Peder Victorious: A Tale of the Pioneers Twenty Years Later

Peder Victorious, the sequel to R lvaag's massive Giants in the Earth, continues the saga of the Norwegian settlers in the Dakotas. Here again, years later, are all the sturdy pioneers of the earlier novel, R lvaag's "vikings of the prairie" Per Hansa's Beret and their children, Syvert T nseten and Kjersti, and S rine. The great struggle against the land itself has been won. Now there is to be a second struggle, a struggle to adapt, to become Americans.

The development of the Spring Creek settlement in these years is manifested in the rebellious growing up of Peder Victorious. Peder is a beautiful and moving novel of youth and youth's self-discovery. It is the story, too, of Beret's pain and dismay at the Americanization of her children, what R lvaag described as the true tragedy of the immigrants, who made their children part of a world to which they themselves could never belong.

Out of the inevitable conflict between the first-generation American and his still Norwegian mother, R lvaag built a powerful novel of personal growth, guilt, and victory.