Author Description

This is the story of a woman from Vesterålen who breaks out from the tragic condition of a turbulent, forced marriage and creates her own life as an author and teacher in Kristiania. Regine Normann (1867-1939) predominantly wrote novels about her native district, her beloved and remarkable Nordland, but it was as an author of fairytales and a narrator of legends that she really made a name for herself. Along with her friends who were writers, Sigrid Undset, Nini Roll Anker and Barbra Ring, she formed part of a literary quartet during the interwar period, and she was compared to Selma Lagerlöf and Asbjørnsen and Moe. Molded by the landscape she grew up in, Regine Normann brought along with her the North Norwegian love of storytelling and the mysticism of nature – but also the childhood's painful yearning for the parents she was separated from at an all-too-early age. As in the fairytale "The Merman's Son," her life unfurled in the conflict-filled area of the need to set out and the desire to return home. In the lure of the possibilities beyond the blue horizon and the dream of fully and completely realizing one's true potential, lay also the yearning to be reunited with one's roots and one's origin. Liv Helene Willumsen is Professor Emerita of History, University of Tromsø (UIT The Arctic University of Norway). She has two doctoral degrees: a Ph.d. in Literature from the University of Bergen, Norway (2003) – a study of the authorship of Regine Normann, En narratologisk studie i Regine Normanns forfatterskap, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (2008) on seventeenth-century witchcraft trials in Scotland and Northern Norway. In 2019, Liv Helene Willumsen was awarded the Norwegian King's Medal of Merit.