Viking Magazine - August 2018 - 24

information about his
American heritage. In
fact, those letters in
their original envelopes
told a great deal about
the daily life of his
mother's family, the
Stavigs, as they helped
to build the new state
of South Dakota.
However, the letters
Knut
from America were only one side of the
conversation. Shortly after returning to
the United States, Torness began asking
relatives about what he suspected must
exist somewhere-the letters from
Norway that would supply the other
end of that correspondence. He was
right. They did exist. But tracking them
down would take years.
In the end, it was worth the effort.
Once the family had them gathered,
there were more than 150 letters from
both sides of the Atlantic spanning
the period from 1880 to 1938. The
letters between the brother who left
and the brother who stayed behind
led to a readers' theater production,
a documentary fi lm, a Norwegian
historian's book about the letters and
fi nally an annotated book of the letters
translated into English.
Rosetta Stone
Already in 1967, Harold Torness had
realized it wouldn't be easy to get
copies of the Norwegian letters between
his grandfather, Lars, and Lars' halfbrother,
Knut.
" Knut, of course, had passed away,
but it was his son, Andreas, who was
on the farm. He was an older man. He
showed this corner cupboard that had
this full repository of letters in it. That's
the fi rst that Dad knew about it, "
says Torness's daughter, Jane Torness
Rasmussen. " The letters were all in
their envelopes and he could recognize
24 VIKING AUGUST 2018 sonsofnorway.com
Lars
the writing and return address. His
grandfather, Lars, had lived here in
Sisseton. Dad had known him well, but
more as a child than as an adult. Here
he saw this opportunity to learn about
why Lars had left and what that story
was. But Andreas was very protective
of the letters and would hardly let Dad
handle them. "
Nevertheless, it was the start of
something. In 1976, Harold and Mary
Torness returned to Norway for a
wedding. Andreas was still living, but
Harold also met his son, Kåre, who
agreed to provide copies of the letters
to Harold when he could. Kåre, the
owner of an electronics store in Molde,
Norway, later made use of a technology
almost unknown in his father's
generation-the copy machine-to
make copies of the letters. A relative
visiting America delivered them to the
Torness family in 1984.
But that presented new challenges,
even though Harold Torness had grown
up speaking some Norwegian.
" He realized that with his limited
Norwegian, there was no way he was
going to be able to translate those
letters, " Jane says.
Fortunately, one of Harold's relatives
was able to introduce him to Marta
and Bruce Boyce in Minneapolis. Bruce
had studied Norwegian at Luther
College in Decorah, Iowa, and Marta
was originally from a part of western
Norway close to where the Stavig
family was from-a
crucial advantage for
getting at the nuances
of the language.
" It was really the
Rosetta Stone there
that allowed the
translation to be true
to the actual letter.
Languages change.
Marta was from that
area, " says John Rasmussen, Jane's
husband. " It was still a big struggle
because it was an older version of the
language. "
Another big breakthrough came in
1994. Harold Torness learned from
Dorothy Stavig, the widow of his
cousin, Alf, that she had found a metal
box containing letters from Norway,
still in their original envelopes, in the
bottom of a trunk. Although Harold
and Alf had talked about family
history over the years, neither of them
had realized that Alf's father, Edwin
Stavig-the youngest son of Lars Stavig
and his wife, Maren-had been the
one who had been entrusted with Knut
Stavig's letters to Lars. Those letters,
too, went to Marta and Bruce Boyce for
translation.
The Play's the Thing
Harold Torness made copies of the
letters for relatives when the translations
were available. Then in early 1996, he
showed the letters to longtime friend
Wayne S. Knutson of Vermillion, South
Dakota, professor emeritus in the
theater department at the University
of South Dakota. Knutson studied the
letters and soon wrote excitedly to
Torness that he thought some of them
could form the basis of a readers' theater
piece because of what they told about
the immigrant experience in America.
Knutson's original work, The Stavig
Letters: The Story of a Norwegian
http://www.sonsofnorway.com
Viking Magazine - August 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Viking Magazine - August 2018
