white picket fence graced with summer flowers frames a modest farmhouse overlooking a vista of mountains and sea. A child once wandered the surrounding pastures, looking upon the world with wonder and discovering a vocation in the solitude of forests and fjords. 
      Novelist Knut Hamsun grew to maturity in the 1860s and '70s in this distant land, high above the Arctic Circle. For him the coastal villages of Nordland were a canvas upon which was painted the enigma of human personality. The glacier-carved mountains, fjords, and woods around Hamaroy were imprints of a mysterious divinity, objects to study and parables of life to describe--in language that would win him the Nobel Prize in literature. (See also "Knut Hamsun: Father of the Modern School of Literature").

Knut Hamsun's home in Hamaroy, restored to its nineteenth-century appearance and open to the public.

      "I give thanks for the lonely night, for the hills, for the whispering of the darkness and the sea," he wrote. "Listen in the east and listen in the west, but listen! That is the everlasting God! This stillness murmuring in my ear is the blood of all nature seething, is God weaving through the world and through me."
      The endless summer nights for Hamsun "colored the horizon with a fatty, red light, motionless like oil. Everywhere the sky was open and pure. I gazed into the clear sea and it was as if I lay face to face with the depths of the earth, and as if my beating heart went out to those depths and was at home there. God knows, I thought to myself, why the horizon clothes itself in mauve and gold tonight; or perhaps there is some celebration above the world."     
    Hamsun moved to a coastal village in nearby Tranoy when he was fourteen to work as a clerk. The building still clings to the water's edge, now outfitted as a gallery dedicated to Hamsun and his work. Outside a child bends close to the ground to gather berries and befriend the creatures near the earth. "I stop," Hamsun wrote with rapture, "turn in all directions and, weeping, call birds, trees, stones, grass and ants by name, I look about and name them each in turn. . . . I take up a dry twig and hold it in my hand as I sit there and think my own thoughts; the twig is nearly rotten, its meager bark distresses me, and pity steals through my heart."

The shop in Tranoy where Hamsun worked as a clerk is now a gallery dedicated to Hamsun's works.

ishing is a timeless vocation binding men to the sea. Docks, factories, and drying racks for rich catches of cod recall the world Hamsun knew. On the horizon across the open water the sharp peaks of the Lofoten Islands form a spiny ridge. Hamsun worked there as a schoolmaster before going south to Bodo to serve as a shoemaker's apprentice and publish an  early collection of poetry. A stately twelfth-century church is among the few structures that survived German bombardment of the city during World War II. Today the waterfront is a vibrant boating center and jumping-off point for yachts, fishing boats, and ferries servicing the far-flung communities to the north.
     With bold confidence, Hamsun traveled to the trading center of Kjerringoy forty miles north of Bodo to obtain a loan from the wealthy merchant Erasmus Zahl, with which to pursue his literary ambitions in Copenhagen. Today Kjerringoy is preserved as Norway's finest example of the "all-inclusive" trading centers that functioned in the nineteenth century like medieval manors, with Zahl the presiding lord.

The waterfront in the regional center of Bodo.

      A demure young woman attired in period dress guides visitors through the main residence, a scene young Hamsun would have recognized as he approached Zahl with his audacious request. A general store where Hamsun briefly worked, a warehouse, and a handful of farm buildings encircle a picturesque public garden. Kjerringoy is thought to be the model of many of his Nordland village portrayals, and a bust of the writer stands along a lonely path.
      These tidy, intimate communities are often agitated by the arrival of an outsider in Hamsun's fiction. Through this device, Hamsun probes the tangled riddle of human affections, particularly the fateful play of desire, pride, and trust between man and woman.
      Hamsun's lovers typically meet by chance along a forest path:

      "I am depressed and full of sad thoughts," I say.
      And in her sympathy she makes no answer.
      "I love three things," I say then. "I love a dream of love I once had, I love you, and I love this patch of earth."
      "And which do you love the best?"
      "The dream."