Bjørnstjerne Martinus Bjørnson, Magnhild [Dust]

Kathy Rees (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.3.5: Norwegian Writing and Culture.
Vol. editors: Sven Hakon Rossel (Universitat Wien), Herbert Rowland (Purdue University), Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (University College London), Anja Tröger (University of Edinburgh)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1877

Places

Norway (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

This novel explores the issue of the unequal marriage, a theme also taken up in plays such as The Newly Married Couple (1865), The Gauntlet (1883) and Laboremus (1901). Magnhild highlights the problem of poor and uneducated women being pressurized into marriages with older disabled men (see, for instance, In God’s Way).

At the age of eight or nine, Magnhild’s life was changed by a landslide which swept away her fourteen relatives and her home, the “gard”. Her remarkable survival gives rise to the notion that Magnhild “must be destined to something” (12), a leitmotif that runs through the novel. The local priest, “in order to set a good example&…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1093 words

Citation: Rees, Kathy. "Magnhild". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 June 2017 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=38736, accessed 25 November 2024.]

Save this article