As one travels inland from the east coast of the United States, one finds that the earliest settlements become increasingly recent, to the point that some were founded practically within living memory. That is certainly the case in North and South Dakota, where European settlers first made their American homes a mere century and a half ago. Unlike the settlements we associate with the founding of our Republic, such as those established by English, Scottish, Dutch, and German immigrants, the Dakotas were largely settled by Russian Germans and Norwegians beginning in the 1870s. The experience of these peoples, combined with the recentness of the communities they established and the starkness of the landscape they conquered, lends a uniquely and devastatingly beautiful character to this region.
Because the cultural roots do not appear to go so deep in the Dakotas as in other regions of the country, one might easily make the mistake of viewing the Dakotas as bereft of a distinctive European culture altogether. Nothing could be further from the truth. Enter O. E. Rölvaag, whose novel Giants in the Earth (1924–1925) brings an old-world perspective to bear on the experience of the Norwegian pioneers who undertook the herculean task of carving an existence out of the terrifyingly new and unfamiliar world of the northern Great Plains.
Rölvaag was born 1876 in Norway, immigrating to the United States in 1896 to try his hand at farming, then pursuing an education and finally taking up a teaching position at St. Olaf College in 1906. Rölvaag wrote for a Norwegian public, but Giants in the Earth, having met with a favorable reception in Norway, was published in English in 1927 to great acclaim. Rölvaag wrote as one who had experienced for himself the inner conflict of the immigrant, who finds himself leaving one world for another and wrestling with the problems of identity that naturally follow. He drew upon the experiences of his grandparents’ generation, which a mere half-century earlier had been engaged in a harsh struggle for existence against almost supernaturally hostile forces of nature.
This understanding of the pioneer experience as a supernatural conflict suffuses Rölvaag’s novel. The very titles of the chapters in Book II (originally published as a stand-alone volume to complete the work in its Norwegian form) forcefully convey this: “The Power of Evil in High Places,” “The Glory of the Lord,” “The Great Plain Drinks the Blood of Christian Men and Is Satisfied.” The title “Giants in the Earth” itself is, of course, a reference to the Nephilim of Gen. 6:4, “There were giants in the earth in those days…” (KJV). Satan himself, together with the trolls of Norwegian folklore, is a palpable presence throughout the story, not in the surface sense of a fantasy, but as a real, spiritual force making itself felt within the consciousness of the human characters.
These characters exist at two poles: The energetic, cheerful, and enterprising Per Hansa, on the one hand, and his fearful, homesick wife Beret on the other. Per and Beret, together with their three children (and a fourth on the way) and their friends and neighbors, four households in all, have immigrated from their Norwegian homeland, where Per had worked as a fisherman. They have made the harrowing trek across the Atlantic, through Canada to Wisconsin and Minnesota, and finally to the trackless wastes of southeast South Dakota, where they establish their settlement in the summer of 1873. As civilization recedes behind them to their east, Per Hansa, the embodiment of the optimistic pioneer spirit, draws vigor and sincere enjoyment from what to him is a splendid adventure, an opportunity for a new life, where he can rule a kingdom established by his own hand. Poor Beret, meanwhile, questions how human beings can live in a place like this. Once their journey ends and they begin to put down roots in what is to be their homestead, Beret continues to cope with the situation by means of a private delusion that at some point her husband and their neighbors must realize that this is no place for men to dwell. Surely they will come to their senses and return to civilization! As the realization gradually dawns that this is their permanent new life, depression and steady terror set in, making for the primary conflict of the novel: How is Per Hansa to balance his dedication to his pioneer undertakings with the need to cherish and nurture his wife, whom he genuinely loves and cares for? How can she survive in this place, so far from the home she knows, where there is nothing even to hide behind?
It is in the context of this basic conflict that the myriad challenges arise: Wild Indians appearing out of nowhere, their intentions uncertain; unfriendly, culturally alien Irish immigrants staking competing claims to the land; harsh winters such as test the endurance even of men accustomed to life within the Arctic Circle back home in Norway; actual plagues of locusts that descend from the heavens and devour everything in sight—even paint and clothing (such locusts, or Colorado grasshoppers, really did plague the Great Plains for several years beginning in 1874). Nor are these challenges merely earthly: In the mind and heart of Beret, especially, these enemies and misfortunes are experienced as manifestations of the wrath of God, of the malice of Satan, even as the capriciousness of trolls.
Thus the challenges are resolved, not only by the courage and resilience of Per Hansa, but through the interposition of God Himself through the agency of a Lutheran minister, come from Norway to tend the scattered flocks that inhabit the new settlements. Per Hansa and his neighbors are Christians, though Per’s religion seems to veer toward the conventional. They are concerned with maintaining devotion to the Lord their God, reading the Scriptures and praying together as households, and even performing an emergency baptism with fear and trembling. But in their untutored practice of their Lutheran faith, they are beset by uncertainty, and the sudden appearance of a regular minister in their midst brings a welcome opportunity to find spiritual clarity, settle troubled consciences, and enter into a more orderly, familiar pattern of corporate worship. In one memorable scene, the minister struggles to bring his sermon theme of “The Glory of the Lord” home to the hearts of his flock, gathered in Per Hansa’s uncommonly fancy sod house for their first Communion service in years. Reflecting afterwards upon his supposedly failed sermon, “the minister sat immersed in a deep gloom…. ‘Never before,’ he thought, ‘have I failed so miserably in any service!’” Meanwhile, the people themselves receive his ministry quite differently: Per Hansa’s friend and neighbor Hans Olsa “had been present at the service last Sunday, had taken part in the Communion; and the longer the service had lasted the stronger and deeper had grown his felicity. He was only a common, uneducated man, and probably lacked a proper conception of the wonders the minister preached about; yet this he knew for certain, that nothing so glorious as that Communion service in Per Hansa’s sod house had he ever before experienced.” Not only this, but the minister’s labors among this flock ultimately have the effect of delivering one of the most desperately helpless characters from the debilitating bondage of dread and devastation, granting a new lease on life. The eternal Word of God, administered according to the old Lutheran customs of the home country, proves more than a match for the dark forces at work upon this tiny but growing immigrant community. It is not giving anything away to say that, nevertheless, the novel culminates in tragedy—but only such tragedy as to drive home the stark reality, the deep beauty, and the ultimate significance of the pioneer life as experienced by these Norwegian households. I have recently relocated to this region, the Dakotas, surrounded by the descendants of these Norwegian settlers and their Russian German counterparts, only five generations removed from their heroic forebears. As such, I can say that, after reading Giants in the Earth, I now look upon this landscape and these communities with new eyes, seeing in them something ancient, grounded, and pregnant with the brutality of the struggle for existence that characterizes man in his fallen condition—a condition that can only be redeemed, then as now, by the Word of the living God.
