Book review by Trygve Riiser Gundersen: «The Haugians. Monopoly and underground»
Is this really the best non-fiction book of the year?
Trygve Riiser Gundersens won the Brage Prize for the best non-fiction book of the year on Thursday evening, and his story about the rise of Haugianism is without a doubt an impressive intellectual and academic achievement.
But it is also a book that communicates more with itself than with the reader.
Among other reasons, I think it is neither the most important nor the best of the year’s Norwegian non-fiction publications.
Riiser Gundersens has already announced a second volume in the magnum opus about Hans Nielsen Hauge and the unique revival movement that he spearheaded in the transition between the 18th and 19th centuries.
But the author is by no means content to depict this phenomenon in isolation. Instead, he unfurls the huge backdrop, with the character and expression of authoritarian rule as a supporting element.
It was a time when the King and his civil service in Copenhagen were the absolute center of power, where any form of popular organization was severely suppressed and anyone who challenged the hegemony of power had to expect to be persecuted and punished in the harshest way.
One of the book’s greatest qualities is that it gives a broad insight into the mentality and way of thinking of the time, as it is formulated and practiced both from the top and bottom of society.
In addition to the state’s monopoly on violence, laws, decrees and bureaucratic correspondence were the most important means of control available to the authorities.
At the same time, the first seeds of a vibrant bourgeois public also appeared. First and foremost in the form of printed media, a way of expression that Hans Nielsen Hauge and his followers also knew how to use.
It is part of history that the clergy, not least in distant Norway, had local control functions that exceeded what we today associate with natural church tasks. Layman’s movements, which Den Hauge was at the head of, therefore simultaneously challenged the legal and religious authority of both civil service and clergy.
Also read
These were nominated for the Brage prize nominations 2022
See the entire list of nominations for the prestigious Norwegian prize for literature here.
Trygve Riiser Gundersen describes the end of the 18th century as a time full of friction, social mobility and popular uprising. Far from the notion that Norway slept its 300-year sleep under Danish rule, until we almost got our freedom granted in 1814.
It is both exciting and challenging that the author spends so much time problematizing and discussing the established horizon of interpretation when it comes to this part of Norwegian history.
The author is a meticulous source researcher who has worked with this material for a number of years. But this thoroughness eventually also becomes a challenge for the reader.
Not necessarily because Gundersen is too meticulous, but because he writes in one and the same way. A dosed, omniscient narrator’s voice which occasionally becomes overtly explanatory.
Not to say heavy as lead. It can be tempting to repeat good points, but it shouldn’t happen too often!
Gundersen also does not shy away from using the form «we» when he has to address the reader. But this approach does not work together literary, rather a bit old-fashioned authoritarian.
The author appears almost as a modern representative of the clergy he – and Hans Nielsen Hauge – is so skeptical of. From his intellectually elevated position, he expounds and interprets his own text for us in a very authoritative way.
The story of Hans Nielsen Hauge has been told several times before in book form. It is almost like talking about a Norwegian heroic story, about the popular rebel who stood up against church and royal power, and who had to pay several years in the penitentiary.
Trygve Riiser Gundersen deepens and expands the story of Hans Nielsen Hauge and his time in a way that commands respect. But this book will probably not be popular reading.
Reviewed by: Sindre Hovdenakk