Peder Victorious Author:O. E. Rolvaag Peder Victorious — O.E. Rolvaag — A tale of the Pioneers twenty years later — With an Introduction by Gudrun Hovde Gvale, translated by Einar Haugen — Peder Victorious, the sequel to Tolvaag's massive Giants in the Earth, continues the saga of the Norwegian settlers in the Dakotas. Here again, years later, are all th e sturdy pioneers of the earlie... more »r novel, Rolvaag's "vikings of the prairie"- Per Hansa's Beret and their children, Syvert Tonseten and Kjersti, and Sorine. The great struggle agains the land itself has been won, and the kingdom founded. Now there is a second struggle, the struggle to adapt, to become American.
The development of the Spring Creek settlement in these years is manifested in the rebellious growing up of Peder Victorious, Per Hansa'sPermand. Peder is a beautiful and moving novel of youth and youth's self-discovery. It is the story, too, of Beret's painful dismay at the Americanization of her children, what Rolvaag himself described as the true tragedy of the immigrant, who makes his sons part of a world to which he can never belong. Out of the inevitable conflict between the first generation American and his still Norwegian mother, Rolvaag has built a powerful novel that no reader of Giants of the Earth will want to miss.« less