Ole Rølvaag’s classic homesteading novel offers lessons for South Dakotans today.
By Lance Nixon
The young teacher wants to write a book about homesteading in Dakota Territory, and by 1925 he’s finished with the work that some readers and critics will eventually consider an outstanding example of The Great American Novel.
But there’s a catch: This great American novel is published in another country, written in a different language, and most Americans won’t be able to read it until the translation of 1927 arrives under its English title: Giants in the Earth.
Ole Rølvaag was writing for Norwegians on both sides of the ocean. He wanted to finish his novel by 1925 in part to honor the first Norwegian immigrants to America, who had arrived exactly 100 years earlier. (He was also trying to finish before the well-known Norwegian novelist Johan Bojer finished The Emigrants about homesteaders in what is now North Dakota.)
This year, descendants of those first Norwegian immigrants are commemorating the bicentennial of the journey as well as the centennial of Rølvaag’s saga. Those are important anniversaries in a state where more than 110,000 people — one out of every eight South Dakotans — claim Norwegian ancestry. The Center for Western Studies at Augustana University, the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra and the South Dakota Historical Society Press all recognized the significance and worked to celebrate the milestone in different ways.
Shortly after Delta David Gier became the music director of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra in 2004, he was given a copy of Giants in the Earth in order to better understand a portion of South Dakota’s cultural history. He later discovered that Douglas Moore, a great American composer of the mid-20th century, had written a Pulitzer Prize-winning opera based on the novel in 1951. When the orchestra performed the piece in April, it was the first time audiences had heard the music since 1973.
“We were happy to be able to rediscover it,” Gier says. “The opera world couldn’t wait to hear it, and there’s not a better musical entity than the South Dakota Symphony to take up the mantle.”
Gier says the music is evocative of the wide-open spaces and loneliness that Rølvaag’s characters experience on their claim in Dakota Territory. South Dakota Public Broadcasting recorded the performance and plans to make it available online.
Harry Thompson, executive director of the Center for Western Studies, says milestones like centennials often remind people of important events, and so Giants in the Earth was a topic of the university’s annual Dakota Conference, where the theme was “Settling and Resettling the Plains.” But Rølvaag’s masterful telling of 19th century European immigration and the westward movement isn’t the touchstone that it once was, he noted.
“Giants in the Earth used to be required reading in schools around the country,” Thompson says. “I was required to teach the novel at Greenwich (Connecticut) High School, when I was doing my teaching practicum in 1976. It is no longer required nationally, and I’d be surprised to learn that many schools in South Dakota or Minnesota require it.”
Still, Dedra McDonald Birzer, the director of research and publishing for the South Dakota Historical Society Press, says many of the novel’s themes remain relevant today. The press published a 100th anniversary edition with a new introduction and annotations by scholar Allan C. Carlson, a historian of Nordic immigration and culture.
The new annotations help explain concepts from the book that may not be as well known today, such as Norwegian mythology, Lutheran understandings and scriptural references. But, Birzer says, it was important to retain the novel’s original integrity. “We kept the original introduction by Lincoln Colcord, who was also the translator and someone who Rølvaag worked closely with,” Birzer says. “We basically added bookends to each side. I’ve known Allen Carlson for a long time. Our ancestors are from the same part of Sweden, so we’ve talked a lot of Scandinavian history. I knew he was well versed in the things we hoped to bring out, such as its impact and the things that Rølvaag was trying to accomplish.”
Rølvaag’s novel was published in Norwegian in two volumes in 1924 and 1925 under the titles, I de dage (In those days) and Riket grundlegges (The Founding of the Kingdom). The English version of two years later takes its title from the same verse of scripture, Genesis 6:4: “There were giants in the earth in those days ….”
In English it was a Book of the Month Club selection and sold nearly 80,000 copies in its first year, with a publisher’s poster proclaiming it, “The fullest, finest and most powerful novel that has been written about pioneer life in America.”
Carlson sees Rølvaag’s novel as much more than an account of one ethnic group’s experience. Native Americans appear briefly. The Norwegian settlers are afraid, although the novel’s protagonist Per Hansa befriends them. Similarly, the Norwegians make friends with a competing group of Irish settlers, despite friction over competing land claims.
Carlson views Rølvaag as rejecting both Anglo-American preeminence and the idea of the “melting pot” to affirm instead “a vision of the United States as a democracy of ethnicities, a unique place where Hispanics, Asians, Africans, and American Indians — along with Europeans — could and should preserve their languages and ethnicities.”
Birzer agrees. “We see this a lot with Beret (Per Hansa’s wife), the idea of hanging on to that Norwegian culture and language and not becoming so American that part of your identity is lost,” she says. “Rølvaag spoke and wrote a lot about that. He thought you should have a distinct culture that is very much part of your identity and then go from there.”
Much of Rølvaag’s research came from interviews with the Berdahl family, who made the trek to Dakota by wagon train. Rølvaag’s wife, Jennie, was a Berdahl.
“Rølvaag depended heavily on his father-in-law, Andrew Berdahl, and other relatives for the factual information that is in the novel,” says Solveig Zempel, Professor Emerita of Norwegian at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and Rølvaag’s granddaughter. “They were part of an 11-wagon train that went from Fillmore County in Minnesota to Minnehaha County in Dakota Territory in 1873.”
The Berdahls settled in Edison Township, just north of Sioux Falls and west of Garretson. Rølvaag placed the characters in his novel farther west, though Per Hansa files on a homestead in Dakota the same year that the Berdahls arrived.
Rølvaag wrote many letters to his in-laws seeking information as he was writing. “He wrote much of the novel in his cabin the forest in Itasca County, Minnesota, and wrote the rest when he was in Oslo, Norway,” Zempel says. “The land where the cabin was located on Big Island Lake is now part of the Chippewa National Forest, and the cabin itself has been relocated to Sioux Falls. It is currently on the campus at Augustana.”
What sets Giants in the Earth apart and makes it a truly great novel — some would argue the greatest novel ever written about Dakota — is the way Rølvaag deals with the psychology of his characters. That has made his work influential in odd and perhaps controversial ways. The first great historian of the Great Plains, Walter Prescott Webb, used Rølvaag’s novel as one of his proof texts for his argument that the Great Plains in its early period was a man’s country where women didn’t feel at ease.
“This story brings out clearly the difference in the effect of the Plains on the men and on the women,” Webb writes. “Men have loved the Plains with a primitive simplicity; women have been repelled from them as from a mysterious and dangerous world. So it is with Per Hansa, the man, and Beret, his wife. To Per Hansa everything was possible … With Beret it was different. She resented the country by the time she entered it — the vastness, the solitude, the newness and strangeness of it all.”
Per Hansa can scarcely believe that as an immigrant — not yet an American citizen, not even able to speak English to any extent — he can still get 160 acres of free land by filing on a homestead and then proving up. “Isn’t it stranger than a fairy tale, that a man can have such things here, just for the taking?” he asks Beret.
Everything Per Hansa touches seems to succeed. Once a fisherman in the Lofoten Islands (as was Rølvaag before he came to America in 1896), he rigs nets to catch waterfowl on the Dakota marshes with his sons. He makes money by trading for furs with the Sioux Indians at Flandreau and then selling the furs for a profit in Minnesota. He plants his wheat at the wrong time, and it still germinates and produces a bumper crop despite a late snowstorm.
Carlson notes that in his extraordinary success, Per Hansa is like “the Ash Lad” of Norwegian folktales, Askeladden — the male Norwegian counterpart of Cinderella — who always seems to triumph.
But Beret’s fairy tale is darker. She misses her family and the familiar terrain of Norway. She wonders how people can even live in Dakota, a great desolation where there’s not a thing to hide behind. She feels more and more oppressed with the “monsterlike” plain of Dakota until finally she begins to see something like a troll face grimacing at her out of the prairie landscape.
“I think Per Hansa and Beret might be considered two sides of the psychology of immigration,” Zempel says.
Ironically, for one who’d written so brilliantly about Dakota, Rølvaag didn’t stay in the place where he set his best novels. He worked as a farmhand near Elk Point for two years before enrolling at Augustana Academy in Canton. After graduating in 1901, he attended St. Olaf College, where he eventually became the head of the Norwegian Department. He died in Northfield in 1931.
Though he spent just a few years in South Dakota, his great novel remains anchored here and still offers food for thought for modern readers. “A reminder of how much we consider what it means to be an American comes out of this immigrant experience,” Birzer says. “In a place like South Dakota, almost everybody has immigration stories, one generation or five generations back, and sometimes those stories have been lost. I still think that is such a shaping experience.”
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.