Grieg's music is rich in evocations of nature and of open space. Mountain echoes, herding calls or distantly heard folk melodies saturate his work, and are among the most characteristic features of his music. Such musical representations of nature or landscape can be understood within the context of the Romantic Naturklang. Analysis of the ‘Jølstring’, op. 17/5, in the previous chapter argued that landscape in Grieg's music sets up dualities of authenticity and musical purity that were especially relevant given contemporary debates about Norwegian identity. As we have already seen, the construction of a Norwegian musical style during the nineteenth century was a function of broader processes of cultural and political self-determination in which folklorism played a central role. Such processes were closely linked with representations of the Norwegian landscape in art, music and literature. At the start of the century, the Norwegian countryside was commonly perceived as being of little economic or social value, a wasteland that was emblematic in turn of Norwegian geographical and political isolation. By the end of the century, however, the Norwegian landscape became increasingly celebrated as a site of cultural and ethnic difference or uniqueness (eiendommelighed), characteristics that, for Grieg and others such as the author Arne Garborg, supported demands for an independent Norwegian nation state. As Patricia G. Bernan has noted, for example, the idealised figure of the Norwegian rural economy, the peasant farmer, became disassociated from the historical reality of hard manual labour, ‘and relocated into a discourse of eternal renewal and immersion in the earth’.