Explore the real places in Oslo that appear in Hunger by Knut Hamsun. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Karl Johans gate, Studenterlunden Park, The Pawn Shop (Pantebankens kontor), The Attic Room (Rooming House), Newspaper Editorial Office (Aftenposten area) and 7 more.
Central boulevard — the narrator's main stage for wandering
The unnamed narrator drifts endlessly along Karl Johans gate, the grand central boulevard of Christiania, in a state of feverish half-starvation. He observes the well-dressed bourgeoisie promenading, feeling both contempt and desperate envy. It is here that his mind begins to fracture — he invents absurd words, constructs grandiose philosophical systems, and rehearses desperate stratagems to obtain food or money. The street is the novel's primary arena for his humiliation and his strange, defiant pride.
Karl Johans gate was laid out in the early 19th century and named after King Karl Johan. It connects the Royal Palace to the Parliament building and has long been Christiania's — later Oslo's — most prestigious thoroughfare, lined with cafés, hotels, and civic buildings.
Karl Johans gate remains Oslo's most famous street, now a partly pedestrianized zone bustling with shops, restaurants, and tourists. The Royal Palace gardens at one end and the Storting parliament at the other still anchor the boulevard as the city's ceremonial spine.
Visit: Karl Johans gate (landmark)
Karl Johans gate — the narrator's outdoor refuge and bench
The narrator retreats repeatedly to the benches of Studenterlunden, the small park beside the university, to rest his weakening body. Here he sits for hours watching passersby, sometimes scribbling on scraps of paper in bursts of creative mania, other times simply enduring the gnawing pain of hunger. The park represents a fragile zone between the indoors he cannot afford and the streets that exhaust him — a place where a destitute man can sit without being expelled.
Studenterlunden, meaning 'the students' grove,' was established in the mid-19th century adjacent to the University of Christiania. It was a gathering place for students, intellectuals, and the general public and has been a green oasis in the city center for well over a century.
Studenterlunden remains a lively public park in central Oslo, used by students, office workers, and tourists. It sits between the National Theatre and the university buildings, and outdoor concerts and events are frequently held there.
Visit: Studenterlunden Park (park)
Near Stortorvet — repeated humiliations in exchange for coins
The narrator visits the pawn shop repeatedly to surrender what few possessions he has left — his waistcoat buttons, his pencil, scraps of his clothing — in exchange for desperately small sums. Each visit is a scene of acute shame. He concocts elaborate pretexts and rehearses dignified speeches, only to be met with the pawnbroker's indifferent, contemptuous gaze. Hamsun uses these scenes to show how starvation strips away not just material comfort but psychological coherence and self-respect.
The municipal pawn office in Christiania served the city's poor throughout the 19th century and was a routine institution of working-class and destitute life. Pawning small personal objects was one of the few financial recourses available to people with no credit or steady income.
The area around Stortorvet, the old main square of central Oslo, has been heavily developed. The specific pawn office building no longer functions as such, but the square and its surroundings remain a busy commercial and transit hub.
Near Hammersborg — the garret the narrator is eventually evicted from
The narrator rents a wretched attic room in a Christiania rooming house, lying awake on a bare mattress as hunger distorts his thoughts into feverish visions and strange linguistic inventions. His landlady grows increasingly suspicious and hostile as he falls behind on rent. When he is finally evicted, he wanders the night streets, unable to find shelter, sleeping in doorways and on benches — a turning point that dramatizes the novel's central terror of complete homelessness.
The Hammersborg district north of the city center was a working-class and lower-middle-class neighborhood in late 19th-century Christiania, filled with rooming houses and cheap lodgings that housed the city's transient poor, students, and struggling artists.
Hammersborg is now a mixed residential and administrative area in central Oslo. The rooming houses of the 1890s have largely been replaced by modern apartment buildings and government offices, though the neighborhood retains a quieter character than the commercial center.
Near Akersgata — where the narrator submits his desperate articles
The narrator, a self-styled writer, delivers handwritten articles and sketches to a newspaper editorial office in the hope of receiving payment that will allow him to eat. The editors sometimes accept his pieces for a few kroner, which he spends almost immediately on bread or a meal. These moments of temporary salvation are agonizingly brief. The editorial office represents the narrator's tenuous claim to being a man of letters — a claim undermined at every turn by his inability to sustain concentration or physical health.
Akersgata in central Christiania was the traditional home of Norwegian newspaper publishing, with major titles including Aftenposten and Dagbladet operating from offices there throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. It was the nerve center of the city's journalistic and intellectual life.
Akersgata remains associated with Norwegian media, though many newspaper offices have relocated or downsized. The street runs through a central area of Oslo near government buildings and is still lined with significant civic and commercial institutions.
Grønland district — where the narrator attempts to buy food
When the narrator obtains a few coins — through a submitted article or a momentary windfall — he sometimes makes his way to the market areas of the eastern working-class neighborhoods to purchase a crust of bread or a bone to gnaw. Hamsun renders these scenes with excruciating physical intensity: the smell of food, the narrator's shaking hands, the humiliation of buying the cheapest possible scraps. Sometimes, in a perverse fit of pride or derangement, he gives the food away to beggars instead of eating it himself.
Grønland was one of Christiania's poorest and most densely populated districts in the 19th century, home to laborers, immigrants, and the destitute. Its markets and streets were a world apart from the bourgeois promenade of Karl Johans gate just a kilometer away.
Grønland has transformed into one of Oslo's most multicultural neighborhoods, with a vibrant mix of immigrant communities, restaurants, and markets. Grønland Bazaar and the surrounding streets remain lively commercial areas with a distinctly diverse character.
Visit: Grønland Bazaar (landmark)
Drammensveien 1 — symbol of the social order the narrator is excluded from
The narrator sometimes drifts as far as the Royal Palace and its surrounding park on his exhausted wanderings up Karl Johans gate, observing the guards and the formal architecture from the outside. The Palace looms in the novel as a silent emblem of the social hierarchy — the stable, well-fed world of order and wealth — that the narrator is utterly excluded from. His proximity to it, even in his ragged, starving state, feeds his delusions of grandeur and intellectual superiority.
The Royal Palace in Christiania was completed in 1849 under King Oscar I and has been the official residence of the Norwegian monarch ever since. Its park, Slottsparken, has been open to the public since the palace's construction and remains one of the city's most visited green spaces.
The Royal Palace and Slottsparken remain major Oslo landmarks. The palace grounds are open to the public year-round, and guided tours of the interior are offered in summer. The daily changing of the guard ceremony draws visitors from around the world.
Visit: The Royal Palace (Det kongelige slott) (historic site)
Pipervika — the novel's final scene of departure
In the novel's devastating final pages, the narrator signs on as a crew member aboard a ship departing Christiania harbor, abandoning the city that has ground him down. He watches the skyline of Christiania recede from the deck. The departure is ambiguous — neither triumphant escape nor tragic defeat, but something stranger: a yielding, an erasure of self. Hamsun ends the novel here, leaving the narrator's fate and interior state radically open, a refusal of conventional narrative resolution.
Christiania's harbor at Vippetangen and the Pipervika area was the city's main commercial port throughout the 19th century, a hub of shipping, trade, and emigration. Thousands of Norwegians departed from these docks for America and other destinations during the great emigration waves of the 1880s and 1890s.
The inner Oslo harbor has been radically transformed since the late 19th century. The Aker Brygge and Tjuvholmen waterfront developments have replaced the old working port with restaurants, galleries, and the Astrup Fearnley Museum. The area is now one of Oslo's most fashionable districts.
Visit: Aker Brygge Waterfront (landmark)
Karl Johans gate 47 — emblem of learning the narrator identifies with
The narrator, who fancies himself an intellectual and serious writer, walks past the university buildings with the complex mixture of identification and alienation that runs throughout the novel. He is educated enough to write philosophical journalism but too destitute to participate in the cultural world the university represents. The university buildings serve as a backdrop to his wanderings along Karl Johans gate, a visible reminder of the intellectual life he believes himself part of, even as starvation destroys his capacity to sustain coherent thought.
The University of Christiania was founded in 1811 and moved to its current monumental neoclassical campus on Karl Johans gate in the 1850s. It was the country's only university for most of the 19th century and the center of Norwegian intellectual and scientific life.
The historic university campus, now part of the University of Oslo, remains in use and includes the Great Hall (Aula), famous for its Henrik Ibsen-era murals by Edvard Munch. The building is open for public events and occasional tours.
Visit: University of Oslo – Historic Campus (historic site)
Near Møllergata — the narrator's encounters with authority
The narrator has encounters with police and civic authority figures during his most desperate phases of homelessness, when he sleeps rough in doorways and parks and attracts suspicion. These confrontations expose the cruelty of a society that criminalizes poverty. Hamsun depicts the narrator's attempts to maintain dignity and coherence before officers who see only a vagrant — a collision between his internal sense of identity as a writer and his external reality as a starving, ragged man with no fixed address.
Møllergata 19 was the address of Christiania's main police station and later became infamous as a place of detention during the Nazi occupation in World War II. In the 1890s the area housed municipal authority buildings that dealt with the city's poor, vagrant, and criminal populations.
Møllergata 19, known as 'Møllergata 19' in Norwegian historical memory, is now preserved as a site of World War II remembrance. The street itself is a normal central Oslo thoroughfare, but its history layers both the social control of the 1890s poor and the political terror of the 1940s.
Working-class district — rare moments of actual food
On the rare occasions when the narrator obtains enough money for a meal, he enters one of the cheap eating houses in the working-class parts of Christiania — a steaming, low-ceilinged room smelling of boiled meat and wet coats. Hamsun renders these meals with painful vividness: the narrator's hands shaking as he lifts the spoon, his stomach revolting against food after prolonged starvation, the shame of being observed. These moments are not triumphs but further degradations, showing how completely hunger has reshaped his body and mind.
Cheap eating houses and soup kitchens were widespread in working-class Christiania during the 1880s and 1890s, a period of significant urban poverty and labor unrest. They served factory workers, day laborers, and the destitute poor in the city's eastern and lower districts.
The eastern districts of Oslo around Grønland and Tøyen that housed working-class eating establishments in the 1890s are now home to a diverse array of affordable international restaurants. The social geography has changed enormously, though affordable food culture persists.
Johanne Dybwads plass 1 — culture the narrator observes from outside
The narrator passes the grand National Theatre on his endless circuits of Karl Johans gate, watching well-dressed theatergoers enter while he stands hungry and ragged on the pavement. The theater crystallizes one of the novel's central ironies: the narrator is a man of genuine literary and intellectual sensibility, yet he is barred from participation in the cultural life happening steps away from him. Hamsun uses such urban landmarks to measure the distance between the narrator's interior world and his material circumstances.
The Nationaltheatret opened in 1899, shortly after Hamsun wrote Hunger, though a theater culture was well established in Christiania by the 1880s. The building was designed by Henrik Bull in a neo-baroque style and quickly became Norway's most prestigious stage, associated with productions of Ibsen's and Bjørnson's works.
The National Theatre remains Norway's principal dramatic stage, still occupying the original 1899 building on Johanne Dybwads plass. It continues to produce major classical and contemporary productions and is a central institution of Norwegian cultural life, open to the public for performances.
Visit: Nationaltheatret (theater)
More by Knut Hamsun: All Knut Hamsun books