DUUN, OLAV

born Nov. 21, 1876, Fosnes, Ja Island, Norway died Sept. 13, 1939, Tnsberg novelist who is one of the outstanding names in 20th-century Norwegian fiction. Duun, a former cattle herder and fisherman, entered a seminary at the age of 26. He worked as a folk-school teacher until 1926, when he retired to Holmestrand on the Oslo Fjord to devote himself to writing. His many novels analyze the psychological and spiritual characteristics of peasant life. His masterpiece is a series of novels, collectively entitled Juvikfolke (191823; The People of Juvik), describing the development of a peasant family through several generations and symbolically tracing the development of the Norwegian people from a state of un-self-conscious primitivism to a state of civilized humanism complicated by throwbacks to their earlier violent heritage. The novels in the series have been translated as Trough of the Waves (1930), The Blind Man (1931), The Big Wedding (1932), Odin in Fairyland (1932), Odin Grows Up (1934), and Storm (1935). Duun wrote in Landsml, an amalgam of peasant dialects that developed into Nynorsk, one of the official languages of Norway. Although this was not the usual literary language, Duun's works have been influential in raising Nynorsk to literary eminence.