The Raven's Hoard

In the autumn of 1890 a Norwegian newspaper announced that a thirteen-year-old girl, the daughter of a town magistrate in Bergen, had written a book. The title page of Vi børn (We Children) said it was by "Inger Johanne, 13 Aar gammel." The real author was thirty-seven, lived in Kristiania, and was called Dikken Zwilgmeyer. Barbara Hendrikke Wind Daae Zwilgmeyer (1853–1913) was born in Trondheim. When she was eight, her father became town magistrate (byfogd) in Risør, and the family moved to the little coastal town on the Skagerrak. That detail gave her away. Within a year the papers had worked out that several of the stories were set in Risør, and Aftenposten guessed "Frøken Zwilgmeyer," the late magistrate's daughter. The mask was made from her own face: Inger Johanne is a magistrate's daughter in a coastal town, and so was she. Her publisher, Fr. Nygaard in Bergen, kept the Inger Johanne name on the books until 1895, when Barndom (Childhood) finally c...

In the autumn of 1924, the critic Kristian Elster reviewed a new Norwegian novel in Aftenposten , praised its epic force, and then admitted he knew nothing of the author's earlier work. That author, Ole Edvart Rølvaag, was forty-eight years old and had already published five books. Not one of them had appeared in Norway. Rølvaag (1876–1931) was born on the island of Dønna in Helgeland and fished in Lofoten from the age of fourteen. In 1896 an uncle sent him a ticket to America. He worked as a farmhand in South Dakota, studied at Augustana Academy and St. Olaf College, and ended up as professor of Norwegian at St. Olaf in Northfield, Minnesota, where he stayed until his death on 5 November 1931. He wrote in Norwegian, for Norwegian Americans, and his early books, among them Amerika-breve (1912), Paa glemte veie (1914), To tullinger (1920) and Længselens baat (1921), were all published by Augsburg Publishing House in Minneapolis. Norway finally met him through the prairie novel...