Featured

A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen — Key Ideas to Explore

(0 User reviews) 965

In Category - Exploration Survival Adventure Tales

Authors: Garland, Hamlin, 1860-1940 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2007 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Orphans -- Fiction; Frontier and pioneer life -- Dakota Territory -- Fiction; Single fathers -- Fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 33,382

Reading time 146 min

Text sections 5

Before opening A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen — Key Ideas to Explore, the edition data offers a quick orientation: 33,382 words, 2 hr 26 min estimated reading time, and 5 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 15.2 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Orphans -- Fiction,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #21850

Hamlin Garland's 1892 frontier novel follows two Dakota bachelors who adopt a Norwegian orphan girl, Flaxen. The narrative shifts from rough-hewn cabin dialogue to a more restrained, introspective tone as Flaxen matures, with Garland's prose mirroring the prairie's seasonal rhythms and the men's unspoken tensions.

Editorial Edition Score 4.7/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg21850

Read the Text

CHAPTER II. Her First Trip in a Blizzard 9

CHAPTER III. The Burial of her Dead Mother 22

CHAPTER IV. Flaxen Adopts Anson as "Pap" 32

CHAPTER V. Flaxen Becomes Indispensable to the Two Old Bachelors 38

CHAPTER VI. A Question of Dress 46

CHAPTER VII. After Harvest 69

CHAPTER VIII. An Empty House 78

CHAPTER IX. "Baching" it Again 86

CHAPTER X. Flaxen Comes Home on a Vacation 105

CHAPTER XI. Flaxen Grows Restless 113

CHAPTER XII. Flaxen Says Good-bye 124

CHAPTER XIII. Flaxen's Great Need 133

CHAPTER XIV. Kendall Steps Out 148

CHAPTER XV. Bert Comes Back 153

A LITTLE NORSK. CHAPTER I.

HER ADOPTIVE PARENTS.

"Ans, the next time you twist hay f'r the fire, I wish't you'd dodge the damp spots," said the cook, rising from a prolonged scrutiny of the stove and the bread in the oven. His pose was threatening.

"Cooks are always grumblin'," calmly remarked Anson, drawing on his gloves preparatory to going out to the barn; "but seein' 's this is Chris'mus, I'll go out an' knock a barrel to pieces. I want them biscuit to be O. K. See?"

"Can't we have some sugar-'lasses on our biscuits, seein' it's Chris'mus?"

"Well, I s'pose we can, Ans; but we're gittin' purty low on the thing these days, an' they ain't no tellin' when we'll be able to git more."

"Well, jes' as you say, not as I care." Anson went out into the roaring wind with a shout of defiance, but came back instantly, as if to say something he had forgotten. "Say, wha' d'ye s'pose is the trouble over to the Norsk's? I hain't seen a sign o' smoke over there f'r two 'r three days."

"Well, now you speak of it, Ans, I've be'n thinkin' about that myself. I'm afraid he's out o' coal, 'r sick, 'r somethin'. It 'u'd be mighty tough f'r the woman an' babe to be there without any fire, an' this blizzard whoopin' her up. I guess you'd better go over an' see what's up. I was goin' to speak of it this mornin', but f'rgot it. I'm cook this week, so I guess the job falls on you."

"All right. Here goes."

"Better take a horse."

"No: I guess not. The snow is driftin' purty bad, an' he couldn't git through the drifts, anyway."

"Well, lookout f'r y'rself, ol' man. It looks purty owly off in the west. Don't waste any time. I'd hate like thunder to be left alone on a Dakota prairie f'r the rest o' the winter."

Anson laughed back through the mist of snow that blew in the open door, his great-coat and cap allowing only a glimpse of his cheeks.

The sky was bright overhead, but low down around the horizon it looked wild. The air was frightfully cold--far below zero--and the wind had been blowing almost every day for a week, and was still strong. The snow was sliding fitfully along the sod with a stealthy, menacing motion, and far off in the west and north a dense, shining cloud of frost was hanging.

The plain was almost as lone and level and bare as a polar ocean, where death and silence reign undisputedly. There was not a tree in sight, the grass was mainly burned, or buried by the snow, and the little shanties of the three or four settlers could hardly be said to be in sight, half sunk, as they were, in drifts. A large white owl seated on a section stake was the only living thing to be seen.

The boom had not yet struck Buster County. Indeed, it did not seem to Bert Gearheart at this moment that it would ever strike Buster County. It was as cold, dreary, and unprofitable an outlook as a man could face and not go utterly mad. If any of these pioneers could have forecast the winter, they would not have dared to pass it on the plains.

Bert watched his partner as he strode rapidly across the prairie, now lost to sight as a racing troop of snow-waves, running shoulder-high, shot between, now reappearing as the wind lulled.

"This is gittin' pretty monotonous, to tell the honest truth," he muttered as he turned from the little window. "If that railroad don't show up by March, in some shape or other, I'm goin' to give it up. Gittin' free land like this is a little too costly for me. I'll go back to Wiscons', an' rent land on shares."

Continue Reading →

Garland opens A Little Norsk inside a snowbound Dakota cabin on Christmas morning, with the cook Bert grumbling about damp hay for the fire and Anson joshing back. The men's dialect—"I wish't you'd dodge the damp spots"—is immediate and unvarnished, establishing a voice that is both colloquial and precise. The opening poem, "On the Plain," sets a contrasting register: formal, rhymed, and full of natural violence. This tension between the men's rough speech and the narrator's lyrical descriptions of the prairie's "terrible northern blast" defines the book's dual texture. As the story progresses, the prose grows more restrained, especially when Gearheart reflects on Flaxen's future, signaling a shift from external action to internal conflict.

Dialect and Domesticity

The early chapters rely heavily on the bachelors' vernacular. Anson's exclamations—"Gee whittiker, thunder and turf, gosh-all—Friday!"—and Bert's dry retorts create a rhythm of banter that feels both affectionate and weary. Garland uses this dialogue to convey character without exposition: Anson's impulsiveness, Bert's caution. The cabin becomes a stage for small rituals—twisting hay, checking on a neighbor's missing smoke—that ground the story in the physical demands of frontier life. The men's speech is not merely decorative; it carries the weight of their isolation and their makeshift family. When Flaxen later sends a photograph, Anson's reaction is pure, unguarded joy, rendered in the same exclamatory style. This consistency in voice makes the later, more restrained passages all the more striking.

The Shift to Interiority

As the novel progresses, the narrative voice moves inward, particularly through Gearheart. His thoughts about Flaxen—"She is not a child—she is a maiden, soon to be a woman"—are rendered in a more formal, almost legalistic prose. The earlier dialogue's immediacy gives way to longer, more analytical paragraphs. Garland marks this change with a shift in setting: from the cramped cabin to the open prairie, where Gearheart walks alone, observing the "low-hung flights of geese" and feeling the "strange charm in the raw air." The external landscape becomes a mirror for internal conflict. The pace slows, and the reader is asked to attend to unspoken tensions—the constraint between the two friends, the letter Gearheart refuses to open. This modulation from action to reflection is the book's central narrative strategy.

Pace and the Threat of Gossip

Garland accelerates the narrative in key scenes of public confrontation. When a drunken man at the post office mutters about "his little Norsk," Gearheart's response is immediate and physical: he "thrust his eyes into the face of the speaker with a glare." The prose tightens, using short, verb-driven sentences. The threat of scandal compresses time and emotion. Later, the same scene's aftermath lingers: the "insinuating inflection" stays with Gearheart "like a bad taste in the mouth." This alternation between swift action and slow, sensory aftermath controls the book's rhythm. The blizzard that opens the story returns as a metaphor for social danger—sudden, overwhelming, and cold. By varying sentence length and scene duration, Garland keeps the reader attuned to both the physical dangers of the prairie and the subtler perils of reputation.

Garland's control of pace and voice rewards attention to small shifts: a change from dialogue to description, a sentence that lengthens as a character hesitates. The excerpts suggest a novel that earns its emotional weight through restraint rather than melodrama. Readers may find it useful to track how the men's speech evolves—or fails to—as Flaxen grows. The opening poem, with its "spectral wolves" and "icy showers," is not merely atmospheric; it is a key to the book's method, where the natural world and human feeling are never far apart.

The rain kept time against the window while I finished A Little Norsk, the cabin’s lingering loneliness staying with me long after Flaxen’s quiet change. That unspoken ache between the men reminded me of another story I’d once shelved—same restrained sorrow, different weather. Later, half-dreaming, I reached for The Lion’s Mouse — Story, Setting & Ideas and found that same held breath, but set among city shadows. One book simply led to the other.