Giants in the Earth. OE Rolvaag

Giants in the Earth
O.E. Rolvaag.Translated from the Norwegian by Lincoln Colcord and the Author.
New York: Harper and Row, Publishers. 1927/1955.

Per Hansa, who had a vision of the settled prairie with full wheat harvests, faces the isolation of a desolate, endless, malevolent landscape with a wife, Beret, who does not share his vision, who is fearful of the environment, depressed and certain that humans living in this environment will turn into beasts. Cold, snow, locusts test the mettle of the Norwegian-born settlers. Per feels guilt for his decision to bring his wife to the prairie because she cannot endure the hardships in anticipation of the rewards. Discouraged, he sets off in a blinding snowstorm to seek help for one of his children, becomes lost and dies. The human cost of settling the frontier.


Some quotes:
"How will human beings be able to endure this place? ....there isn't even a thing that one can hide behind." p. 28.

"No one put the thought into words, but they all felt it strongly; now they had gone back to the very beginning of things...." p. 32.

"This formless prairie had no heart that beat, no waves that sang, no soul that could be touched....or cared...." p. 37.

Beret: "Oh, Per, it's only this--I'm so afraid out here.... it's all so big and open...so empty." p. 42.

"House and barn under the same roof.... She said no more, but fell into deep and troubled thought.... Man and beast in one building.... How could one live that way?" p. 53.

"Before the snow came, Beret thought it delightful to have such white walls inside; but after there was nothing but whiteness outside--pure whiteness as far as the eye could see and the thought could reach..... Her eyes were blinded wherever she looked, either outdoors or indoors; the black-brown earthen floor was the only object on which she could rest them comfortably; and so she always looked down now, as she sat in the house." p. 183.

"There was one who heeded not the light of the day, whether it might be gray or golden: Beret stared at the earthen floor of the hut and saw only night round about her.... She tried hard, but she could not let in the sun." p. 216.

"That night the Great Prairie stretched herself voluptuously; giantlike and full of cunning, she laughed softly into the reddish moon: 'Now we will see what human might may avail against us....' " p. 339.

" 'What is a man to do?' Per Hansa grasped the minister by the arm, clutching hard in his terrible agitation...."
" 'He shall humble himself before the Lord his God, and shall take up his cross to bear it with patience!' said the minister impressively....."
" 'Ha-ha!' Per Hansa suddenly burst out in a bitter laugh.... 'Too scanty a fare for me to live on..... Better put that kind of talk aside.... I ask as an ignorant man, and I must have an answer that I can understand. Did I do right or did I do wrong when I brought her out here...?' "

Historian Vernon Louis Parrington: "If in one sense the conquest of the continent is the great American epic, in another sense it is the great American tragedy. The vastness of the unexplored reaches, the inhospitality of the wilderness, the want of human aid and comfort when disaster came, these were terrifying things to gentle souls whom fate had not roughhewn for pioneering. Fear must have been a familiar visitor to the heart of the pioneer woman, and for a hundred and fifty years this fear of the dark wilderness was one reason why the settlements clung to the more hospitable seaboard. Beret, the wife of Per Hansa, brooding in her sod hut in Dakota, afraid of life and of her own thoughts, and turning for comfort to a dark religion, is a type of thousands of frontier women who--as the historian Ridpath said of his parents--'toiled and suffered and died that their children might inherit the promise.' "