Fairyland in Odin

ODIN IN FAIRYLAND--Olav Duun-- Knopf.

The fourth U. S. installment of The People of Juvik, a six-volume Norwegian "saga," Author Duun's story tells of young Odin's adventures in a fairyland whose marches lie more in his own nature than in the Norwegian countryside. Though he is only a bastard Juviking, enough corpuscles of that great family's blood tingle in his veins to make them burn intermittently with mischievous, heroic, un earthly music.

At 7 little Odin is taken by his mother to work as herdboy for Bendek and his strange dark wife Gurianna at Kjelvik on the sea. On that lonely farm where, frosty winter evenings, the housedog runs barking at some invisible menace along the blackened beach, Odin works hard to be a man like Bendek in the inhuman countryside. Once, out picking cloud berries, he is attacked by mountain trolls. He beats them off with a switch, only to find that they are the Jörnstrand boys from over the hill. And so he meets their sister Karen-Anna, who is to be his love.

Bendek, besides being a real man, is also something of a thief. Odin can put up with his stealing fish from other folks' nets, but when Bendek impounds a neighbor's ram to slaughter it, Odin sets it free. Bendek admires that kind of spirit -- "he can be whatever he chooses, par son or pirate, that one" -- but he has not so much of it as Odin. On a dare from the Jörnstrand boys Odin takes Bendek's bewitched otter-gun, shoots a grey troll-creature that appears on an island offshore. When Bendek discovers that the troll-creature was his grey ram, he goes wild, sends Odin back to his mother.

She lives at Vennestad with her husband Iver who is none too pleased to take her bastard into their home. But out of loyalty to his mother Odin keeps the home fires burning cool. His Juviking father, Otte Vetran, returned from America, has settled in the neighborhood. He makes a quiet living at cabinetmaking, preaches, lives a strange philosophy--"Resist not evil!" Towards him Odin, in spite of his love for his mother and Karen-Anna, is irresistibly drawn. After a series of boyish escapades, capped by a miraculous escape from drowning, Odin leaves home to join his father. "It was queer to be walking like this all alone on a strange road. And he had felt the same when he was a little boy, sometimes: it was as though you couldn't believe in what you saw. It was just as grand for all that. And it was good for a man: to be alone."

The Author. Born in 1876 in the peasant region of Namdalen, north of Trondjem, Norway, Author Duun has written exclusively of the life of his native parish, though his books are far from parochial. His earlier works (Three Friends, The Good Conscience} were preparatory to his six-volume Juviking epic that follows that family's affairs from times when Progenitor Per Anders fights hand to hand with the Devil, to his descendants' struggles with more modern devilish banks and herring-oil factories. Highly prized by his fellow Norwegians (many of whom read him in English translation rather than in his difficult Landsmaal dialect) he is reported to have missed a Nobel Prize by one vote. The circulation of his Juviking books in the U. S. has left a large market untapped: The Trough of the Wave sold 1,063, The Blind Man 556, The Big Wedding 372. Not discouraged, Publisher Knopf will wind up the saga with Youth, The Storm.

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