. Such a
nature, one would think, must be the final blossoming of powerful
hereditary tendencies, converging silently through numerous generations
to its predestined climax. All we know is that Hamsun's forebears were
sturdy Norwegian peasant folk, said only to be differentiated from their
neighbours by certain artistic preoccupations that turned one or two of
them into skilled craftsmen. More certain it is that what may or may not
have been innate was favoured and fostered and exaggerated by physical
environment and early social experiences.

Hamsun was born on Aug. 4, 1860, in one of the sunny valleys of central
Norway. From there his parents moved when he was only four to settle in
the far northern district of Lofoden--that land of extremes, where the
year, and not the day, is evenly divided between darkness and light;
where winter is a long dreamless sleep, and summer a passionate dream
without sleep; where land and sea meet and intermingle so gigantically
that man is all but crushed between the two--or else raised to titanic
measures by the spectacle of their struggle.

The Northland, with its glaring lights and black shadows, its unearthly
joys and abysmal despairs, is present and dominant in every line that
Hamsun ever wrote. In that country his best tales and dramas are laid.
By that country his heroes are stamped wherever they roam. Out of that
country they draw their principal claims to probability. Only in that
country do they seem quite at home. Today we know, however, that the
pathological case represents nothing but an extension of perfectly
normal tendencies. In the same way we know that the miraculous
atmosphere of the Northland serves merely to develop and emphasize
traits that lie slumbering in men and women everywhere. And on this
basis the fantastic figures created by Hamsun relate themselves to
ordinary humanity as the microscopic enlargement of a cross section to
the living tissues. What we see is true in everything but proportion.

The artist and the vagabond seem equally to have been in the blood of
Hamsun from the very start. Apprenticed to a shoemaker, he used his
scant savings to arrange for the private printing of a long poem and a
short novel produced at the age of eighteen, when he was still signing
himself Knud Pedersen Hamsund. This done, he abruptly quit his
apprenticeship and entered on that period of restless roving