SOURCE: "Before the Mast of a North Sea Fisherman," in The New York Times Book Review, April 29, 1923, p. 7.

The courage that possessed the men that went down to the sea in ships centuries ago and cut the first path across the Atlantic Ocean became the heritage of those dauntless fishermen of Norway who made the Lofoten Islands their cherished goal before steam, electricity and other motor power put sailing craft in the discard. In open boats, scarcely different in construction from those used by their Viking ancestors, Norwegian fishermen of less than a generation ago would sail the long distance north in search of the shining cod, while in constant battle with the elements. It was a struggle with wind and weather, and danger lurking in every wave that beat furiously against the boat with its complement of half a dozen men. It is these to whom Johan Bojer builds a monument in The Last of the Vikings.

Two great characters stand out conspicuously in modern Norwegian fiction—Isac, of Knut Hamsun's The Growth of the Soil, and Kristiver Myran of Bojer's last work. It is difficult to say which of these is the greatest. As The Growth of the Soil wrote itself down as an epic of the cultivator's labor, so assuredly The Lost of the Vikings must be assigned a place as an epic of the sea. Side by side, Knut Hamsun and Johan Bojer are the legitimate successors to Börnstjerne Björnson and Jonas Lie as interpreters of a Norway whose sons and daughters have done their part in advancing civilization.

It is a simple story that Bojer has to tell, and yet how effective. Criticism may well think twice before declaring that it has found any vulnerable spots in the plot itself or in the manner of its telling. It is one of these books that unrolls a canvas on which the artist has employed no high colors to fascinate the eye. It is all so subdued in tone, and yet what action there is as the characters become living personalities and grip the onlooker!

The dim, blue twilight had already fallen upon the countryside, and when the bell at Lindegaard rang to call the workers home to supper, its sound rose and fell like an angelus over fjord and mountains.… The farm laborers lived in the little fishermen's cottages down by the steel-gray fjord, each with a small piece of land about it. They were pledged to work many weeks of the year on the big farm, and cultivated their own land when they came home in the evening, and even then they had to resort to the sea for their principal means of subsistence. They took part in the herring fisheries in the Autumn, and in the Winter sailed hundreds of miles in open boats up to Lofoten, perhaps tempted by the hope of gain, but perhaps, too, because on the sea they were free men.

With a few strokes Bojer produces a striking contrast between peace on land and the danger of the sea. It is a peace, of course, made almost insufferable because of the difficulty for these humble folks of the Norwegian coast country to make a bare living on shore. There is Màrya Myran, the wife of one of the farm laborers, cutting the grain on the big farm, the single worker remaining on one of the large barley fields, and "though Màrya had done twice an ordinary day's work, she wanted to finish the last little bit before she went home; but she dreaded standing erect, for she was ready to drop with fatigue."

Kristiver's wife has with her in the field her baby. It is a touching picture where she finally stumbles homeward with the little one on her back. It is a household in which her boy Lars is soon to join his father on the Lofoten trip; a thing that his youthful fancy has pictured as the height of ambition.

It is not impossible that in the person of Lars, Johan Bojer tells of some of his own experiences as a Lofoten fisherman. He, too, was a poor boy, born March 6, 1872, at Orkesdaloren near Trondhjem. The greater part of his childhood was passed at Risen, on the other side of the fjord. He fished in the fjord, tended cattle in the fields in Summer, and went once a week to school, to stay two days. On Sundays he went to service with the grown-ups, and in the evenings, in front of the open fire, he heard Mother Randi tell fairy tales and stories like those that Bojer later retold under the title Old Tales. Mother Randi herself had seen these little queer people and believed firmly in them. All was preparatory to the time when Bojer turned to writing.

Màrya Myran had passed the seventeen years of her married life on the coast, but had lived her earlier life in a valley, among the forests and mountains, and was now as little reconciled to her life by the sea as she had been on the first day of it. Her husband, Kristiver, was still the handsomest man in the district, but he was out on the sea the greater part of the year, chaining her to a life on the wild, barren shore and filling her with such fear and unrest during the long Winter nights that it was all she could do to restrain her impulse to flee from it all. For him and their six children the gray cottage out there was home, but it would never be hers. She was as homesick now as she had been all through the first year of her married life; she might do the work of two or three, but she never succeeded in working herself into a feeling of home.

The sea, with its terrible, howling storms that raged all through the Winter [we read], the waves that day and night thundered and foamed upon the sand and seaweed, foamed, too, in her mind and made her sleepless, and would one day, she felt, rob her of her reason. They were long, long years. She looked forward to the day when Kristiver would sell his boats and house, move with her and the children up into the valley and take to farming. They could never be worse off than they were now.

Every Winter he risked his life upon the Lofoten Sea, and, if one year the fishing was good, it was eaten up by the seven bad years, and they were always in poverty. But to hope to draw him from the sea to the land was like trying to change a fish into a bird, and he turned the children's minds in his direction. The eldest boy, Lars, was only 16, but he wanted to go to Lofoten next Winter; and Oluf, who was 14 in the Spring, talked of nothing else. She was like a hen with a brood of ducklings, vainly calling and enticing them away from the water.

The simile could hardly be more perfect. Johan Bojer, as Joseph Hergesheimer said of The Great Hunger, writes in such a way as to cause "annoyance to a world of fat comfort." And John Galsworthy adds that there is in his works a "stark realistic spirituality characteristic of a race with special depths of darkness to contend with, and its own northern sunlight and beauty." All this applies with special force to the men and women whom Bojer presents as typical of their environment and true to the life in The Last of the Vikings.

Kristiver Myran had become sole owner of a Lofoten boat with a reputation for capsizing so often that when it was put up for auction he was the only bidder. He had been a headman for many years, but only part owner in the boat, and what is the good of a successful fishing season once in a while when the proceeds have to be divided among six men? He owed for the boat, it is true, and would have to go still deeper into debt if he alone had to equip six men for a Winter's fishing. It was foolhardy, but he had taken the plunge, and what was done could not be undone.

There can be love in a cottage, even as humble as that of Kristiver Myran. The affection that existed between Kristàver and Màrya was not of the kind that wastes itself in words. The day was near when the Lofoten boats were making ready for their perilous voyage north. Below the boathouse at Kristàver's place lay the Seal, the craft that he and his son were about to set out in, together with their four companions:

At Myran, where Kristàver and Màrya slept in a bed against the south wall, Kristàver woke in the middle of the night, and a little while after said softly:

"Are you crying, Mlrya?"

"Oh, no!"

"You mustn't be so unhappy about it."

He was just dropping asleep again when he felt her arm about his neck.

"It'll be so sad for me when you're gone!"

"Oh, well, but you're so clever you will get on all right."

"And you're taking them with you! Now it's Lars, and next it'll be Oluf, one after another. You're taking them away! You're taking, them away!"

What could Kristiver say to this? They disagreed on this point, but in all else Marya was the best of wives, and toiled from morning till night, only sometimes with a look of fear in her eyes. Her arms were around his neck now, and she did not quite agree with him again; but it would all come out right, for Mirya was the best of wives.

It is a moot point whether Johan Bojer is at his best when describing a homely scene like this: the gathering in the little church on the last Sunday before the sailing, when many a wife from the shore district raised her eyes from her hymn book to look across at her husband, when the hymn became a little prayer for his return from the long voyage northward, or when he deals with the sea itself and the men who are taking their lives in their hands as they set sail for Lofoten. The romantic and sentimental element in The Lost of the Vikings is not over great. As boys will be boys and girls will be girls, Lars does leave behind him a lass, Ellen Koya, who had found a soft spot in the young fisherman's heart. But this is really subsidiary to the main theme of the book. It is fighting the battle against the angry North Sea waves that spells the great fascination of this story. If Johan Bojer is in his element on shore, even more so is the sea his element.

The Seal was one of four boats making that particular spot of the Norwegian coast their home port. There was the Storm-Bird, where Andreas Ekra was headman; the Sea-Fire, owned by Peter Suzansa, and the Sea-Flower, where lame Jacob limped about to make ready for the great adventure. Six men to each boat was the rule. The hour for departure was nigh. Mirya was standing with other wives upon the beach. Kristiver climbed back over the roof of the aft cabin to put on the steerage and then crept forward again, and dropped into the headman's place on the seat, turning his face to the land and to her, but without saying anything.

"Let go!"

There was a sound of wet rope against an iron ring as the grapnel was hauled in; a block screeched, and the broad, heavy square sail was hoisted up the mast, and, filling with the wind, was fastened obliquely across the boat; and the Seal moved and began to glide slowly into the bay.

"Good-bye, Kristiver! Good-bye, Lars!" And "Good-bye!" cried many wives on the beach as they took off the kerchiefs that covered their heads and waved them in farewell.

Kristiver was now a headman, who swung the tiller above his head and looked after everything on board, but he nevertheless waved his sou'wester vigorously and shouted "Good-bye!" A gust of wind flung dark streaks across the bay; the Seal heeled over, and the water foamed at her bow and in her wake, and the red pennon fluttered at the masthead. Mirya looked at it, and her face brightened. She had made it out of material that was to have been a petticoat for herself, and she had embroidered Kristiver's initials upon it with blue thread. Those who stood on the shore began to run along the beach as if trying to keep up with the boats, and the last thing that Mirya saw, as the Seal disappeared in the frosty haze, was a sou'wester waved from the stern as the topsail was hoisted.

And so they sailed away. It was Kristiver's first sailing day with the Seal, and he stood with every sense alert, trying to make acquaintance with the boat. That there was something wrong with her he saw at once. There was not the right accord between the rigging and the boat. Women and horses have their caprices, he thought to himself, and so has a boat, and he meant to tame her.

And he did. How Kristiver accomplished this task, Bojer relates in one of the most fascinating chapters of the book. It would spoil the effect of the whole not to leave it for the prospective reader.

Days and nights passed and still they kept sailing north. Lars was being initiated into the mysteries of the great deep. How wonderful it all was and yet how strenuous the life. Much of the sailing was through dangerous passages, then open water again, and on the wind-swept shore of a bay in the gray mountain-wall stood a few houses, with smoke rising from their chimneys. Lars thought that if his mother lived there she would go quite out of her mind. "Poor mother! If only Oluf will do all he can to help her this Winter!"

Lofoten is reached. Thousands of fishermen like Kristiver and his crew have assembled to make ready for the fishing. The scene is like no other in all the world. The signal flag is hoisted in the inspection office. Oars struck against one another and creaked, one boat bumped up against another and at the same time was pushed from the opposite side; swearing and threats filled the air. All wanted to be first on the fishing grounds. But the first day brought disappointment. The nets were set and hauled up without any catch worth speaking of. But hope was something that kept their spirits up. And then came the day when the sea gave up its riches in such abundance as never before in the memory of man. With what color effect Bojer sketches the life of these men, both as they are at work on the fishing banks and spending their time ashore under conditions that would be insufferable to any one but such who have known nothing different since attaining manhood.

But let us not forget the women and children left at home. A great storm was sweeping up the coast. It is unpleasant to be out on such a stormy night. It is bad enough down by the fjord, but what must it be for those who perhaps are out on the sea! Lofoten! Lofoten!

Mirya had relighted the lamp and put the children to bed, and had returned to her weaving. The house shook with the wind, and it was a relief to her to have her fingers occupied when the gusts of the wind threatened to lift the cottage and carry it away through the night. Was she afraid? No, but she felt inclined to sing, to cry out wild, incoherent words, only to drown those shrieks of anguish out in the darkness, where the storm was like the howling of evil spirits. She worked with busy fingers. It was no ordinary piece of weaving, not homespun or linen; it was a hanging with figures woven into it, and she had learned it, and she had learned how to do it from the master forester's wife up the valley when she was a girl. This lady had lately come to her with a pattern for her to weave from. It represented the legend of Siegfried, and at present she was doing the part where Siegfried was riding his horse Crane through a great, crackling fire on the mountain in Franconia.

It is in touches like these that Johan Bojer shows his mastery in delineation:

As she sat there with the storm about her, she seemed to be looking at her own life as she wove the great legend of long ago into her web. She was condemned to live here by the sea, which she hated. It would almost be a rest to go out of her mind some day, but she would have to take Kristàver with her. She could easily throw herself into the sea in weather like this, but she must have Kristàver with her.

They say that in Norway they read Jack London in preference to any other American writer. It is not difficult to account for this. There is a kinship between London and one who, like Johan Bojer, depicts life in all its elemental strength that must perforce appeal to a race like that which has the Vikings for its forebears.

No other European writer of the generation ever succeeded in gaining the ear of the American public more quickly than did Bojer. Before 1919 his name was virtually unknown this side the Atlantic Ocean. The Great Hunger was the first of his books to appear in English, The Face of the World likewise was published here in 1919. In 1920 appeared Treacherous Ground and The Power of a Lie. Life followed shortly afterward. In the heyday of his literary activity it is to be assumed that The Last of the Vikings will yet have many successors, but whether Johan Bojer can ever excel himself is doubtful.