Ingeborg Anders-Datter Grytten came from a Norwegian-Danish family belonging to the clergy and lived the isolated life of a leper in her parents’ home in Holmedal in Sunnfjord on the west coast of Norway.
Her hymn book Kaars-Frugt, published in 1713, expresses a yearning for death and for God’s liberation of the soul from the body. The notion of life in the body as an exile from life in Heaven as a motif in Ingeborg Grytten’s writing has deep, personal resonance owing to the story of her illness.