Thereafter literary production remained minimal until the 1830s, which witnessed the emergence of a number of supremely gifted poets, starting with Henrik Wergeland (1808-1845), who made his debut with Skabelsen, mennesket og messias ('Creation, Man and Messiah') in 1830. Wergeland’s poetry fused Romanticism with political liberalism and cosmic religious universalism. He was also highly productive, writing drama, epic poetry, history, articles on popular education and an autobiography in the style of Laurence Sterne, Hasselnødder ('Hazelnuts', 1845). Wergeland wanted to establish a Norwegian cultural identity based on Norwegian tradition. His strongest opponent was Johan Sebastian Welhaven (1807-1873), who believed that Norway should endeavour to withhold close links with Denmark’s highly-developed aesthetic culture with a view to bringing Norwegian literature up to a European level.

The bitter struggle between the intelligentsia (the Welhaven camp) and the patriots (the Wergeland camp) dominated the 1830s and continued to surface in various different forms throughout Norwegian literary history. During the 1840s, under the influence of German national romanticism, Norwegian literature sought to combine admiration for the grandeur of ancient Norway with a new fascination with nature and the rural lifestyle, and culminated in pioneering efforts to research and collect Norwegian folklore. Literary scholar Peter Christian Asbjørnsen (1812-1885), together with theologian Jørgen Moe (1813-1882), travelled the country gathering folk tales and legends which were eventually printed in Norwegian Folk Tales (1852). This was followed by a collection of folk songs by M M Landsstad (1802-1880) and a Norwegian history by P A Munch (1811-1884). Perhaps most significant in the process of defining ‘Norwegian-ness’ were the studies of Norwegian rural dialects undertaken by linguist and poet Ivar Aasen (1813-1896). As a result of his researches a new language, landsmaal ('country language’), was identified and in 1885 the Storting declared this to be equal to the official Danish language. Landsmaal is nowadays known as Nynorsk (New Norwegian).