Bernhard Nordh

Bernhard Nordh (born April 19, 1900 in Björklinge , Uppsala municipality , † August 9, 1972 in Uppsala ) was a Swedish adventurer and author.

Joel Bernhard Nordh was the illegitimate son of the maid Selma Bolin. When the mother later married a farm worker, the stepson got his family name Nordh.

At the age of seventeen he was already a foreman of a railway construction team and a supporter of syndicalism . After organizing a strike for the eight-hour day , he was blacklisted and only found work again at the Högfors power station .

After a winter as a lumberjack, he made the decision to become a bear hunter in the mountains of Vilhelmina , where he almost died.

He then managed to get by as a tramp for a few years until he found a permanent job in a peat factory near Kumla in 1923 . When he broke his arm a year later, he was able to work as an office clerk. The owner of the factory, Count Lewenhaupt, granted Nordh access to his library. In 1926 Bernhard Nordh's first story appeared and he quit in order to devote himself only to writing. His first novel Blessed Harvest was published in 1936 , albeit without great success.

When the Swedish Tourism Association needed an article about the new settlers in Västerbotten , it commissioned Bernhard Nordh to do it. He went to the villages by bike and found the 83-year-old Jonas Larsson, who told him many stories about the hard life in the north. That provided him with material for three novels. The first, Schatten über die Marshalde , appeared in 1937 and got good reviews. Nordh published a total of 28 books.

Translations

• Shadow over the marshalde . Braunschweig 1941.
• Norrland sons . Braunschweig 1943.
• The people of Kroksjö . Braunschweig 1948.
• Heart among wolves . Vienna 1949.
• The lovers from Gulbrandstal . Vienna 1954.
• The woods are silent . Vienna 1957.

literature

• Mi Edvinsson: Bernhard Nordh, master of the Norrland adventure novel . In: Inlandsbanan . Östersund 2011, p. 28f.