Faulkner's reputation in Norway may be said to rest upon a legend of the difficult but otherwise great story-teller from the South, a legend that has been even more tenacious because so few people have been capable of correcting it by reading the books themselves. But it also, inevitably, rest on the reception of the first translations of his books, on influences from abroad and on the relatively wide reading of English-language paperbacks. 
     The Norwegian translation of Soldiers' Pay in 1932, was the first translation of a Faulkner book anywhere. Sigurd Hoel, Norwegian novelist, critic and editor, included the book in his already famous "Yellow Series".2 Hoel also wrote an introduction which is interesting in many ways, not the least because it is one of the very first non-English essays written on Faulkner.3 Light in August was brought out in a translation two years later (1934), also with an introduction by Sigurd Hoel. It was re-issued in 1951, 1964 and 1989. No more translations appeared till after Faulkner's Nobel Prize in 1950: Sanctuary was published in 1951, as was a collection of fourteen short stories. Sanctuary was reprinted in paperback in 1970, and a book club edition appeared in 1988. The collection of selected short stories contains the following fourteen stories: "Was," "Barn Burning," "Two Soldiers," "Death Drag," "That Evening Sun," "Red Leaves," "A Justice," "A Courtship," "Ad Astra," "Wash," "Honor," "Doctor Martino," "Carcassonne." The version of "Was" included here is taken from The Portable Faulkner--not from Go Down, Moses, and should not really have been included since it is stated in the book that all stories are taken from Collected Stories. 
     Translations of  The Unvanquished, The Reivers, The Wild Palms and The Sound and the Fury appeared in 1957, 1964, 1966 and 1967, respectively. Only The Sound and the Fury has been re-issued, in a book club edition as one of the books in "The Library of  the Century" in 1992.4 
     In 1992 a translation of As I Lay Dying was published. In 1992, moreover, a very handsome edition of 28 of Faulkner's short stories was published by a book club. The book includes 13 of the 14 stories in the 1951 short story volume, and, accordingly, fifteen stories translated into Norwegian for the first time. Absalom, Absalom! appeared in translation in 1994, and Go Down, Moses in 1996. In 1996 the first volume of SNOPES, The Hamlet, was also translated, followed by a translation of The Town in 1998. In the meantime, in 1997, Faulkner's only book for children, The Wishing Tree, was made available in Norwegian. 
      On the basis of this survey, one might think that Faulkner stands a better chance of being influential among Norwegian writers in the coming years than ever before, since so many books have been translated only recently. But literary influence works in mysterious ways, and Faulkner has been read in English as well as in Danish and Swedish translations by Norwegian writers and intellectuals from the early 1930s. One of those whom we know read William Faulkner was, of course, Sigurd Hoel, who did not particularly like his books and preferred Hemingway and Steinbeck and other American writers to Faulkner. Hoel's own novels (of which Faulkner had two in his library) are much simpler structures than any of Faulkner's books, and he clearly preferred logic and clarity whereas Faulkner's books often seem to develop in accord with some subversive or inexplicable logic.

     To my knowledge, we have only one piece of evidence to show that Olav Duun read Faulkner. In a letter to a book reviewer he recommends strongly that she read As I Lay Dying.5 He is clearly impressed by the book, and he has read it very early. Knowing that Faulkner's early books were thus available (in American or British editions) in Norway very quickly, it is tempting to speculate that Duun read more books by Faulkner, like The Sound and the Fury and Light in August; perhaps even Sanctuary. Authors seem to have been more impressed by Faulkner's books than the reading public in general, and an established and very professional novelist like Duun would certainly find things to admire in Faulkner's narrative structures and rhetorical force that he had never dared to even attempt himself. Duun himself remained a fairly traditional teller of stories in the best tradition of historical novels, and even in the contemporary books from the 1930s, he experimented little. Yet Faulkner is certainly also a great storyteller, even in the experimental modernistic novels such as As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, and even more so in Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!. In a general sense, what Duun and Faulkner share, is first and foremost their sense of place. Both writers are totally and deeply immersed in the land and the culture they write from and about, yet able to see it at a distance and fictionalise it with wry humour and generous understanding of its shortcomings. Both prove that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, and they both create imaginary areas within which almost all their characters live, and all the events of their stories take place. 
     The single most important event in Faulkner's development must be said to be his discovery of his native land, and the functions it could be given in his fiction. As he struggled against reluctant publishers, bad reviews, and low sales, Faulkner discovered his own "postage stamp of native soil,"6 the basis for his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. With The Sound and the Fury (1929) a complete transition seems to have occurred, and in many of his early books he was, to different degrees, "rewriting the homeplace" to use Richard Gray's phrase.7 
     Instead of a comparison of individual novels or of narrative handling or of the function of place, it seems to be both necessary and worthwhile to present Olav Duun and his fictional world and work. Faulkner's world is more or less well known to Faulkner readers young and old. A survey of some of the characteristics of Duun's fiction may hence indicate how and where it in significant ways relates to Faulkner's better known world of Yoknapatawpha.

     Olav Duun's fiction is firmly rooted in a certain place and time, yet his writing surpasses all geographical or sociological borders, and creates a fictional region in which man's injustice to man is the key question, and in which the metaphoric or figurative representation of landscape, transforms hamlets and villages, islands and inlets, into places of the mind. Duun's places belong in his recollections of a past, in time and place, and they were created in anguish and agony, not in order to trace the well-worn paths of childhood or describe socio-economic or historical changes, but in order to penetrate to the hidden and forbidden recesses of the human heart, in order to understand better, and, by implication, to help in the uplifting of people's hearts. 
     Duun is capable of fusing the local and universal, the individual and community, everyday acts and questions of morality and humanity. By creating literature he lifts his people and their stories onto a new level, where the plain, often illiterate, certainly uneducated and often poor people of his region, fight the struggles, face the conflicts, endure the hardships, suffer the defeats and survive on a few triumphant moments when pity and compassion and even mercy are shown to exist among human beings who are all too often prone to fight all for themselves and their private and small ends. Their struggle reminds us of the Icelandic sagas, and Duun's people are not too distant relatives of the heroes of old. They may even share their wisdom and live according to the same belief in the rule of a blind fate, although they may finally learn that they can shape their own destinies. 
     The observant reader will have noticed that even the language used in my description of Duun's fictional world is intertextually indebted to statements Faulkner made about Yoknapatawpha. A closer study of the uses of place, in Duun's as well as in Faulkner's fiction, must rely on detailed attention to his text, to stylistic devices, narrative techniques, uses of oral language in a writing which is often poetic and beautiful, but also full of contradictions and ironies. 
     Olav Duun (1876 - 1939) was born on the small island Jøa off the coast of Namdalen in Mid-Norway. His family had come from other regions just a generation earlier, and Duun was only slowly accepted as a writer in the region he came from. He grew up on a farm in an area where fishing and agriculture dominated, and he spent numerous winters as a fisherman off the coast where he lived, and only at the age of 25 did he finally make it to a teacher's training college. He then went on teaching till 1927, to begin with in schools in mid-Norway and then from 1908 in Holmestrand south-west of Oslo. He had no wish to become a teacher, but needed an occupation, and the combination teacher and writer has certainly not been an uncommon one in Norway. Duun created his own version of the New Norwegian language, based in local dialects and syntactically very much in keeping with oral story telling traditions he had listened eagerly to as a young boy. He modernised this language and used it with a richness and variety hardly ever paralleled in our country. Even one of his opponents, a strong advocate of the old language based on Danish, Arnulf Øverland, claimed that "a richer and more beautiful, a more resounding and colourful, a more capricious and happy instrument for human spirit and emotion does not exist." To understand Duun's position in Norwegian literature and within the institution at large, one has to be aware of his language. We must bear in mind that marginality seen from one centre may be centrality seen from somewhere else, yet the creation of a world based on the land- and seascape of Namdalen and written in a private version of a marginal language, presented all the excuses a literary critic or historian would ever need to label Duun a regional writer even when he produced world literature. 
     Duun published his first book, a collection of humorous short stories, in 1907, and then hardly a year went by without a book--with few exceptions novels--from his hand. His first books would in all respects qualify as a combination of regional literature--Heimstaddikting--and new realism. His very first novels are lyrical and psychological, but still realistic. We are at sea in open boats, fighting nature to eke out a living the way Duun himself had experienced, but psychological conflicts, in the main characters, or between characters, dominate. New inventions, mechanisation, education and even small industries are part of a new, promising future, but the conservatism and apparent unchangeability of the social order are fought for by those who profit from the old order. Duun knew these forces, the almost complete change of the kind of communities he describes, that took place during the first decades of this century. Again and again he portrays young men and women who, uncertain of themselves, their place and their role, struggle with complicated relationships and sexual desires they do not quite understand, until, in some cases, they are broken, destroyed, become losers in the dangerous battle which life always is in Duun's fiction, or, perhaps, they adjust to a quiet, inconsequential life, because they have found that they were not meant for more, had not been cut out for more, of happiness or of grief. 
     Duun is the great, intuitive psychological writer in Norwegian literature. He knows much about the hidden and profound depths in human hearts, much about drives and desires and bindings and inhibitions, and he links it all to a realistic framework where nature itself, landscape, climate, the social system contribute to the description of psychological patterns, reactions, and consequences. Often character is defined according to what a person may be expected to inherit, from a long family history of strong or weak personalities. Of two brothers, one is often understood to be the born loser while the other one is to carry the family tradition onwards into a new glorious age. Duun's landscapes appear to be anchored in a real, actual society, and events and elements from the outside world are used in his fiction, but they are transformed and take place within the wider world which is his fictional universe. In his early novels, places seem to change from one book to the next; they are never the same or related, but in the period from 1914 (Three friends) to 1923 (In the storm), Duun has established a more stable and lasting region: Leinland, Nesse, Skarsvågen, Valværet, Juvikvågen, Kjelvika, Segelsund, Håberg, with a myriad of smaller places and specific houses, fields, churches, country stores etc. in addition. People also appear and reappear in many of the ten novels in this period. In the fifteen later years of Duun's career, he is again much freer in his choice of place, in the concrete scene he sets up for the agonising acting out of human cruelty and human greatness--for instance in Medmenneske (1929) and in Menneske og maktene, his last book in 1938.