If We Look More Closely at the Context, the Alleged Racism in Markens Grøde Becomes More Complicated.

Again and again it is claimed that Hamsun's Nobel Prize-winning novel The Produce of the Field (1917) is a racist novel. This is often justified by references to and quotations from what is actually found in the novel of racist characteristics of the Sami. The problem is that the context of these characteristics, both literary and historical, is often underemphasized. That we, as Erik Vassenden writes in an essay in Morgenbladet on March 4, must…