Giants in the Earth
53 pages • 1-hour read
Ole Edvard RölvaagGiants in the Earth
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Content Warning: The section contains depictions of mental illness, suicidal ideation, child death, and illness or death, as well as depictions of racism and anti-Indigenous racism, including the use of outdated language.
The Immigrant’s Dream and the Psychological Price of a New Kingdom
In Giants in the Earth, the dream of building a personal empire on the frontier carries a psychological and spiritual cost that rises as high as the material rewards. The novel explores this cost through Per Hansa’s drive to claim the Dakota prairie and Beret’s contrasting fear that the place will strip her inner life bare. Per Hansa treats the plains as a canvas for heroic deeds, while Beret sees a godless emptiness that threatens her sense of self. Their opposing reactions expose how the frontier can erode the inner world, even as it promises a new one.
Per Hansa channels the energy of a builder. When he claims his quarter-section, he responds to the open land with excitement rather than dread, exclaiming, “This kingdom is going to be mine!” (41). That desire shapes every choice he makes. He attacks the soil with urgency, plants potatoes before raising a proper roof, and pictures a future “royal mansion” that will be “white, with green cornices” (127). His confidence rests on physical strength and the richness of the ground at his feet. He treats the prairie as something waiting for his touch, a view that lets him turn the emptiness that overwhelms Beret into a source of pride and possibility. This is, in effect, his expression of the immigrant’s dream of moving to a new place and creating a new life for himself through sheer force of will.
Beret’s experience moves in the opposite direction, denoting the psychological cost of such an enterprise. Where her husband sees potential, she reads the same landscape as a constant threat. When she reaches their land, she can only think, “Why, there isn’t even a thing that one can hide behind!” (33), suggesting that hiding is her first instinctive reaction to their new home. As the months pass, she sinks farther into dread. She imagines herself trapped inside a “magic circle” (65) and comes to believe that no one can live in a place where there is “nothing to hide behind” (43). The loss of church, home, and familiar customs leaves her without bearings, and she interprets each setback as a sign of punishment or a trace of demonic presence. Knowing her husband’s dreams, however, she hides these anxieties from her husband, and they gradually erode her mental health, leaving her a fraught wreck.
Per Hansa’s confidence and Beret’s terror meet in the final tragedy. His energy brings the family prosperity, but the pressure to find a minister for the dying Hans Olsa during a brutal blizzard pulls him into a journey shaped by Beret’s insistence on spiritual duty. He rides out to save another person’s soul, rather than to gain land or wealth, giving in to his wife’s insistent piety. When the settlers later find him frozen, his eyes fixed on the western horizon, he becomes a stark reminder of the kingdom he tried to found and the land that ended his life. He faces west, even in death, always looking ahead to the vast potential of the land. That death marks the steep price of the immigrant dream, where the prairie’s demands—material and spiritual—push past what any single person can bear.
The Fragile Struggle to Build Civilization in the Wilderness
The work in Giants in the Earth centers on more than settling the prairie. The settlers try to rebuild the structures of civilization in an environment that threatens to wipe out the customs and habits they brought from home. Rølvaag shows how these men and women fight to impose order through homes, rules, and institutions while staring at plains that refuse to offer comfort. Their progress depends less on how many acres they cultivate and more on how well they hold on to the identities they carried with them.
On arriving in their settlements, the families begin with the most basic symbol of order: the home. The settlers’ sod houses reveal how shaky their position remains. Each hut comes directly from the earth the settlers want to master, so the walls give shelter while reminding them of their rough conditions. They are literally resculpting the environment to accommodate them. Hans Olsa’s half-built house looks for a moment like “a bulwark against some enemy” (25), a sign that even building a home feels like a defensive act. Per Hansa’s idea for a two-room dwelling, with one room for the family and another for livestock, draws laughter from Tönseten, yet it shows Per Hansa’s desire to plant a permanent foundation for his household. At the same time, Beret nurtures an unspoken belief that the presence of animals under the same roof will make the world seem less lonely. These small structures form the first barrier between the settlers and the empty prairie.
The absence of formal rules soon tests the group’s principles. The conflict around the Irish claim stakes captures how quickly ambition can collide with inherited moral codes. Per Hansa removes the stakes that mark another man’s claim, a practical move from a frontier viewpoint and a demonstration of his fierce belief in the importance of his own small community. He cannot tolerate the idea that his new settlement might already be broken apart by something so trivial–from his perspective–as a rule or law. Beret reacts with alarm, citing the command, “Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmarks!” (176). She warns that without the law they once relied on, “we’d better take care lest we all turn into beasts and savages out here!” (176). The moment shows how thin their ethical ground becomes when distance from established society leaves them to police themselves. Per Hansa is willing to break the rules and laws that govern society, all while trying to build a society himself.
As the settlers work to secure food and shelter, they also try to bring back the cultural and spiritual institutions that shaped their earlier lives. They decide to start a small school, taught by Henry Solum in their homes, to keep their language and heritage alive for their children, while also educating the children (and adults) in English, thus creating a bridge between their community and the communities around them. Through this education, they can make the empty prairie feel smaller; they will no longer be Norwegian-speaking immigrants, but American settlers building a new community. The arrival of a minister becomes an even larger step. When the first Communion takes place inside Per Hansa’s sod hut, the gathering marks a formal reentry into the religious structure they lost on the journey west. The minister’s sermon affirms this effort by describing their settlement as a “new kingdom” (427) rooted in their faith. Their attempts to restore these institutions reveal their ongoing struggle to hold off a spiritual wilderness that mirrors the physical one, all while blending the old and the new. The community created by men such as Per Hansa is, in effect, an attempt to fill what they perceive to be an environmental void with their presence and their culture. This fine line between making something new out of something old is a direct challenge to the emptiness–as they perceive it–of the frontier.
The War Between Worldly Ambition and Spiritual Dread
In Giants in the Earth, a quiet stretch of prairie becomes the setting for a conflict inside Per Hansa and Beret’s marriage. They respond to the open land with two kinds of belief. Per Hansa places faith in human effort and the promises of the soil. Beret reads the emptiness as a sign of punishment or a realm touched by the devil. Their reactions turn the settlement into a test of worldly hope and spiritual fear, with their marriage itself embodying the tension between secular and religious worlds, as well as the perils associated with each.
Per Hansa’s ambition grows from a secular confidence in his own labor. He trusts physical work more than divine guidance. While he considers himself to be a good Christian man, Per Hansa chooses to view his own labor as an act of devotion. He is not a believer in an interventionist God, believing instead that his deeds and acts are permitted and encouraged by the divine, thus turning the family’s journey west into an expression of his quiet spirituality. As soon as he arrives, he begins breaking the land for crops even though the house remains incomplete. That urgency shows his conviction that prosperity will rise from force of will. His certainty shapes the naming of his newborn son. At the emergency baptism, he declares that the child shall be “Peder Seier” (277), or Peder Victorious, a name that expresses his belief that his line will overcome the wilderness through human strength. God, in this worldview, is an ambient presence rather than an active force.
Beret’s beliefs move in another direction. Her sense of guilt shapes everything she sees. For her, the prairie becomes an instrument of punishment, a tool wielded by the Living God to punish the hubris of her family. The novel complicates this particular interpretation of religion by portraying it alongside her mental health struggles, depicting how such struggles shape her relationship with God. She thinks their westward journey answers for disobedience to her parents and for the premarital relationship with Per Hansa, suggesting that every misfortune that befalls them is a consequence of God trying to punish them. To Beret, God is felt everywhere, even more so in the void of the prairie, but only ever in the way that God punishes her and her family. Each hardship reinforces that fear. She treats the locust plague as a biblical scourge and cries that “the devil has come” (398). When she hides in her immigrant chest, she tries to escape a spiritual presence that Per Hansa cannot acknowledge. Then, when Per Hansa reports how she is communicating with her deceased mother, she talks of sending a child into the afterlife to be with her mother. This mental health breakdown is blended with the vocabulary of religion, suggesting that Beret’s spiritual dread is a product of other, deeper-seated anxieties that have been left unaddressed because her husband is determined to focus only on the positives and potential of their journey.
Their conflict reaches its peak during the formal baptism of Peder Victorious. The settlers gather for a rite meant to offer grace, but Beret feels consumed by terror. As the minister repeats the chosen name, she tries to stop the ceremony and yells, “How can a man be victorious out here, where the evil one gets us all!” (432). To her, the name challenges the dark forces she believes rule the plains. Her outburst reveals the depth of the divide that shapes the marriage. The ceremony that should offer belonging instead confirms her fear that the prairie stands as a place of spiritual danger. In spite of Per Hansa’s fear for the safety of their children, he follows the minister’s advice and insists that Beret be allowed to keep the baby. She overhears this and takes comfort from his words. Yet her religion takes on a new, even more pious tone. While her spiritual dread may be alleviated, she preaches religion with a newfound determination. It is this determination that makes her convinced that her husband should fetch the minister for the dying Hans Olsa. Per Hansa knows that the trip may kill him, but he cannot allow Beret—who sincerely believes that the trip must be made—to do it herself. Per Hansa is killed by the blizzard; the irony of the War Between Worldly Ambition and Spiritual Dread is that Beret actively encourages Per Hansa to embrace his death. She is ultimately left even more alone, with only her religion to comfort her as the source of her family’s worldly ambitions lies frozen in the snow.
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