Kristofer Uppdal


Kristofer Oliver Uppdal, born Opdal, was a Norwegian poet and author, born in Beitstad, Nord-Trøndelag.
As a boy, Uppdal worked as a shepherd, and later as a miner and construction worker. In 1907 he started working for Norsk Hydro, and came to their factory in Rjukan in 1910-1911. In 1905, he debuted with Ung sorg and Kvæde, collections of poetry, followed by Sollaug in 1908, and Villfuglar in 1909.
With the short-stories collection Ved Akerselva in 1910, Uppdal introduced his epic 10-volume series of novels, Dansen gjenom skuggeheimen. Here listed are the separate volumes in the order that Uppdal himself later designated and explained in the preface to Herdsla, along with year of publication:
Uppdal seems to have decided to link the stories together in hindsight, as he outlined the plan in the last volume, Herdsla, and thus revised and republish the three volumes first published so they'd fit the puzzle. His intent, by his own statements, was to describe the dawn of the working class, its severance from its origins, the proletarization, and finally the modern worker and the worker movement. At the same time, Uppdal claimed he was not a "proletarian poet;" his main purpose was to describe the human being.
Two of the volumes were republished in revised editions in the 1950s, in which Uppdal had changed the language used into a more archaic and dialectal form. These editions didn't win any acclaim, and later editions of the series in the 1970s and 1985-91 were made from the 1919-24 editions.
Uppdal was also an important lyric poet. He gathered his finest poetry of youth and adulthood in Elskhug in 1919, and Altarelden in 1920. Of his poetry, Johs. A. Dale has written that "It has a primitive strength and a masculine self-assertion, and is marked by suffering and conflict of the soul." Uppdal was finally granted a poet's pension by the state in 1939, perhaps due to his long periods of financial hardship.
When confronted with his difficult prose and asked if he had plans to make his novels more audience-friendly, he is said to have responded: "I don't give a damn about the audience! Don't give a hoot about what anyone else says, be yourself even if it should take you straight to the pits of Hell."