The project is affiliated with the NTNU-based project ImagiNation 1814-1905: Mapping the Imagined Geographies of Norway.
This project begins by observing the fact that the motif of heim (the New Norwegian word for home) appears constantly in Nynorsk literature’s beginnings and well into the modern breakthrough. This motif has hardly been commented on, aside from its definition as a symbol of topographical place, to where one belongs or returns, or from where one departs. Yet, out of this fixed meaning,heim develops a second meaning that becomes a primary symbol in poetry.
The conception of home that we find in this corpus of poetry expresses not only lived space, but many other descriptions: the world, the nation, the universe, the heavens above and below,Heimat and the Fatherland, the uncanny and mankind. Yet, at the same time, heim has been conjoined with the motif of det heimlause, or homelessness. Although it may seem at odds with the home, homelessness becomes, by the 1920s, a kind of home, too.
This thesis looks at heim in two parts. First, it traces the history of the heim motif in poetry from the late Romantic period and into the so-called Neo-Romantic turn of the century. Then, in the second part, this thesis examines four poets — Olav Aukrust, Tore Ørjasæter, Henrik Rytter and Kristofer Uppdal — in light of the development of the poetic symbol of heim.
Publications from the project
“En kort, historisk oversikt over nynorske poet-oversettere, fra Aasen til Hauge,” Nordisk tidsskrift for oversettelses- og tolkeforskning (NTOT) 1:2 (2025): 38-50, https://doi.org/10.5324/ntot.v1i2.6494.
“The New Norwegian Peer Gynt: On the Nynorsk Versions of Ibsen’s Last Drama in Verse,” Ibsen Studies (2025): 1-30, https://doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2025.2499791.