purity!
To tell the truth, little by little the writers will show themselves less and less conciliatory. If this was not yet the case with Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754), a native of Bergen, but a Copenhagener for most of his life, he nevertheless showed a certain irony when he portrayed the society in which he lived, in the pure tradition of Molière. It can be read in French at Editions théâtrales and Belles lettres(Three comedies: Jeppe du Mont, L'Homme affairé, L'Heureux naufrage). Joseph Herman Wessel (1742-1785) followed more or less the same geographical and intellectual path, with one difference: in Copenhagen, he assiduously frequented the Norwegian Society which had been founded there in 1772. This private circle, in which some nationalist ideas were certainly fermenting, closed in 1813, at the dawn of a major change: in 1814, Norway was ceded to Sweden, which granted it a relative autonomy until 1905, when it finally regained its independence.
No one embodied the awakening of Norwegian literature as well as Henrik Wergeland (1808-1845), whose ardor was the harbinger of the patriotic romanticism that was in force for the three decades following his death. His temperament did not win him only friendships during his short life, but no one could deny his influence, especially on the language which, after having been suffocated by Danish, had to reinvent itself, which it did in two forms: Bokmål, derived from Riksmål (Danish-Norwegian), and Nynorsk, which is derived from Landsmål (a dialect of the countryside). The latter could not have existed without Ivar Aasen, a wandering linguist who published a Grammar of the Norwegian Folk Language in 1848. Today, although Bokmål is 85% majority, both languages have official status
The "Big Four
By chance or by sign, in 20 years four major writers were born, including a Nobel Prize for Literature. The first, and most famous in our latitudes, Henrik Ibsen, was born in 1828 in Skien. His career was full of pitfalls, he was rejected and disappointed, he came close to alcoholism and was fired from the theater he directed. It was finally his departure for Italy in 1864 that helped him, undoubtedly providing him with the necessary distance to finally practice social criticism, a focus that he would never leave and that would give him his reputation. Many of his plays are still performed on French stages - A Doll's House, Peer Gynt, The Wild Duck or Hedda Gabler - to name only the most famous. The second, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, born in 1832, is more complicated to discover in our language, although the Belles Lettres catalog offers Beyond the Forces: I & II, two oppressive plays that denounce the excesses of mysticism and economic violence, and are quite representative of the "National Poet", crowned with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1903, who was strongly invested in political issues. The rare translated texts of Jonas Lie (1833-1908) are now out of print(Trolls, Gilje's Family), yet they had the double interest of evoking rural life and keeping the memory of traditional tales. Finally, still in the (fiercely) realistic vein, Alexander Kielland offered in his novels(Les Aventures des Worse: Garman et Worse, Le Capitaine Worde, éditions des Belles Lettres) an acerbic critique of the political and religious pillars on which the city of Stavanger, where he was born in 1849, rested
This family portrait would not be complete without Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) because, even if his style moves away from the naturalist trend to modernism, or even post-romanticism, his novel La Faim (Le Livre de poche) is quite simply a masterpiece that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1920. This semi-autobiographical text, which portrays a man on the brink of a precipice, is in fact a precursor of the "stream of consciousness" that James Joyce and Virginia Wolfe would later explore. Sigrid Undset, who was awarded the prestigious Swedish prize in 1928, was on the opposite side of the spectrum, abandoning the individualistic approach in favor of commitment, first and foremost that of a woman to her family, but also that of a politician, a symbol of her own resistance during the Second World War. In 2022, the Cambourakis publishing house published Jenny, which gives an overview of her eclectic work. Among her contemporaries, we should mention Cora Sandel who is probably a bit more feminist(Alberte & la liberté, Presses universitaires de Caen), the novelist and novelist Arthur Omre who initiated the noir novel by evoking his own experience as a smuggler at the time of alcohol prohibition, the poet Claes Gill(Les Imperfections de la vie, éditions de La Différence) the libertarian Jens Bjørneboe (L'Instant de la liberté, Plein chant éditeur), and above all Tarjei Vesaas (1897-1970) who knew how to explore all the literary currents and whose work was put forward again in France thanks to three independent publishers: Cambourakis(Les Oiseaux, Nuit de printemps), L'Œil d'or(L'Incendie) and La Barque(Ultimatum, Vie auprès du courant).
Norwegian literature continues to be prolific and to innovate at an astonishing speed. Henceforth, the novel allows itself a quasi-sociological approach, even autobiographical if one thinks of the tidal wave provoked by Mon Combat (in six volumes) by the unclassifiable Karl Ove Knausgård born in 1968 in Oslo. The works of Dag Solstad(T. Singer, published by Noir sur Blanc), Per Petterson (published by Gallimard), Jostein Gaarder (including his philosophical bestseller Le Monde de Sophie), Jon Fosse, playwright (L'Arche) and novelist (Bourgois), and Herbjørg Wassmo and his indispensable Livre de Dina (published by 10-18) are also well represented in France.
