Tor Jonsson

Translator's Note: This is a machine-assisted translation completed on March 10, 2025. While care has been taken to maintain accuracy, this translation has not yet undergone human review or validation. Please note that specialized terms, historical references, and nuanced content may benefit from expert review. The poetry excerpts are also machine-translated.

Tor Jonsson (1916–1951) was a poet, author, and journalist. He was born and raised in poor conditions in Lom, Gudbrandsdalen. His father passed away when he was 13, and after that, the reserved young boy spent most of his life at home with his mother and an unmarried sister—in a one-room kitchen with a sleeping alcove. Tor Jonsson was considered by many to be a loner and felt a strong attachment to both women in his household, especially his mother. It was only after her death in June 1950 that the son moved to Oslo. By then, he had already published three poetry collections, the first in 1943.

He likely moved to Oslo because he wanted to escape the narrow-minded mentality that often dominates small places. This mentality targets those who are, behave, or feel different. It is connected to a sense of alienation and "the village beast," as Tor Jonsson called it. However, he did not find peace in the capital either, and shortly after New Year in 1951, he took his own life at the age of 34.

In literary history, it has generally been accepted that Tor Jonsson was heterosexual, and his poetry has therefore been interpreted in that context. This perspective was particularly prominent in Ingar Sletten Kolloen's biography of Tor Jonsson, Berre kjærleik og død (Only Love and Death, 1999). The theme is not even questioned, whether regarding the author or the content of his poetry. However, considering such a fragile and divided person as Tor Jonsson, it is surprising that Kolloen did not seem to entertain the idea that Jonsson might have felt an attraction to his own gender, that his poems could at least be interpreted in such a direction, that they might be "genderless," or that the poems were not always as unambiguous.

Kolloen's book sparked lively debate, including an article by me. In retrospect, Kolloen had to admit that the thought had crossed his mind, but he had found no evidence that Tor Jonsson was homosexual. In a literary biography, the biographer's foremost task is to interpret the author's work. I therefore attempted to do this in a long article in Syn og Segn titled "Tor Jonsson – ‘A Bird with a Broken Wing’" (2001). Afterwards, I received a call from a Nordic professor with good knowledge of the Lom village, who thanked me for the article and mentioned that the villagers had thought along the same lines as I had.

A Bird with a Broken Wing

Poetry can be read in many ways, and each reader has their interpretation. Poetry is a concentrated form of expression that encompasses various forms of masking, symbols, and codes, but one of the most important poetic devices, and what likely distinguishes poetry most from other fictional genres, is the unspoken. A significant criterion of poetry is also that the author is more visible and personal in a poem than, for instance, in a novel, so that "the reader perceives a convergence between the poet's and the poem's self" (Kittang and Aarseth 1968). The following is therefore my interpretation of Tor Jonsson's lyrical opus:

To me, Tor Jonsson is "like a bird with a broken wing," as he describes himself in the posthumous poem "I Never Owned Love", quoted below. Like the bird with the damaged wing, Jonsson also cannot rise from loneliness and fly away from what he perceives as his sad fate: the division within himself, the fear of fully knowing himself, and the longing for, but also the fear of, getting close to another person. This is expressed in the famous lines from the poem "When You Are Gone" (1951): "You are closest when you are gone. / Something is lost when you are near. / This I call love— / I do not know what it is."

Longing as a Driving Force

Longing is a powerful driving force for the man from Lom, as seen in the poem "Longing Built Cathedrals" (1946). The poet’s voice has never dared to live out its innermost longings: “For so long the mind glowed / with longings that never became / anything but leaves on tired soil—” (1975). As a theme, longing is something the sensitive poet seems to have sustained himself on since The Dreamer in the first poetry collection (1943):

He walks there alone,

confused in thought:

for the fairest life

he hides himself shy.

Yes, longing has cursed

a life and set the soul ablaze.

Why is he in so much pain? Why does he suffer so? He may explain it in the short story "The Ascension" (1975): “I am in pain. That’s why I toy with thoughts: We suffer because we long for something else. No, we suffer because we don’t dare to know everything about ourselves. Then we long for women, and afterward, we know that, really, it was something else we longed for... But we dare not know more…”

What is it he dares not know? What he truly longs for? Warmth and love from another person? But can he ever be happy? “You do not possess happiness alone. / Happiness is not for two.” (1948). This may seem contradictory but reflects the poet’s ambivalence and inner disharmony. The reason may be that another resides within him, one he never dares to reveal, one who never gets to express himself, as the poet admits in "The Unknown" (1951):

I am a man no one knows.

For who I am always walked an unknown path.

Farewell then, all good friends,

who only know him who never resembled me.

 

No one can praise or blame me,

For no one knows me and no one comes near me.

/.../

No one can bury me, for no one

has known me.

There is another in me, he never owned

words.

The Motif of the Other

The other person and the inner division appear in the poem "The Shadow" (1948): “The man drags a shadow behind him. / The shadow of a man, ugly and misshapen, /.../ The shadow twists in wicked longing backward, / misshapen like my own soul.” Also worth mentioning is the poem Sinai (1946), where the poetic self drinks and reflects in a spring: “Then I saw what I never understood before.” Like a Narcissus, he sees someone like himself, a kindred spirit, and glimpses the future: “I saw the new fair land of milk and honey.” A land often called Arcadia, a pastoral idyll where love knows no rules or boundaries.

The motif of the other also appears in another poem about anxiety and loneliness, "Selfishness Defiled Me" (1975). Here the poet acknowledges that “Suddenly from my heart / sprang a stranger.” The poet does not want the stranger to leave and pleads with the other not to abandon him. No, it is now too late, comes the reply: “The love in you freezes. / I return to the origin’s light.” The poetic self is to blame, and the key to happiness seems painfully simple:

The answer was black:

You yourself have made yourself what you are.

The answer was white:

Love, love, and breathe freely—

It has been suggested that Tor Jonsson’s tragedy was that, with his strong need for human contact and to thaw in the warmth friendship and love can provide, he never managed to break through the wall that his difficult nature seemingly built around him. Nor did he allow others to enter that same wall. He hid his face behind a mask—“spiritual camouflage,” Tore Ørjasæter called it: “He wore his mask like the knight’s visor.” He did not wear his heart on his sleeve, emphasizes Ørjasæter, but “you could sense in him a great need for understanding, for warmth, which he seemed to lack so bitterly [...].” The tragedy of his life is the unlived. (Ørjasæter, 1951). In Diary Pages (1948), Tor Jonsson himself articulates the dilemma he and others like him lived under:

We struggle against all others

and long to get close

to every person we meet,

and still be the ones we are.

A Man Burned by the Village

Tor Jonsson feels at home neither in the village nor the city. He is a solitary wanderer but not the only one: “I carry a burden for all my fellow villagers.” His alter ego walks beside him, the one no one knows, as in Wanderer (1948):

He is a solitary man of the village,

one whom the village burns.

 

But a homeless spirit in the sea of time

shall never reach its dreamed goal.

I burn and burn on the loneliness pyre,

to which eternity pours oil.

Many, many follow me,

but each is solitary, like me.

In the poem above, we see the “village beast” at full force! It is as if we can hear the chill of medieval pyre burnings. Much weighed down the visibly disharmonic and fragile soul of Tor Jonsson. He was far more complex, with his tender and closed-off spirit full of contradictions and an insurmountable loneliness, along with a seemingly never-satisfied longing for closeness and love. In the poem Bound to the Pyre (1946), this fundamental despair surfaces in the line “To be bound to the mockery’s pyre”:

Never, never to speak out

about what you carry in your heart—

this gives the greatest sorrow.

 

To live a lie among people

and feel that you are alive,

frees a cry of terror from the heart.

Tor Jonsson could not cope with the fear of what lay deep within him, which made him never trust himself, nor those around him: “How long will we believe what we say / and never dare see ourselves as we are?” he laments in the poem Oh Lord, How Long Shall We Hear (1975). The poet longs for closeness but claims that the days rot and the birds flee from him: “Everyone flees from me. / Never shall anyone weep / safely upon my rock-hard chest. /.../ Eternal as unborn life / you shall live in my heart” (Love Song, 1948). The poet both wants and does not want: “All loneliness is a closed gate. / Come near, come near—” (Diary Pages, 1948).

The poet is aware early on that he cannot create any form of life to leave behind, as expressed in The Youth’s Path (1948): “Oh, brothers on this burnt youth soil! / Our destiny is to become soil for what grows.” But he hopes and believes, with the last remains of his soul, that the future will be better: “Oh, pale brothers, on earth we shall create / the good life we ourselves had to forfeit.” The theme of like-minded brothers one day experiencing another kingdom of love reappears in what is likely the last poem Jonsson wrote, I Owned No Love.

I Owned No Love

The sensitive and emotional Tor Jonsson harbored a deep longing for affection and warmth. If he were God, he would therefore create love and death, only love and death—and in addition: “If I were a God / I would create / a quieter world. / There, everyone would love.” He called this poem A Poor Wish (1951). The dream of a world ruled by love is also expressed in the mercilessly honest poem I Owned No Love (1975). However, the poet does not seem entirely convinced of it. He feels completely crushed and cannot bear the thought of getting back up. It seems that only death remains. Here is an excerpt:

I owned no love

but spoke softly with angelic lips

and all my empty words mark my time of living.

/.../

I burned for all the wretched

and stood in a brotherly ring,

but I owned no love

and therefore am nothing.

 

I owned no love

and therefore am earth.

But perhaps there is a kingdom

where only love grows.

/.../

One day I shall die in loneliness,

like a bird with a broken wing.

It was likely the poet from the neighboring village of Skjåk, Jan-Magnus Bruheim, two years older, who came closest to understanding Tor Jonsson. Bruheim was immediately informed of Jonsson’s suicide attempt, which initially landed him in the hospital. The atmosphere by the hospital bed is warmly and poignantly depicted by Jan-Magnus Bruheim in his beautiful and moving memorial poem about his friend, titled Farewell to a Friend. In the first part, he waits for a miracle to happen; in the second part, a desperate Bruheim tries to call his friend back to life—here are the first and last verses:

A restless spirit flees between hope and despair—

He is still alive. A miracle must happen.

But friendship saves no one. We are

alone

on the farthest isle in our heaviest moments.

/.../

I stand here before the closed, and call for

you

from the lonely shore by the quiet sea.

And cry out from the depths: Come back!

But friendship awakens no one from

death.

Both Jonsson and Bruheim likely faced the “village beast” for behaving differently from what was expected in rural society. Neither of them married and instead remained living at home with their mother or father instead of venturing out. They worked with words instead of cultivating the earth. Yet it was only when they felt that they were truly living—when they escaped into their own world of words and imagery, rhythmical poetry, and metaphors—that they found meaning.