Aasmund Olavsson Vinje · 1861 · road

The first great literary work in nynorsk, and a walking book. Vinje set off from Oslo in the summer of 1860 to cover a coronation in Trondheim for his own magazine, went up through Osterdalen and came back by Kristiansund, Romsdalen and Dovre - and the magazine folded, so he posted it to six hundred subscribers instead.

1. 1
   Christiania

   Oslo, summer 1860, and a lawyer turned journalist sets off north on foot to cover the coronation of Karl XV for his own paper Dolen - which folded before he could print any of it, so he posted it to subscribers instead.

2. 2
   Eidsvoll

   He begins the walk proper here on purpose: the house where Norway wrote itself a constitution in 1814 after four hundred years under Denmark - a political statement made by choosing where to put the first foot down.

3. 3
   Osterdalen

   North up the eastern valley through farm villages and market towns to the mountain farms and summer pastures - and Vinje writing about how people actually live, against the romantic view of the peasant he blamed Bjornson for.

4. 4
   Rondane

   The high fells, and the poem: No ser eg atter slike fjell og dalar - now I see again such mountains and valleys as those I saw in my youth. Printed here first, and now one of the best-known things in Norwegian.

5. 5
   Trondheim

   Nidaros cathedral and the coronation, which was the errand - and which takes up rather less of the book than the walking did, because by the time he arrived he had found what he was actually writing about.

6. 6
   Kristiansund

   Out to the coast and south-west, which is the long way home - the return leg going by sea and fjord rather than back down the road he came, so that the book covers two different countries in one journey.

7. 7
   Romsdalen

   Up the valley from the fjord under the Trolltindane, some of the steepest walls in Europe - and the stretch that made Romsdalen a destination for British mountaineers within a decade of Vinje walking through it.

8. 8
   Dovre

   Over the Dovrefjell, the high crossing between north and south that every Norwegian journey has used since the sagas - and where the phrase about being united until Dovre falls comes from.

9. 9
   Gudbrandsdalen

   Down the great valley, and the writing that broke with romanticism: comparison between opposites as a method, and Vinje's tvisyn, the double vision that will not let a thing be only one thing.

10. 10
    Jotunheimen

    The mountains he named - Jotunheimen, home of the giants, is his word - and where he bought Eidsbugarden and built a hut, and where he said on his deathbed that his spirit would sit on Falketind and look out over Norway.

11. 11
    Christiania

    Home, and the first great literary work in nynorsk - a walking book that invented a language's prose and contains its most quoted poem, published in instalments to subscribers of a magazine that no longer existed.