The stones of Lillehammer: Norway’s literary canon

If you walk through the centre of Lillehammer, you keep stepping on literature. Set into the pavements are twenty-five slabs of Iddefjord granite, brass letters cut into the stone, each carrying a sentence from a different Norwegian book. The walk begins at the library with a line from Vǫluspá, the Old Norse poem in which a seeress tells Odin how the world ends, and finishes a few hundred metres and roughly a thousand years later with Øyvind Rimbereid’s Solaris korrigert, a 2004 poem written in an invented future dialect of the oil coast. A town of just under 29,000 people decided that its streets should be a reading list. That impulse, to fix in stone what a national literature is, turns out to be very old in Norway, and the Lillehammer stones are only its most literal expression.

What follows is the story behind the lists: who made them, what each one was for, and why a country of barely five million has spent a century arguing, in public and with feeling, about which of its own books matter most.

The reader before the canons

Before any publisher or jury drew up a list, there was a schoolbook. Nordahl Rolfsen’s Læsebog for Folkeskolen first appeared in 1892 and, across its many revised volumes, is reckoned to have been printed in more than eight million copies through the mid-1950s. The country that opened that ledger held fewer than two million people. For three generations the reader was simply the book Norwegian children read in. It is where most Norwegians first met the folk ballads, the sagas in retelling, and the canonical short texts of Wergeland, Bjørnson, Ibsen, Ivar Aasen, Vinje and Garborg.

The Norwegian canon has been a civic instrument, something a young nation used to tell itself who it was.

Gyldendal, and the year the books came home

The single most important fact in this story is commercial. In 1925 a group of Norwegian investors “bought home” the publishing rights to the four writers Norway thought of as its greatest, Bjørnson, Ibsen, Lie and Kielland, the so-called De fire store or Four Greats, together with Knut Hamsun and other major living authors. Those rights had belonged to the Danish house Gyldendal, a residue of the four centuries when Norway had been governed from Copenhagen and had no real publishing industry of its own. Hamsun, the recent 1920 Nobel laureate, became the new firm’s largest shareholder. Repatriating the rights and founding Gyldendal Norsk Forlag was an act of cultural sovereignty dressed as a business deal. The man who chaired the new firm’s board, from its founding in 1925 until 1968, was the literary historian Francis Bull.

Out of that house came the work that anchored the Norwegian canon for most of the twentieth century: Norges nasjonallitteratur (“Norway’s National Literature”), a uniform multi-volume edition of the country’s classics that Gyldendal issued four times: in 1928, 1941, 1967 and 1996. The very title is a thesis. The set was the literature understood as national property, bound identically, sold as a set, meant to stand on the shelf of every educated home.

The 1928 and 1941 editions belong to the interwar and wartime decades, when a still-young independent Norway (the union with Sweden had ended only in 1905) was actively assembling a usable past. The 1941 edition is the eerie one. It appeared the year Bull himself was arrested. As a board member of the National Theatre he had urged the rejection of the occupying regime’s new rules for staging plays. The Nazi minister Gulbrand Lunde personally ordered the arrest in late June 1941, and Bull spent much of the war in the Grini detention camp, where he became famous among the prisoners for lecturing them, from memory, on Norwegian literature. There is no need to overdramatise a backlist, but the context is real. Under occupation, a uniform edition of the national literature was a quiet statement about what could not be confiscated.

The edition everyone remembers is 1967. Bull selected it himself, forty volumes from Sverres saga to the near-present, with his own prefatory essay framing the set as “Norway’s literary gold reserve.” It bears his personality completely. Bull worked by the historic-biographical method he had learned from his own teachers: literature read as the life and the era expressed through the work. He imposed an idiosyncratic rule that no novel forming part of a larger cycle could be admitted, which is why Sigrid Undset, of all people, was represented by the early novel Våren rather than by Kristin Lavransdatter, the most beloved Norwegian novel of the century, ruled offside on a technicality. He routed most of the poets into shared anthology volumes rather than giving them their own, and devoted seven of the forty volumes to anthologies of poetry, short fiction, essays, speeches, letters and diaries. The short-story volumes were edited by Edvard Beyer, then the country’s pre-eminent professor of Nordic literature. The 1967 set is the high-water mark of a particular idea: the canon as a single scholar’s authoritative bequest to the nation, in the social-democratic decades when folkeopplysning, popular enlightenment of the book-in-every-home variety, was something the culture genuinely believed in.

By 1996 that confidence had cracked, and the fourth Gyldendal edition shows it. The early nineties were the years the West argued about the canon itself. Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon came out in 1994, and in 1995 the Norwegian historian of ideas Trond Berg Eriksen published Nordmenns nistepakke (“Norwegians’ Packed Lunch”), a pointed sixty-four-work counter-canon built on a different premise from Bull’s. Where the scholar’s canon asked which texts were stylistically and aesthetically valuable, Eriksen asked which had actually left a mark on readers. The 1996 Norges nasjonallitteratur, slimmer at thirty volumes, reads like a canon that has absorbed the critique. Kristin Lavransdatter is finally allowed in. So are Agnar Mykle’s once-scandalous Lasso rundt fru Luna, Jens Bjørneboe’s Frihetens øyeblikk, Herbjørg Wassmo’s Dinas bok and Dag Solstad’s Roman 1987: twentieth-century modernism, the politically inconvenient, and women catching up with a list that had kept them waiting.

The rival house, and the paperback decade

Gyldendal did not have the field to itself. In 1987 the competing house Aschehoug published Søyler i norsk litteratur (“Pillars in Norwegian Literature”), a fifteen-volume series of the same broad kind, the classics in matching bindings, sold by subscription. Its very framing leaned on De fire store as the load-bearing pillars, with Hamsun, Undset and Garborg as the next tier. In Norway the canon has often been shaped by publishers competing for the same prestige and the same living-room shelf. The 1980s were the decade of the heritage paperback across Europe, and Norway’s two big houses each fielded their own definitive set. A canon, here, has frequently been a product line as much as a verdict.

2007: the canon goes public

Everything described so far was a publisher’s backlist, authoritative but ultimately the work of a firm or a single editor. The 2007 list opened a different kind of conversation: a deliberately public, jury-made canon, produced to start an argument rather than to sell an edition.

The initiative came in the autumn of 2006 from the Norwegian Festival of Literature at Lillehammer, which had grown out of the Sigrid Undset seminars and still carries the subtitle Sigrid Undset-dagene. A jury of ten, drawn from writers, critics and literary scholars, was chaired by the critic and scholar Janike Kampevold Larsen. The jury held its first meeting on 18 December 2006 and, on 30 May 2007, presented Norsk Litterær Kanon: twenty-five works, from Vǫluspá to Solaris korrigert. The following year the publisher Cappelen Damm brought out a book of the same name, with newly commissioned essays on each of the twenty-five works by prominent writers and critics, and the chosen sentences were cut into the granite stones now set in Lillehammer’s streets. The first two stones were unveiled by the library on World Book Day, 23 April 2008, and the full set was in place by the time of the 2009 festival.

The figure behind it was Stig Sæterbakken, the festival’s artistic director from 2006, himself one of the most uncompromising Norwegian novelists of his generation and a deliberate provocateur. The canon project carries his sensibility. Its twenty-five titles include an unusual number of poetry collections and lean noticeably toward the writers’ and critics’ taste rather than the schoolroom’s, evident in choices like Gunvor Hofmo’s Fra en annen virkelighet or Rimbereid’s Solaris korrigert. Sæterbakken took his own life in 2012, at forty-six. The stones in the pavements are, among other things, his monument: a working writer’s argument about Norwegian literature, made permanent in the street.

The same spring produced a scholarly counter-move. Four literary historians, Erik Bjerck Hagen, Petter Aaslestad, Jørgen Magnus Sejersted and Tone Selboe, published Den norske litterære kanon 1900–1960 with Aschehoug on 29 May 2007, sixteen authorships rather than a list of works, followed in 2009 by a companion volume covering 1700 to 1900. Norway, in other words, had two canons launched within weeks of each other in 2007: the festival’s public, essayistic, poetry-rich list, and the academy’s tighter, period-bounded one. The argument had become a genre.

What the lists are really arguing about

Read across the century, these selections trace the same few fault lines, and they are the fault lines of modern Norway.

The first is language. Norway writes in two official written standards: Bokmål, descended from Dano-Norwegian, and Nynorsk, the language Ivar Aasen constructed in the nineteenth century from rural dialects to give the nation a tongue not inherited from Denmark. The canon is partly a record of that struggle. The Nynorsk and dialect-rooted writers, Vinje, Garborg, Duun, Vesaas, Olav H. Hauge, and now Fosse, thread through every list, and their steady presence is itself a political statement about which Norway gets to be classic.

The second is the state’s hand. In 1965 Norway introduced the innkjøpsordning, the scheme under which the state buys a fixed quantity of every qualifying new Norwegian book for the libraries. It transformed who could afford to be a serious writer. The canon downstream of 1965, including the politicised Profil generation of the 1960s, the AKP(m-l) Maoist novelists of the 1970s, and Solstad above all, exists partly because the state had decided literature was infrastructure. The canon turns equally on the conditions that let certain books get written at all.

The third is the slow admission of who counts. Of the works that hold steady across the publishers’ editions and the festival list alike, Camilla Collett’s Amtmandens Døttre is the only one written by a woman, and for decades she was almost the lone woman in the room. Cora Sandel, Undset on her own terms, Hofmo, Wassmo: their movement from the margins of Bull’s 1967 monument to the centre of the 2007 stones is the clearest single change the lists record.

After 2007

The Lillehammer stones end at 2004, with Rimbereid. They were laid just before the two events that would most obviously reshape any canon recut today.

In 2009 Karl Ove Knausgård, who had studied creative writing in the early 1990s at Skrivekunstakademiet i Hordaland with Jon Fosse as one of his teachers, began publishing Min kamp. Six volumes over 2009 to 2011, around 3,600 pages, the longest novel in Norwegian history; roughly half a million copies sold in Norway alone, in a country of five million, and translation into thirty-five languages. Whatever one thinks of it, My Struggle did to the contemporary novel what few books do: it changed the default. It made autofiction the central mode of a literary generation and forced a public argument about privacy, family and what is permitted to count as literature. Any canon assembled after 2011 has to reckon with it.

Then, in October 2023, Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the fourth Norwegian laureate after Bjørnson (1903), Hamsun (1920) and Undset (1928), and the first ever to write in Nynorsk. The loveliest detail belongs to the canon itself. Fosse’s first and most-performed play, Nokon kjem til å komme (Someone Is Going to Come), was already on the 2007 list; the jury had canonised him sixteen years before Stockholm did. And in his Nobel lecture Fosse reached for an image of writing as a child building leaf huts in the forest and lighting candles inside them, an image he attributed to Olav H. Hauge, whose Dropar i austavind is itself one of the twenty-five stones. The canon, at its best, is this: a small literature talking to itself across a century, the laureate quoting the poet in the pavement.

If the stones were recut now, the additions almost choose themselves. Knausgård’s Min kamp is unavoidable. Fosse’s prose, the Septology or Morgon og kveld, belongs there on its own merits, beyond the early play. Beyond those two, the conversation would have to make room for Per Petterson’s Ut og stjæle hester (2003; Out Stealing Horses, 2005), which carried contemporary Norwegian fiction to a global readership; Vigdis Hjorth’s Arv og miljø (2016; Will and Testament, 2019), the most consequential Norwegian novel of the last decade about family, memory and the ethics of writing from life; and Roy Jacobsen’s De usynlige (2013; The Unseen, 2016), which renewed the island-and-sea tradition that runs from Duun through Vesaas. Dag Solstad, who died on 14 March 2025 at eighty-three and whose Gymnaslærer Pedersen the 2007 jury chose, would by now have a serious claim to a second stone.

The argument that does not end

The striking thing, laying the five selections side by side, is how little the bedrock moves and how much everything else does. Only Erasmus Montanus and Peer Gynt appear in every list from 1941 to 2007. Around that tiny stable core, the canon churns continuously: Hamsun under four different titles, Undset exiled and readmitted, the poets and the women rising, the politics of language quietly insisted upon in every edition.

That churn is the point. A canon is an argument a culture keeps having with itself about what it has been and what it is willing to claim. Small nations have this argument more intensely than large ones, because for a small nation the stakes are existential: the literature is a good part of the evidence that the nation exists at all. Norway has had the argument in schoolbooks, in publishers’ boardrooms, in a scholar’s forty-volume bequest, and finally in the literal stones of a small town’s streets. If you visit, you can still walk it from the seeress to the oil coast, one sentence at a time.

The five lists, work by work

The table below collects every work that appears in any of the five selections, sorted by original publication year (or by the closest known composition date in the case of the sagas and the Eddic poems). A filled mark (●) means the work was selected in that edition. Two date columns sit on either side of the editions: the year of first publication on the left, and the year of the first complete English translation, where one exists, on the right. Blank cells under either year column indicate that no firm date or no published full translation could be confirmed.

Columns. 1941: Gyldendal, Norges nasjonallitteratur, 1941. 1967: Gyldendal, Norges nasjonallitteratur, 1967 (40 vols, ed. Francis Bull). 1996: Gyldendal, Norges nasjonallitteratur, 1996 (30 vols). Søy '87: Aschehoug, Søyler i norsk litteratur, 1987 (15 vols). Fest '07: Norsk Litteraturfestival, Norsk Litterær Kanon, 2007 (25 works). A small marker after the dot, * for the 1941 omnibus volumes (Dass/Wessel; Wergeland/Welhaven; Aasen/Vinje/Garborg) and † for the 1941 Eddic/folk-poetry volume, flags how an inclusion was actually published rather than as a dedicated volume.

Sources and notes

This piece draws on the Norwegian Wikipedia overview Norges litterære kanon and the Norwegian Festival of Literature for the lists, jury and stone project; the Store norske leksikon entries on Francis Bull and Edvard Beyer; the English Wikipedia entries on Jon Fosse, Stig Sæterbakken and Karl Ove Knausgård; the Nobel Foundation’s text of Fosse’s 2023 lecture; the Visit Lillehammer page documenting the literary-walk stones; and the Wikipedia article on My Struggle for the volume, page-count and translation figures. Bibliographic details of the Gyldendal Norges nasjonallitteratur editions and the Aschehoug Søyler i norsk litteratur series are from Norwegian library and bookseller records. The Aschehoug series appears in catalogues under both Søyler i norsk litteratur and Søyler i Norges litteratur, and a single named general editor for it was not reliably established in the sources consulted; safest to describe it as a fifteen-volume Aschehoug classics series of 1987 without attributing it to one editor.

Beyond the five lists charted above, the modern Norwegian-canon landscape also includes Trond Berg Eriksen’s Nordmenns nistepakke (1995, sixty-four works), explicitly framed as a counter-canon to Bull, and the Bokklubben World Library, the Norwegian Book Clubs’ 2002 project that invited a hundred writers from fifty-four countries to vote for the hundred best world books (a Norwegian-curated list of world literature rather than a list of Norwegian literature, so kept out of the comparison). The Bjerck Hagen, Aaslestad, Sejersted and Selboe two-volume Den norske litterære kanon (Aschehoug 2007 and 2009) is built around sixteen authorships per period rather than individual works and so resists tabulation in the same form as the five lists above; it is treated in the prose rather than as a column. Neither has a single-source work-list as easily checked as the five lists included here, and so they are mentioned for context.