Greenland (Denmark) / All works
Novel · A way to begin
A Greenlander's Dream
Singnagtugaq
Mathias Storch · 1914
Synopsis
Pavia, a boy from a coastal village whom the pastor considers gifted, discovers at the Danish colony houses finer than those of his own people and is astonished by them. Against the wish of his mother, who wanted him to be a hunter, he leaves to study at the seminary in Godthåb. Around him pass the hunt, famine, village quarrels and the thwarted love of Sofie and Silas. The narrative ends with a long dream in which Pavia sees the Greenland of the future.
Context
The novel was published in Copenhagen in 1914, and Knud Rasmussen translated it into Danish the following year. A novel of education, it holds that Greenlanders should strengthen their faith while broadening their horizons, and its final dream imagines a modernised, democratic country living from fishing. It has been reissued several times in the successive orthographies of the language, then translated in 2016 into English and French, with an introduction by Karen Langgård for the French edition.
Who it is for
A short, didactic novel, more documentary than novelistic, whose final dream is what gives it its value.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first novel written in Greenlandic, or one of the first two, and for a long time the most influential work of that literature.
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