Growth of the Soil

In the remote Norwegian highlands, a solitary, powerful man named Isak walks north through unmarked wilderness until he finds a hillside with good soil, a stream, game, and wild berries. He claims the spot on the Almenning, common land owned by the State, and builds a turf hut. He hauls supplies from the distant village on his back and asks passing Lapps, or Sámi reindeer herders, to spread word that he needs a woman to help, but no one will come to such an isolated place.

One evening a large, capable woman named Inger arrives, claiming she is only passing through. She stays the night and never leaves. Inger is nearly thirty, with a hare-lip that makes her speak with a hiss. The narrator notes that her disfigurement is the very reason she has come, other men having passed her over. She milks the goats, scours pots, and brings lambing ewes, a spinning wheel, and other possessions. Each tries to outdo the other in work, a form of competitive affection.

Inger returns from visiting her family leading a cow called Goldenhorns. Isak builds a log house and carries a cooking stove from the village on his back. The farm grows: Isak acquires more livestock, a plough, and a harrow. While he is away, Inger gives birth alone to their first son, Eleseus. A distant relative named Oline confirms Goldenhorns came from Inger's family legitimately. Isak and Inger travel to the village, where they marry and have Eleseus christened. A second son, Sivert, is born. Over the following seasons, Isak brings home a lamp, a clock, a loom, and many other goods.

A Lapp beggar named Os-Anders, regularly supplied by Oline during his wanderings through the area, visits carrying a dead hare. Inger is horrified, connecting it to a superstition that seeing a hare during pregnancy causes a child to be born with a hare-lip. Lensmand Geissler, the district sheriff, arrives with his assistant Brede Olsen to formalize Isak's purchase of the land. Geissler names the place Sellanraa, sets a price of 50 Daler (the local Norwegian currency), and notes Isak deserves the land for nothing given his labor. Geissler soon leaves his post under investigation for financial irregularities, and his successor, Heyerdahl, raises the price to 10 Daler per year for 10 years.

Inger contrives to send Isak away. The day he leaves, she gives birth alone to a girl with a hare-lip. Seeing the disfigurement, identical to her own, Inger kills the baby within minutes and buries the body in the woods.

Oline returns and discovers the grave. Inger erupts in fury and accuses Oline of sending the hare through Os-Anders to curse the unborn child. Isak learns the truth and asks simply why. Inger explains the child had the same mouth as herself, and she could not bear to let it live that way. Lensmand Heyerdahl investigates; Inger confesses and is sentenced to eight years. Before she is taken, she sends Isak to Sweden to find Geissler, urging him to carry all their money so it will not be confiscated upon her arrest. Isak returns to find Inger gone and Oline installed with the boys. He sinks into a grey, joyless routine.

Years pass. Oline pilfers supplies, bartering them to passing Lapps. Isak teaches the growing boys about nature and the land. Geissler returns, recognizes stones the boys had been playing with as copper ore, and offers Isak 200 Daler for the mining rights plus a percentage of future earnings. He reveals he has visited Inger in Trondhjem, where her lip has been surgically repaired, and has submitted a pardon application to the King.

A telegram arrives: Inger is free. Isak paints the buildings, trims his beard, and drives to the steamer. Inger arrives with Leopoldine, her five-year-old daughter born in prison. Her hare-lip is now only a tiny scar, and she speaks clearly. At Sellanraa, the boys do not recognize their beardless father.

Inger is changed by her years away. She uses elegant speech, corrects Isak's language, takes up dressmaking, and arranges for Eleseus to be sent to town as a clerk despite Isak's objections. One Saturday, telegraph workers camp in the barn and dance; Inger joins them, and Isak later discovers her sitting in the heather with a young worker. When Inger takes money from their savings to send to Eleseus without permission, Isak catches her, lifts her from the floor, and slams her down. They gradually reconcile. Inger grows despondent and turns intensely religious. She is pregnant again; a daughter, Rebecca, is born healthy and beautiful.

New neighbors settle the area. Axel Ström, a careful bachelor, farms at Maaneland. Brede, formerly Geissler's assistant, neglects his own farm at Breidablik. Barbro, Brede's daughter, comes to work for Axel, and they form an uneasy domestic arrangement. Aronsen, a former fisherman drawn to the region by the mining operations, establishes a trading station called Storborg. When Barbro gives birth alone by a stream, she claims the child was born dead. Axel later finds the body buried under moss. Barbro departs for Bergen. At trial, Fru Heyerdahl, the Lensmand's wife, delivers an impassioned defense of unmarried mothers, and Barbro is acquitted.

Geissler returns with four wealthy Swedish gentlemen, relatives of his wife, who buy the copper mine for 40,000 Kroner (Norwegian currency). When the buyers try to pay Isak only 500 Kroner for his percentage, Geissler insists on 4,000 Kroner and threatens to cancel the sale. The mine eventually fails. While Isak is away, Inger has a brief affair with Gustaf, a young Swedish stoneworker helping at Sellanraa. Afterward, she retreats into devotion and tells Isak vaguely that she has not been as she ought toward him. He comforts her without understanding the full truth.

Eleseus takes over Storborg from the struggling Aronsen but runs the business poorly, giving credit freely and drawing on his father's dwindling funds. Barbro returns to Maaneland and marries Axel. Oline dies. Isak, aging, begins clearing a site for a small retirement house, struggling with a boulder until Inger comes out to help. They discover its flat underside makes a perfect door-slab, and Isak pretends he knew it was there all along.

Unable to sustain his business, Eleseus slips back to Sellanraa at night and tells Sivert he is going to America. Isak comes out, says only "Good luck," and turns away to hide his emotion. Sivert walks partway with his brother and presses a gold coin into his hand. Eleseus boards the steamer and never comes back.

On the way home from a peddling trip, Sivert encounters Geissler among deserted mine huts. Geissler delivers a speech praising the settlers as "the needful on earth" (270), contrasting their rootedness with the restlessness of industrialists. The novel closes with Isak sowing corn at sunset, bareheaded, casting seed in an arc that flashes like gold. The narrator calls him "a settler in the wilds, nine hundred years old, and, withal, a man of the day" (274): a figure rooted in the earliest days of cultivation yet belonging fully to the present.