Litterær tekst: Hamsuns Sult | Norwegian Grammar

Knut Hamsun's Sult ("Hunger", 1890) is the founding text of Norwegian literary modernism and one of the first European novels to take the nervous, fragmented interior of a single mind as its whole subject. There is barely a plot: a starving, nameless would-be writer wanders Kristiania (old Oslo), and we live inside the swings of his hunger-warped consciousness. Hamsun does this with syntax — long periods that suddenly snap into dashes and fragments, a restless slide between past and present tense, and the impressionistic foregrounding of perceptions as they strike the narrator. Because the 1890 first edition is firmly in the public domain, we can read a short real excerpt and take it apart. The spelling is Dano-Norwegian (the elite written norm of 1890, much closer to Danish than today's Bokmål), so part of the C2 work here is decoding period forms — and then watching what a modern rendering keeps and what it must change.

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Hamsun famously demanded a literature of "the unconscious life of the soul" — det ubevisste sjeleliv. The grammar below is not decoration: the broken syntax, the dashes and the tense-shifts are the psychology. Read the punctuation as a heartbeat.

The text (1890 original)

These are the genuine opening lines of the novel, in Hamsun's 1890 orthography (Project Gutenberg edition; the original printed Aa/aa is here modernised to Å/å, as in that edition's transcriber note).

Sult (1890, original spelling)	English
Det var i den Tid, jeg gik omkring og sulted i Kristiania, denne forunderlige By, som ingen forlader, før han har fået Mærker af den . . . .	It was in those days when I went about and starved in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before he has been marked by it . . . .
Jeg ligger vågen på min Kvist og hører en Klokke nedenunder mig slå seks Slag; det var allerede ganske lyst, og Folk begyndte at færdes op og ned i Trapperne.	I lie awake in my garret and hear a clock below me strike six; it was already quite light, and people began to move up and down the stairs.

And a short later fragment of the hunger-euphoria, with the dashes and run-on perceptions that are Hamsun's signature:

Sult (1890)	English
Hvad kom Luften mine Lunger ved? Jeg var stærk som en Rise og kunde standse en Vogn med min Skulder. En fin, sælsom Stemning, Følelsen af den lyse Ligegladhed, havde bemægtiget sig mig.	What did the air have to do with my lungs? I was strong as a giant and could stop a cart with my shoulder. A fine, strange mood, the feeling of bright indifference, had taken hold of me.

The text in modern Bokmål

Here is a faithful modern-Bokmål rendering of the same lines. Compare it word by word with the original above — the differences are the whole lesson.

Modern Bokmål
Det var i den tiden jeg gikk omkring og sultet i Kristiania, denne forunderlige byen som ingen forlater før han har fått merker av den …	(opening)
Jeg ligger våken på kvisten min og hører en klokke nedenunder meg slå seks slag; det var allerede ganske lyst, og folk begynte å ferdes opp og ned i trappene.
Hva hadde lufta med lungene mine å gjøre? Jeg var sterk som en kjempe og kunne stanse ei vogn med skulderen. En fin, selsom stemning, følelsen av den lyse likegladheten, hadde bemektiget seg meg.

Period forms: decoding 1890 Dano-Norwegian

The first hurdle is orthographic and morphological, not syntactic. The 1890 norm is Dano-Norwegian (riksmål avant la lettre), and several features look alien against modern Bokmål.

Capitalised common nouns — Tid, By, Klokke, Slag, Luften, Lunger. German-style noun capitalisation, inherited from Danish, was dropped in Norwegian only in 1907. Every capital here marks a noun.
Old single-consonant preterites — gik (→ gikk), kunde (→ kunne), begyndte (→ begynte). The doubling of final consonants to mark a short vowel is a later reform.
Weak preterite -ed / past participle -et — sulted (→ sultet), fået (→ fått). The -ed ending and the Danish-style fået are pure period morphology.
Danish vowels and spellings — Mærker (→ merker), stærk (→ sterk), mig (→ meg), af (→ av), Hvad (→ hva), sælsom (→ selsom, the word survives but loses its Danish æ). The æ-for-e and the -ig-for--eg are Danish.

gik omkring og sulted → gikk omkring og sultet

'went about and starved' — the two signature period verbs: single-consonant gik and the -ed preterite sulted. (archaic)

før han har fået Mærker af den → før han har fått merker av den

'before he has been marked by it' — fået (Danish past participle of få) becomes fått; Mærker → merker; af → av. (archaic)

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A quick rule of thumb for any pre-1907 Norwegian text: lower-case the nouns, double the short-vowel consonants (gik→gikk), turn -ed into -et, and swap the Danish vowels (æ→e, af→av, mig→meg). Do that and most of the page becomes ordinary Bokmål — the syntax underneath is already modern.

The tense-shift: preterite ↔ present

The most striking grammatical move in the opening is not the spelling — it is the tense. The first sentence is firmly in the preterite: Det var i den Tid, jeg gik omkring og sulted ("It was in those days when I went about and starved"). Then, mid-paragraph, Hamsun slips into the present: Jeg ligger vågen på min Kvist og hører en Klokke … slå seks Slag ("I lie awake in my garret and hear a clock strike six"). And then, in the same breath, he slides back: det var allerede ganske lyst ("it was already quite light").

Det var i den tiden jeg gikk omkring … Jeg ligger våken … det var allerede ganske lyst.

'It was in those days I went about … I lie awake … it was already quite light.' — preterite → present → preterite within two sentences. (literary)

This is not carelessness; it is the historic present (det historiske presens) used to drag the reader inside the remembered moment. The frame ("those days") is past, but the lived scene — lying awake, hearing the clock — erupts into the present as if it were happening now, then recedes again into narrative past. English can do this too ("So I'm lying there, and the clock strikes six…"), but Hamsun does it without warning, mid-clause, which is far more vertiginous. For a C2 reader the lesson is to stop expecting a stable narrative tense: in this kind of modernist prose the tense itself is a camera, zooming between memory and immediacy. (Compare the systematic treatment in Tense in narrative.)

Fragmented, dash-laden syntax and foregrounded perception

Hamsun's other signature is syntax that fractures under pressure. The opening sentence is one long, comma-spliced period that trails off into spaced dots (. . . .) — the sentence does not so much end as dissolve. Elsewhere, dashes break the line where the narrator's attention jumps. And crucially, he uses Norwegian's fronting (topicalisation) to put the perception first, before the grammar of the clause catches up.

Look at the rhetorical question Hvad kom Luften mine Lunger ved? — literally "What did the air concern my lungs?", i.e. "What did the air have to do with my lungs?". The idiom komme noen ved ("to concern someone") is wrenched into a question that foregrounds the air and the lungs — the two bodily sensations dominating the hunger-high — before resolving into sense.

Hva hadde lufta med lungene mine å gjøre? Jeg var sterk som en kjempe.

What did the air have to do with my lungs? I was strong as a giant. — a rhetorical fragment of euphoria, then a flat declarative; the rhythm enacts the mood-swing. (literary)

En fin, selsom stemning, følelsen av den lyse likegladheten, hadde bemektiget seg meg.

A fine, strange mood, the feeling of bright indifference, had taken hold of me. — the heavy subject is built up in apposition (stemning … følelsen …) and only resolved by the late verb hadde bemektiget seg. (literary)

That second sentence is a masterclass in Norwegian's tolerance for a heavy, appositive subject held in suspense before the verb. The subject is En fin, sælsom Stemning, re-described as Følelsen af den lyse Ligegladhed, and only then does the predicate arrive: havde bemægtiget sig mig ("had taken possession of me"). The reflexive bemægtige sig (modern bemektige seg) governs a genitive-like object — an elevated, almost legalistic verb dropped into a hunger-hallucination, which is exactly the unsettling tonal collision Hamsun wants. (For how Norwegian builds and resolves such suspended, participle-anchored subjects, see Participial clauses.)

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Hamsun's punctuation is grammar. The trailing . . . ., the dash, the comma-splice — read each as a deliberate marker of where the mind stalls, jumps, or runs on. A "tidy" rewrite that fixes the punctuation would destroy the psychology.

What the modern rendering must change — and must not

Re-spelling 1890 into Bokmål is mostly mechanical, but two choices are interesting. First, gendered nouns: the original en Vogn is common-gender, and a modern radical-Bokmål rendering may prefer feminine ei vogn … lufta … lungene to sound natural and contemporary; a conservative rendering would keep en vogn … luften. Either is defensible — the choice signals how "modern" the translator wants the voice to feel. Second, lexis: words like selsom ("strange, uncanny" — the 1890 spelling is sælsom) and bemektige seg are archaic-elevated even today, so a faithful rendering keeps the words (respelled) rather than flattening them to rar and ta over — losing them would lose Hamsun's register-collision. The rule for rendering Hamsun: modernise the spelling freely, but preserve the syntax and the marked vocabulary, because those carry the mind.

❌ Det var en gang jeg var sulten i Oslo, en rar by.

Incorrect rendering — flattens the syntax, the tense-frame and the elevated vocabulary; the voice is gone.

✅ Det var i den tiden jeg gikk omkring og sultet i Kristiania, denne forunderlige byen …

Correct — keeps Hamsun's clause architecture, the city's old name, and forunderlig over rar. (literary)

Cultural note

Sult made Hamsun's name and changed European fiction; its method fed directly into Kafka, Joyce and the whole stream-of-consciousness tradition. Hamsun won the Nobel Prize in 1920 — and later disgraced himself by supporting the Nazi occupation of Norway, a fact every Norwegian reader carries alongside the work. Note the city: Kristiania was the official name of Oslo from 1877 to 1925, so the spelling itself dates the text. Reading Sult in the original is, for Norwegians, a double encounter — with the birth of their modern literature, and with a language one reform away from the one they write today.

Common Mistakes

❌ Reading capitalised By, Tid, Klokke as proper nouns or emphasis.

Incorrect — pre-1907 Norwegian capitalised all common nouns, Danish-style; it carries no emphasis.

✅ Lower-case them mentally: by, tid, klokke are ordinary common nouns.

Correct — the capitals are 1890 orthography, not meaning. (archaic)

❌ Treating the preterite→present shift (gik … ligger) as an error or typo.

Incorrect — it is the deliberate historic present, pulling the scene into the now.

✅ Read ligger / hører as the historic present inside a past-tense frame.

Correct — the tense slide is a narrative camera, not a mistake. (literary)

❌ Parsing fået as a misspelling of fra or fag.

Incorrect — fået is the Danish-style past participle of få (modern fått).

✅ fået = fått ('gotten/received'); har fået Mærker = har fått merker ('has been marked').

Correct — period morphology of få. (archaic)

❌ Giving up on the suspended subject in 'En fin, sælsom Stemning … havde bemægtiget sig mig.'

Incorrect — the long apposition makes readers lose the verb.

✅ Track it as Subject (stemning = følelsen) … then verb (hadde bemektiget seg meg).

Correct — the heavy subject is held in apposition before the late predicate. (literary)

❌ 'Modernising' Kristiania to Oslo in a faithful rendering.

Incorrect — Kristiania is the period name (1877–1925) and dates the text.

✅ Keep Kristiania; it locates the novel in pre-1925 Oslo.

Correct — the old name is part of the historical texture.

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