Was there ever a town whose name better expressed the buoyant optimism of the prairie frontier than Westhope, near the Canadian line, in Bottineau? Local chroniclers have credited the name to a phrase, “Hope of the West,” emanating from the railroad men who founded the town in 1903, but I want to believe the sentiment was honest. Westhope.
For a few years now I have been acquainted with a wonderful ballad that originated from Westhope—“The Sower’s Prayer,” penned by the Swedish-American farmer, John F. Talcott. I found the stanzas published in the Nonpartisan Leader, the newspaper of the Nonpartisan League, on 30 June 1919. I have written about this farmer’s poem before, but somehow, I think, overlooked something important about it.
Despite its initial publication in a newspaper that many at the time considered radical, and despite its origin at an obscure point on the plains, “The Sower’s Prayer” was reproduced and sung across the country, because it carries a universal message—the farmer’s pious petition for a good crop, or perhaps for something more basic yet. When I commenced revival of the ballad, lacking any note as to its original tune, I set it to one from my hymnal.
Now in the fields I’ve put the seed,
And, Lord, I’ve done my best indeed;
Look now with kindness, Father dear,
To all the little kernels here!
Published with the stanzas in 1919 is a note from their author: “After a Scandinavian Idea.” A Scandinavian idea—this puzzled and intrigued me from the beginning. I learned that John Talcott was a Swedish immigrant, born Johan Ferdinand Jönsson in Skåne in 1875, who changed his name to John Ferdinand Talcott when he homesteaded in Bottineau County. In 1919 he was a prosperous and successful farmer.
And a learned one, I conclude, as I contemplate the “Scandinavian idea” behind his words. I went back to the original text in the Nonpartisan Leader, printed in a box inside a farm-scene illustration, and one feature struck me: a spreading tree wrapped around the text-box. And I realized—this is the Yggdrasil, the tree of life in Nordic cosmology.
Norse cosmology appears fairly commonly in prairie literature. Mari Sandoz calls her beloved sandhills the Jotunheim, the land of giants, of her youth; the Jotunheim is nearby the Glæsisvellir, the Glittering Plains, on one root of the Yggdrasil. More prominently, Ole Rolvaag’s classic novel of Norwegian immigration is entitled, Giants in the Earth.
We mortals occupy the Midgard, the earth, situated on the middle trunk of the Yggdrasil, centered in the cosmos. In early twentieth century Scandinavian scholars on both sides of the Atlantic were going deep into the sagas, sketching their cosmic connections for twentieth-century readers. John Talcott was one of those readers. In his ballad, he prays piously to his Christian God, from his position on the Norse tree of life.
Some called the Norse narratives pagan, but in fact, the Christian concept of a tree of life is close enough to that of the Norse that the two fused in the minds of modern Nordics. Given knowledge of this depth of cultural lineage and fusion, and situating myself with John Talcott on the land, smack on the plains of the Midgard, I feel comfortable joining in on his humble final stanza.
God—Father, Son and Holy Ghost—
Send rains when they are needed most,
But if my prayers selfish seem,
Lord, give to me as best you deem.
