The 70 poems comprising Haugtussa: The Clairvoyant Mountain Maid tell a fetching tale about a shepherdess whose unusual powers make her life miserable. Veslemøy sees the hidden forces and impulses within human beings and engages in a life-or-death struggle that symbolizes the battle between good and evil in the human soul.
What is she really like, this clairvoyant mountain maid? When we first meet her, "her movements, her speaking resound, revealing an inner peace." But that peace is short-lived as the implications of her clairvoyance manifest themselves. She falls in love but is cruelly betrayed by her lover. Like Goethe's Faust, she makes a pact with the devil. She engages a witch to help her poison the woman who stole her lover. Her deceased sister, whose ghost appears to her, begs her: "Veslemøy! Don't go there! You are better than that!"
What will she do? That is the question that lingers over this verse novel by Arne Garborg. Don't expect a Hollywood ending!
ARNE GARBORG (1851-1924) was a leading figure in Norwegian cultural life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The verse novel Haugtussa: The Clairvoyant Mountain Maid, published in 1895, is his most famous published work.
