Tore "Spencer Brown" Ørjasæter (3 March 1886, Skjåk

Skjåk

Skjåk is a municipality in Oppland county, Norway. It is part of the traditional region of Gudbrandsdal. The administrative centre of the municipality is the village of Bismo...

, Oppland

Oppland

is a county in Norway, bordering Sør-Trøndelag, Møre og Romsdal, Sogn og Fjordane, Buskerud, Akershus, Oslo and Hedmark. The county administration is in Lillehammer. Oppland is, together with Hedmark, one of the only two landlocked counties of Norway....

 - 29 February 1968, Skjåk) was a Norwegian poet.

The son of a teacher, he attended folk high school

Folk high school

Folk high schools are institutions for adult education that generally do not grant academic degrees, though certain courses might exist leading to that goal...

 and qualified as a teacher before becoming a writer.
Ørjasæter’s poetry, in nynorsk

Norwegian language

Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...

, is in the Norwegian folk tradition. His writing is influenced by Ivar Aasen

Ivar Aasen

Ivar Andreas Aasen was a Norwegian philologist, lexicographer, playwright and poet.-Background:...

, Aasmund Olavsson Vinje

Aasmund Olavsson Vinje

Aasmund Olavsson Vinje was a famous Norwegian poet and journalist who is remembered for poetry, travel writing, and his pioneering use of Landsmål .-Background:...

 and Per Sivle

Per Sivle

Per Sivle was a Norwegian poet, novelist and newspaper editor. He is known for his novel Streik from 1891, and for his collections of stories issued between 1887 and 1895, Sogor , Vossa-Stubba, Nye Vossa-stubbar and Sivle-Stubbar...

. Like these, he was concerned with modernization

Modernization

In the social sciences, modernization or modernisation refers to a model of an evolutionary transition from a 'pre-modern' or 'traditional' to a 'modern' society. The teleology of modernization is described in social evolutionism theories, existing as a template that has been generally followed by...

 of traditional society, and the conflict between individual and community, but he differed from these poets in a more positive attitude to the new society. Towards the end of his life, he also started experimenting with more modernist writing

Modernist poetry

Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature in the English language, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the...

.

His main work is considered to be the poem Gudbrand Langleite. Ørjasæter is often mentioned in conjunction with Olav Aukrust

Olav Aukrust

Olav Aukrust was a Norwegian poet and teacher. He was born in Lom and wrote poems with a renewed national romantic style. His use of rural dialect contributed to the growth of Nynorsk as a literary language.-Life:...

.

Works

• 1908 - Ættar-arv (Ancestor-heritage) – poetry
• 1910 - I dalom (In the valley) – poetry
• 1913 - Gudbrand Langleite – trilogy, first part
• 1915 - Manns kvæde (Man’s chanting) – poetry
• 1920 - Bru-millom (Between bridges) – trilogy, second part
• 1925 - Skiringsgangen (The cleansing walk)
• 1927 - Skuggen (The shadow) – trilogy, third part
• 1932 - Elvesong (River song) – poetry
• 1945 - Livsens tre (The tree of life) – poetry
• 1948 - Christophoros – play
• 1949 - Den lange bryllupsreisa (The long honeymoon) – play

Awards

• Statens kunstnerlønn from 1929
• Gyldendal's Endowment
  Gyldendal's Endowment
  Gyldendal's Endowment was a literature prize which was awarded in the period 1934–1995 by the Norwegian publisher Gyldendal Norsk Forlag. The prize was awarded to significant authors, regardless of which publisher the author was associated with...
  
   1946
• Dobloug Prize
  Dobloug Prize
  The Dobloug Prize is a literature prize awarded for Swedish and Norwegian fiction. The prize is named after Norwegian businessman and philanthropist Birger Dobloug pursuant to his bequest. The prize sum is . The Dobloug Prize is awarded annually by the Swedish Academy.-Prize winners:...
  
   1952
• Gudbrandsdal
  Gudbrandsdal
  The Gudbrandsdalen is a valley and traditional district in the Norwegian county of Oppland. The valley is oriented in a north-westerly direction from Lillehammer at Mjøsa, extending 230 km toward Romsdal...
  
  's culture prize of 1957
• Melsom-prisen 1968