Tarjei Vesaas enjoys the paradoxical privilege of being at the same time Norway's most provincial and most cosmopolitan writer. He has spent practically all of his life in relative seclusion among the Telemark farmers whose dialect he speaks and writes, yet he has also travelled widely abroad, and his contact with foreign literature has helped develop his personal style, the most modern and most European in Norway. Vesaas uses Norway's second language, nynorsk, which has somewhat restricted his Norwegian popularity; on the other hand he has won many admirers in the neighboring countries and in recent years has seen his books appear simultaneously in nynorsk, Danish, and Swedish. His position in Norwegian letters is comparable to that of Pär Lagerkvist in Sweden and Martin A. Hansen in Denmark.

Tarjei Vesaas was born in 1897 at Vinje in Telemark, a district known for its great traditions in rustic arts, folk music, and medieval ballads. Telemark is the home of the fourteenth-century visionary poem Draumkvædet as well as of a number of modern poets, notably Aasmund Vinje (1818-70) whose outlook, like that of Vesaas, was European, though he wrote in nynorsk. Among contemporary Telemark artists sculptor Dyre Vaa, poetess Aslaug Vaa, and composer Eyvind Groven are second cousins of Vesaas; the rosemaling specialist Øystein Vesaas is his uncle.

Vesaas' teens fell in the years of the First World War. He was a lonely and sensitive boy who felt as his own the suffering and broken hopes of youth on the battlefields of Europe. Being the oldest son, he was expected to take over the family farm, even though working with the soil did not satisfy his ambitions; he was a good student and wanted to go on studying. Instead he had to leave school at the age of fourteen, and with the exception of a year at Voss Folk High School, never   [p. viii]   continued his formal training. For all that he remained a great reader, and the books of Knut Hamsun, Rudyard Kipling, Selma Lagerlöf, and Tagore set him dreaming of a new world, more colorful than Vinje parish, which he now wanted to explore. In 1917 he spent the winter at Voss near Bergen; in 1919 he served seven months with the Royal Guards in Oslo. He went abroad for the first time in 1926 and in the following ten years visited a number of European countries: Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Italy, France, England, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Austria. In 1934 he married Halldis Moren, a well-known poetess, and settled in Vinje on the farm Midtbø, which he had bought from an uncle. Since 1947 Vesaas has received a yearly stipend from the Norwegian State. He won the 1952 Venice Triennale Prize for the best European prose work of that year, and in 1964 he was awarded the Nordic Council Prize for Literature.

Travelling still excites this writer. He sets out on his journeys with all the intellectual curiosity of a bright school boy unspoiled by inverted snobbery or by cultural pessimism. He relaxes completely on a crowded ocean beach, and has no objections to juke boxes or to electric power plants, even when they threaten to impinge upon the rustic idylls of Telemark. Vesaas can accept the spirit of modern times more easily than many of his restless and disillusioned colleagues because, unlike them, he is still firmly anchored in the old culture of his inland home. His frequent jaunts abroad do not inspire him directly, but act as a catalyst for his only true inspiration, the everyday miracles of Vinje parish. He writes of what are, socially and intellectually speaking, very ordinary people. He is not concerned with analyzing them as products of a Norwegian rural community; rather he wishes to interpret their conduct in terms of the surrounding landscape. Hence he uses a language laden with images of the mountains, waterways, and pine forests of Vinje, and he believes that such images or symbols disclose secrets about his characters which conventional language cannot convey. In this sense Vesaas belongs to the modernist movement in European literature,   [p. ix]   standing somewhere between Kafka and Robbe-Grillet, but mainly he belongs to Telemark, whose ballad poetry from Draumkvædet to modern nystev shows an unbroken tradition of symbolic language.

Vesaas' first novel, Children of Man (Menneskebonn, 1923), is the melancholy story of a boy who loses his parents and later his sweetheart under tragic circumstances, yet who for all his misfortune still retains a naïve faith in the importance of good deeds. The novel has some wonderfully sensitive landscapes, but parts of the plot are not very believable, and the rhetorical style might conceivably produce laughter sometimes where tears were intended. Excessively sweet, though nevertheless attractive to many specialists, is Vesaas' next book Huskuld the Herald (Sendemann Huskuld, 1924), which tells of a lonely old village eccentric, a local St. Francis of the Birds, whose last years are blessed with the companionship of an adopted child. Most of Vesaas' writing, even his best, is colored by the author's sentimentality and love of melodrama. In these early works, however, the emotional style is carried to extreme limits by exaggerated use of expletives, rhetorical questions, repetitions, and unusual syntax. Such is also the style of the play God's Abodes (Guds bustader, 1925) and the two-part novel Grinde Farm and Evening at Grinde (Grindegard, 1925; Grinde-kveld, 1926). None of these works are important except insofar as they contain the crude beginnings of certain motifs which Vesaas later handled with great skill, e.g. the lack of communication between parents and its effect upon a sensitive child. This subject is treated with a rather lively and colorful realism in The Black Horses (Dei svarte hestane, 1928), Vesaas' first successful novel.

Usually classified as a romantic, Vesaas with some justice could also be termed a realist, not only because he can render details of reality with the penetrating precision of a Dürer drawing, but also because of his ability to express himself convincingly within the framework of complete, realistic actions and situations. This he has done most often in his short   [p. x]   stories, a genre well suited to his talents and one in which he achieved early greatness. Already a story like "Signe Ton," from The Bell in the Mound (Klokka i haugen, 1929), shows a complete integration of plot, character, atmosphere into one bold image; on the other hand such integration is totally lacking in the four novels about Klas Dyregodt: Father's journey, Sigrid Stallbrokk, The Unknown Men, and The Heart Hears Its Native Music (Fars reise, 1930; Sigrid Stallbrokk, 1931; Dei ukjende mennene, 1932; Hjarta høyrer sine heimlandstonar, 1938). Ever since Children of Man Vesaas has applied dramatic techniques in much of his prose. His descriptive passages are usually written in a lapidary style, with verbs frequently left out, as in stage directions. Dialogues without inquit ("said he") are common, as are long soliloquies which are straight monologues rather than dreamlike streams of consciousness. Of special interest, and difficult to reproduce in English translation, is Vesaas' extensive use of the impersonal pronoun ein ("one," here normally rendered as "they" or "you") in so-called erlebte Rede, e.g. "one was always alone" instead of "'I am always alone,' he thought." Unfortunately Vesaas' prose did not at first have the richness, tempo, and concentration needed for a successful application of such techniques. A case in point is the Dyregodt tetralogy mentioned above: fine details notwithstanding, the melodrama and forced psychology of these novels as well as the repetitive and drawn-out action make the reading of them unrewarding. Very different is The Sandalwood (Sandeltreet, 1933), a story about the fears and expectations of a pregnant woman and her relationship with an understanding husband and with her children. The novel is tightly composed, free from exaggerated sentimentality, and on the whole closer to life than Vesaas' earlier works: from this time on a deeper awareness of social and political conditions determines the subject matter of his writing. Thus the play Ultimatum (1934; written in Strassbourg, 1932) shows Vesaas' early reaction to the European arms race and points forward to House in Darkness and to other great novels of commitment. Also to this trend belong   [p. xi]   the present novel about life on a farm, The Great Cycle (Det store spelet, 1934), and its sequel, The Women Call: Come Home (Kvinnor ropar heim, 1935). Though perhaps not the chief merit of these books, their picture of peaceful productivity can well be seen as a warning to Norwegian readers that the dissatisfaction, restlessness, and aggressive tendencies in the world might soon invade their own community. This argument is taken up once more in The Clay and the Wheel (Leiret og hjulet, 1936), a substantial collection of stories, which includes such masterpieces as "Twenty-One" and "Bread."

In the sixteen years between 1923 and 1938 Vesaas published sixteen books, all of them, with the notable exception of The Great Cycle and half a dozen stories, the works of a learner experimenting with a new narrative style. Vesaas' first books are filled with conventional imagery: the sun and the moon are personified; gold and silver metaphors are used to indicate beauty, wealth, happiness. Much more interesting is another type of imagery based upon observations of nature and everyday life in Vinje: pine trees are likened to candles burning in the night, the life of a modest man is described as a rustle in the fallen leaves, true love as the filling of hollow hands. The wind and the earth are personified, also the mountains (symbolizing a man's conscience); later the farm, the house, the home, take on personality, and finally abstract ideas like speed, murder, the cry. Vesaas' novels from the 1930's document his efforts to integrate these various symbolic elements, but not until The Seed (Kimen, 1940; Eng. tr., 1964) did he write a book in which his intentions were fully realized. It tells of a happy island community suddenly stirred up by the news of a murder among them. An insane stranger has killed a young girl, and carried away by excitement that gradually grows into fury, they all join in the pursuit and execution of the "criminal." Then, as their passions subside, they perceive their guilt and need for atonement, and peace is once again restored to the island. Essentially this story of mass hysteria is a reversal of the biblical myth in Luke 8: "Then   [p. xii]   went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine." The first part of the book opens with a description of the two sows: "Long naked tusks protruded all too plainly from ugly jaws, vicious teeth rooted in flesh—beneath the pitted, narrowed, overhanging brows." With this background Vesaas is able to use the pitted brow as a symbol of a downfall, of man's inherent evil, his violence, fear, and lack of judgment. The constructive forces, on the other hand, are symbolized by "the seed in the dust" (also from Luke 8), the motto which heads the second part of the book.

House in Darkness (Huset i mørkret, 1945) is one of the most significant of several Norwegian novels treating the German occupation of Norway, 1940-45. Its allegorical style is highly imaginative; the occupied country is presented in the form of a bewitched house, constantly creaking, and steeped in darkness except for certain corridors lit by shining arrows that signify the Nazi ideology. The man hired to polish the arrows is a collaborator and later a traitor, yet he is drawn with great sympathy, one of the poor of spirit who always fascinate the author. Vesaas cannot save him from liquidation by the underground, but in a very moving chapter he shows how his innocent children have their honor restored to them. Much more realistic, and hence symbolic rather than allegorical, is the novel The Bleaching Place (Bleikeplassen, 1946), which was first written as a play. It has retained a number of the qualities of drama—unity of place, a well-developed plot, suspense, and a beautiful white and black atmosphere which suits a drama of sin and atonement. The book calls to mind the biblical story of David and Bathsheba as well as King David's psalms of penitence.

The Norwegian resistance movement is the subject of several Vesaas poems from this period, and also of a play, Morning Wind (Morgonvinden, 1947), which was produced with some success at the Norwegian Theater in Oslo. While in The Bleaching Place atmosphere is evoked through visual imagery, in Morning Wind special emphasis is placed on the uses of sound, a technique further developed by Vesaas in his radio   [p. xiii]   plays. In the novel The Tower (Tårnet, 1948) Vesaas has reshaped and extended his first important symbol, the mountain peak in Children of Man. Jorunn and Randolv, a scrap iron dealer, lose their young baby when he cuts himself on the jagged, rusty iron and then develops blood poisoning. The image of the jagged barb is now used to illustrate the destructive powers of a sick conscience throughout the novel. Conscience is also portrayed, however, as a positive force, and is seen as a shining tower by Randolv's young son Nils. That he, who had been jealous of his new little brother, is finally able to overcome the crippling effects of his conscience, is an example of Vesaas' cautious optimism. Such optimism is present even in the gloomy novel The Signal (Signalet, 1950), of all Vesaas' novels probably the one most consistently allegoric. The situation is surrealistic rather than realistic: a train full of people stands ready to leave the station, but the signal of departure is not given, and never will be. Vesaas at this time had not studied Kafka, and though many critics have pointed out the similarity between The Signal and works by the German modernist, the novel in most of its striking qualities is still entirely typical of Vesaas. The positive note—that Jens is somehow able to make himself at home amid all this meaninglessness—is what set Vesaas most apart from other writers of romans nouveaux. In 1952 Vesaas published a collection of short stories, The Winds (Vindane, 1952), which later appeared in several other languages and won for its author the Venice prize mentioned above. Better than other collections of Vesaas' stories, The Winds illustrates his ability to create atmosphere by the simplest of means; typically, three of these thirteen stories have been turned into successful radio plays, and, in fact, Vesaas' rich, evocative language lends itself particularly well to oral presentation.

On the subject of symbolic language, Jacques Maritain writes in one of his English essays: "There is a curious—and tragic—phenomenon, where something great and invaluable is looked for, and missed (namely the dignity of words, which refers to truth, not power), and where by dint of refinement   [p. xiv]   the civilized mind retrogresses to that magical notion of the sign which was normal in the childlike state of mankind, yet is for mankind in its adult stage but a pathological symptom." There is no such retrogression in Vesaas; his style is not the result of refinement and decadence, but of an organic development. As for the adjectives childlike and pathological, Vesaas' sense of realism has made him choose characters who have these very qualities; that is, characters for whom even in the adult state of mankind symbolic language is natural language. A special Telemark word is the adjective næpen, usually used of scales and other weighing instruments to indicate that they are very sensitive. Vesaas uses the word of some of his characters to show how they are weighed down by an abnormal sense of guilt, by feelings of persecution often combined with stubborn pride. They are the people in the Grinde and Dyregodt books, or in books such as The Sandalwood, The Seed, The Bleaching Place, and The Tower. Especially interesting among Vesaas' sensitive characters are his children and adolescents; they are the most important personalities in his short stories and in many of his novels, such as Spring Night (Vårnatt, 1954; Eng. tr., 1964). This novel, like The Signal, has a simplified plot. A rather neurotic family of five, travelling across the moorland, have to seek refuge in a lonely house after their car breaks down. In this house there are only a young boy and his sister at home; they and each of the five intruders get involved in a curious pattern of events: an old woman dies, a child is born, there is a series of love adventures and as many disenchantments. All action is concentrated within one night and seen through the eyes of the fourteen-year-old boy Hallstein, to whom these hours become a fearful initiation into adult life. In spite of its strained use of the unities, in its details Spring Night is more realistic than The Signal. This development away from allegory toward a subtly organized symbolic novel is seen more clearly in The Birds (Fuglane, 1957), one of Vesaas' two or three best novels. Of all Vesaas' characters who express themselves in images, few seem dearer to the author than the village simpleton, people   [p. xv]   such as Huskuld the Herald or the arrow polisher. In The Winds, an entire story, "Tusten," is devoted to him; in The Birds he is the novel's "hero," and his name is Mattis. He lives happily in the house of his sister Hege until, one day, she loses her heart to another man, leaving no room for Mattis. The Birds is a book about loneliness, but also about the moments full of joy and beauty which may come to a retarded mind. It is a very moving book, sometimes sentimental, yet always tempered with sparkling humor, a rare thing in Vesaas' works.

A Lovely Day (Ein vakker dag, 1959) is Vesaas' most recent collection of stories. These all deal with everyday events in the lives of animals, children, people young and old, but the form ranges from straight realistic description to symbolic-allegorical presentation. Again, the sense of atmosphere in several stories is extraordinary, and some of them have been given as radio plays. The Fire (Brannen, 1961) is a novel which suggests both the fearful Kafkaesque world of The Signal and Vesaas' Norwegian background: like Olav Aasteson in Draumkvædet, Jon in The Fire is called upon to wander through a modem inferno. The fire raging in men is a destructive one, yet it also purifies and helps each individual in his search for self. "Have you seen the mirrors turn, so you know who you are? What you are?" Vesaas' answer, even though this is his darkest novel, is not without a faint light: "A speck of dust in an infinite vault. And yet—." The Ice Palace (Is-slottet, 1963; Eng. tr., 1966) is a novel about young people's withdrawal into intellectual or aesthetic isolation, a common enough theme in Scandinavian literature. Ibsen's use of it comes to mind (e.g. Gerd and the Ice Church in Brand), or, since in Vesaas' novel it is a question of children, Hans Andersen's "Ice Queen." The treatment, though, is typical only of Vesaas. Central among his visual images is the huge frozen waterfall—the Ice Palace, a beautiful structure of dazzling mazes—where Unn finally loses all sense of direction and freezes to death. Nowhere in Vesaas' work is the problem of a person's identity presented more strikingly than in The Ice Palace. Furthermore this book represents a new departure   [p. xvi]   in form: the chapters have headings (used earlier in some novels, e.g. House in Darkness and The Tower); they are often short, usually lyric in quality, and, sometimes, take the form of poems. One such poem, "Dream of Snow-covered Bridges," describes the snow falling on the arms of two people holding each other's hands:

As we stand the snow falls thicker.
Your sleeve turns white.
My sleeve turns white.
They rest between us like
snow-covered bridges.

But snow-covered bridges are frozen.
In here is living warmth.
Your arm is warm beneath the snow, and
a welcome weight on mine.

It snows and snows
upon silent bridges.
Bridges unknown to all.

This same problem of human contact is the subject of Vesaas' most recent novel which bears the symbolic title The Bridges (Bruene, 1966). Two teenage friends, the girl Aud and the boy Torvil, who live near a bridge, discover the corpse of a newly born baby killed and abandoned in the woods by its young mother. Later they have secret meetings with the young woman, whom they wish to protect, but this new contact threatens to destroy the old relationship between Aud and Torvil. In the end Vesaas lets each of the three characters gain a deeper understanding of his or her personality, so that they are able to accept life as it is lived by the bridge. Here, as in other Vesaas novels, the "story" is radically simplified to allow readers to achieve the immediacy of experience (of anguish, sorrow, pride, hope) which is normal in the visual arts.

Although even in the 1930's Vesaas was nationally known as a novelist and writer of short stories and plays, most of his great novels and stories have appeared since the war. During these years he has also established himself as one of Norway's   [p. xvii]   leading poets. Five collections of poetry have appeared: Kjeldene (The Springs), 1946; Leiken og lynet (The Game and the Lightning), 1947; Lykka for ferdesmenn (Wanderers' Happiness), 1949; Løynde eldars land (Land of Hidden Fires), 1953; and Ver ny, vår draum (May Our Dream Stay New), 1956. Certain general characteristics of Vesaas' style—its impressionism, symbolism, and lapidary syntax—are naturally less striking in a verse context than in prose. Nevertheless Vesaas' poetry has contributed significantly to the liberation of Norwegian poetry from conventional patterns. His form is modern and international, free from the musical regularity of the popular ballad, and though his themes are mostly the old things which gladden his inland heart—the mountain, the snow, and the trees—he also writes of the wandering tower, the way of a serpent upon the rock, and the anxiety of young people parting:

Your knees and mine
and the warm moss
and our young years
Your thirsty fear
like mine
And heavy like mine
God's eye in a sun
ablaze
Your own confusion
joins mine:
Farewell.

The Great Cycle, though it is not always judged to be Vesaas' best novel, is commonly singled out as a classic among his works, possibly because its language is free from the excesses of his experimentation: the monumental simplicity of its Old Testament style has given the book a prominent place in the well-established tradition of Norwegian rustic novels. These novels normally have for their subject the development of a young farm boy under adverse circumstances. In Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson's Sunny Hill (1857) the boy is a headstrong descendant of the Vikings who finally learns to behave in society; in Arne Garborg's Peace (1892) he is torn   [p. xviii]   between loyalty to his psychotic father (the main character of the novel) and a wish to get away from the farm; in Sigurd Hoel's The Road to World's End (1933) he is seen more in Freudian terms as a child reacting against an environment full of falsehood and authority. The Great Cycle has a number of points in common with all these books, also with Hamsun's Growth of the Soil, whose back-to-nature message reverberates through the pages of Vesaas' novel. Still, while Hamsun gives his hero mythical dimensions, making Isak into a demigod who rides triumphant through all his battles, Vesaas places his people in a real world; his Norwegian farm is a typical small holding with no end of hard work, little encouragement for its owner, and no spectacular rewards. Also, instead of pitting a simpleminded superman against nature, Vesaas places the drama inside his protagonist, whose search for meaning in life now makes up the chief subject matter of the book. Thus the story of Per Eilevson Bufast from his sixth to his twenty-first year becomes a modern Norwegian Entwicklungsroman in rustic setting.

The great cycle of the earth and the seasons, of which Per himself will ultimately be a part, is a pageant or mystery play with Life and Death as central characters. They make their appearance together at the beginning of the book where the cow calves and the prospect of pancakes and beestings pudding gives the boy a wonderful sense of security which will never quite leave him; but at the same time he must think of the little bull—calves fated to die the minute they are born. Neither Per's mother, with her frothing buckets full of first milk, nor Auntie, who carries around in herself all the rawness and strength that the earth was smelling of, can dispel the fear of death and danger which appears to the boy in many disguises—the big bull in heavy iron bands, the river current which pulls and wills, the ever-present risk of fire—and the word death itself, with its hard, dry sound, "so very far away from Sunday," reminds him of the scythed stubble in the field. Not until the end of the book, when Per takes over after his father and, almost in the manner of some ancient high priest,   [p. xix]   slaughters Goldie, does he see how Life and Death are only different manifestations of one personality.

At the center of Per's cycle is Bufast. The rather unusual name (from the adjective bufast, "permanently resident") indicates that though this is a new farm, the owner hopes to honor the Norwegian tradition and have his family live here for generations. Except for the seasonal changes, life on the farm is entirely uneventful. But farther away things are happening, automobiles and summer guests appear on the roads, newspapers tell of fires, naval disasters, wars abroad; and it is toward these more exciting regions that Per directs his yearnings. Once in the city he is struck by the beauty of trees illuminated by lamplight, but his dreams are not otherwise well-defined. Really he only wants to leave Bufast and will do so in the way most common for Norwegian farm boys of his generation: he will be brighter than all the rest at school; then his parents will have to let him study for the ministry. His conscience, however, immediately rises high as mountains: "You are only doing it to get away from Bufast," says the hill, and he is reminded of what sin is: "a polluted well in the yard of a derelict farm; the well had been half dry and full of mud, and smelled rotten."

Per's conscience and his feeling of sin are reflected in nature. There are no people to tell him about right and wrong, for he is an independent boy who has difficulties with his human contacts. He never understands his brother Botolv, and he is hardly aware of little Åsmund until it is too late. To Auntie he is drawn from his earliest years, but he soon becomes ashamed of her caresses. All the more does he welcome the relationship with Olav Bringa, a friendship so pure and poetic that (as also with Auntie) biblical language is needed to describe its temporary close: "he went out and wept bitterly." The account of Olav's, Per's, and Åsne's tacit rivalry contains a number of beautifully sensitive passages, but even more moving is the story of Åsmund's loneliness. Time and again he is described, in Vesaas' symbolic language, as wandering about in the painful fields of thistles; and when he   [p. xx]   finds himself a companion in little Knut Prikken with the strange, bird-like face, their attachment is of a very special kind. After Knut's death Per reflects that his own friendship with Olav must have been poor by comparison. Although Åsmund is only a minor character, his tragedy is important for an understanding of the book's argument. The Norwegian rural community is peculiar for its so-called alodial rights (odelsrett), a form of property ownership acquired by a family to a farm held for at least twenty years, whereby members of this family have the right to redeem it within up to five years of selling. This right falls to the oldest son (odelsgutt) as a privilege, though often also as an obligation which he would gladly have taken away from him. In Vesaas' story most of Per's difficulties stem from his conflict with those in power—with father and God, that is—who have scared him too much, saddled him with burdens and judgments, writing the commandments for him, setting flaming texts on his head: "You will stay at Bufast to the end of your days." But as he grows up Per understands that Åsmund's loneliness is much more hopeless than his because Åsmund is cut off from Bufast and the great cycle. Like Hagar's son Ismael he will have to wander into the desert, while Per stays behind to begin a new life as master of the farm.

Most impressive in Vesaas' art are the remarkably delicate lines of his human portraits, particularly his pictures of adolescence. But there are also grown men in his novels, and though they are placed less centrally in the plot than Vesaas' more sensitive characters, they are often made to carry the author's message. "Grown-up" is in itself a word which commands the greatest respect in Vesaas; it signifies justice, compassion, heroism, and instead of young people's morbid self-preoccupation, a strong sense of social obligation. Typically, The Great Cycle ends with Per's coming of age and finding his way to a woman with whom he will share his whole adult life. Some readers may feel that blood and milk flow so freely in this novel as to suggest a form of Blut und Boden mysticism. They should be reminded that few Norwegian writers have taken   [p. xxi]   their role as spiritual freedom fighters more seriously than Vesaas. In the fall of 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland and Stalin Finland, he gave a lecture, "Poetry and Hard Times," in which he used Edith Södergran's words, "whoever wishes to kill the sun will fail," to sum up his own conviction. The sun and the seasons, he said, could not be controlled by dictatorships, neither could men who were part of nature's rich cycle of birth, love, death, and new birth. This cycle he considered to be the basis of poetry, which is men's longing for the mysterious, the fleeting, the fearful. And because he found it impossible to imagine that men should ever cease to be moved by the miracles of life and death, he believed there would always be poets to interpret men's dreams and to speak out against whoever wished to stop them. To Vesaas, therefore, the ever-rising sun is not only a symbol of nature's regulating forces, but a guarantee that sound individualism will ultimately prevail.