Garborg, Arne Evensen

Arne Evensen Garborg, Arne also spelled Adne, (born January 25, 1851, Time, Norway—died January 14, 1924, Asker), novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist, one of the first great writers to show the literary possibilities of Nynorsk, a language that many writers wished to establish in place of the standard Dano-Norwegian literary medium. The demand for social reform was central to Garborg’s life and work.

Garborg was the son of a farmer, and his father’s suicide, the result of an overstrained religious conscience aggravated by his son’s rejection of the family farm, made the young Garborg a permanent enemy of orthodox religion, especially his narrow Pietist heritage. Like Tolstoy, he understood Christianity to mean a social and spiritual revolution. Later he moved ever further to the left and became interested in socialism, anarchism, and free love, though he attacked each when it threatened to become dogmatic.

Educated at a teachers’ seminary, he taught school and edited newspapers before studying at King Frederick’s University (now the University of Oslo). An unusually versatile and prolific writer, Garborg established himself as one of the great writers of his time with his second novel, Bondestudentar (1883; “Peasant Students”), a depiction of the cultural clash between country and city life as embodied in the struggles and moral decline of a peasant student living in the capital. The naturalistic approach of this novel was developed in Hjaa ho mor (1890; “At Mother’s”), winner of a German literary prize, and several later works. Garborg’s masterpiece is a poetic cycle in Nynorsk, Haugtussa (1895; “Woman of the Underground People”), which describes a young girl’s belief in the supernatural and was set to music by Edvard Grieg. Novels in English translation include Trætte mænd (1891; Weary Men), about the decadence of European society in the final decades of the 19th century, and Fred (1892; Peace), depicting the religious beliefs and economic difficulties of the Norwegian peasant. Among Garborg’s other works are translations of the Odyssey (1918) and of a section of the Mahābhārata (1921), and from the Danish, for presentation in the Nynorsk theatre that he and his wife had founded, Baron Ludvig Holberg’s classical comedy Jeppe på bjerget (1921; “Jeppe of the Hill”).

In Garborg’s early novels set in the city of Kristiania, the stifling or corrupting consequence of upper-class sexual mores is a central concern, and eventually the author connects sexuality with religious expression. In his later novels, and in the drama Læraren (1896; “The Teacher”), religion per se is at the centre, along with Garborg’s personal religious confessions. What is remarkable about most of his confessions, whether they be religious, moral, or social, is their artistic motivation and intellectual open-mindedness.