Simply and beautifully written, this universal tale of a boy growing into manhood is told by an author who was also the firstborn and faced with the pressures of inheriting and expectations of working the family farm. Vesaas, however, takes this simple tale into new emotional and linguistic territory, as he poetically presents the experiences of Norwegian peasant life.

In remote prehistory, before anything and everything else that would come to pass, in a portion of the Bible that most people skip over, we have written treasure that extends into the distant past.