Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prarie

Wonderful history of settling in a new land! What struck me the most was the feeling the endless plains gave so many: Nowhere to hide! My husband's ancestors were part of that wave of settlers...Minneapolis seemed the middle of nowhere...like setting out for the moon...and then they ventured even further west...the possibilities, the horror, the promise...wow! Giants in the Earth is so well written...it left me shaken. It provided a new perspective of those adventures never imagined...an awesome read!

This book grabs you from the very first page ("Tish-ah, tish-ah, said the grass....") and holds you tightly and doesn't let you go. Wow. From the first page to the last, I was IN the book, feeling the Dakota sun, freezing in the snow, feeling Beret's woe and Per Hansa's exuberance. It is beautifully written at a delightful pace alternating between gloom and hope. I am just astonished that it's not more popular in American literature!

Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth will forever remain as of the truly epic works of American literature. A descendant of the Trottlander tribe of southern Norway myself, I grew up on a farm in midwest Minnesota and experienced the identical landscapes so vividly described in Rolvaag's masterpiece. Needless to say, I have always felt a profound connection to this work through how its rich pathetic fallacy largely mirrored my childhood fantasies and dreams.Giants in the Earth is a novel about dichotomous relationships. And in a novel that depicts how relationships ultimately define their participants, the central figure in this important work is the land itself. It is interesting to note the order of effects the pastoral loneliness produces in its inhabitants. Beret, like many other non-natives living on the Great Plains, views the land as a lethal threat too pervasively gargantuan to overcome. Per on the other hand, views the land like so many of my father's generation: a fertile blessing that contains some of the most arable land on the entire planet. The attitudes of the novel's central characters towards their situation comes to reveal their strengths and weaknesses in a poignant, bittersweet saga as morose and sublime as the land itself. Compelling, tragic, humorous and underspoken, Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth reflects the feelings and goals of an entire generation of immigrants striven to succeed at all costs. Thankfully for us all, they did.

O.E. Rolvaag's epic GIANTS IN THE EARTH is truly an American classic, especially for those of Norwegian or Scandinavian descent or those who've lived in the Great Plains. It seems to be a true description of the life the early settlers lived, the desperation of opressive freedom, and the claustrophobic effect of too much open space. Per Hansa, the protagonist of our story, moves his family from a fishing village in Norway to the plains of the Dakota Territory in the last part of the 19th century. They are homesteaders, the people who settled the untamed prairie and bound themselves to it, sometimes at great personal cost.Rolvaag brilliantly describes both the psychological effect of early prairie life and the Norwegian immigrant culture of the time. Being a new land, there were new challenges, new ideas, and new opportunities. In Per Hansa, Rolvaag invents a character that displays the passion and drive of the early settlers. His wife, Beret, like so many wives of the time, follows him with little idea of the hardships and, unfortunately, none of the psychological tools to deal with them. Their neighbors are wonderfully crafted: Tonesten, the whiner; Kjersti, his strong, capable, disrespectful wife; Hans Ola, the solid, dependable Scandinavian whose success is not so much from following his dreams as it is making no mistakes. One comes to love the settlers even as they deal with squatters, locusts, sod houses, and the endless winter of the northern Plains. Midwestern Americans of Scandinavian descent will know that this is our story - our great-grandparents and great-great grandparents were contemporaries of Per Hansa and Beret. Rolvaag should know this story - he himself was an immigrant and lived in Northfield, Minnesota for many years. The book was originally written in Norwegian and published in Norway, so in translation some idioms and cultural forms are hard to understand, but the translators and editors of the current text do a fine job with footnotes and introductory material.

For years, my father repeatedly urged me to read this book about the pioneer life of Norwegian immigrants. Although my father is from Texas and has no Norwegian roots, he read this book in high school and it apparently made quite an impact upon him. Moreover, my great-grandmother on my mother's side immigrated from Norway around 1900 and this gives me some insight into her experience. The author does an outstanding job of conveying the mental as well as the physical struggles that pioneer families faced in the 1870's. I never contemplated that the isolation of pioneer life could be so difficult. The book was a quick read after the first 50 or so pages, and I am now moving on to Peder Victorious. I am glad I finally followed my father's advice.