A phantastic work, combining Griegs own style, Norwegian traditional folk music, and influences from French impressionism which Grieg had met during a visit to Paris. The "Killingdansen" e.g. is a traditional Norwegian folk dance of type Halling. The poetry is taken from a - in Norway - famous novel written totally as a sequence of poems. The title of the novel is the same - Haugtussa. The title means "the girl from the hill", and the author was Arne Garborg. The novel is about a simple girl from the countryside from the landscape of Jaeren in the south-west of Norway, south of the city Stavanger. She is clairvoyant - she can see into the world of ghosts and demons without being conscious of it. During a summers work as a herding girl in a mountain cottage in the landscape Rogaland she meets views into this 'other' world, but she also has her work to think about, and falls in an unlucky love with the son of the farmer who employed her. She has to undergo a life crisis in her young years, caused by her views into the secret world of the demons and by her unhappy love affair with the young guy. The novel - whole in poetry - is written in the 1890-ies in an old-fashioned language (nynorsk) which sounds very archaic and is very difficult to read for foreigners like me. Anyhow - I can recommend it warmly to all people with more than a superficial knowledge of the Norwegian language. Grieg took only a few of these poems, thus the actions of the novel can not be reconstructed from his song version. Grieg loved the "New Norwegian" (nynorsk) language which was created artificially around 1850 but was based on old Norwegian dialects, as a contrast to the official language 'bokmål' which was a modified and adapted version of Danish. The most common Norwegian in use today is still 'bokmål'.
![Edvard Grieg - Haugtussa {The Mountain Maid}, op. 67 [With score]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
