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Old story

Category: Ramblings | Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 7:11 pm

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We've got lots of written stories from when the vikings were still roaming the seas. The man who did most of the work, Snorre Sturlasson (1178-1241), was from Iceland. He started writing down stories that had been orally handed down from about 900 onwards, so we're not certain of his facts although his time line is more or less correct. What we do know, is that all the stories are shorn of embellishment, crisp and to the point. I'll give you an example.

In Flatoyrboka we find this story: «A herdsman stood resting, his head hanging. Torgeir Håvarsson struck him down with his sword. When asked why, he said: «He stood in a good position for a stroke.» His father deemed it an ill deed, but his mother thought he had the makings of a great king.»

Not exactly your normal bed time story.

The people in Snorre's stories are defined by what they do and how they act. We do not know how they think. Their spoken words are few and to the point. Of course it's mostly about men. The women are just accessories and rarely act. And the winning party is very honest and well-behaved, while the losers are dirty, sneaky characters.

Snorre himself used other peoples' work as sources. There were monasteries in Scandinavia and the monks were busy writing down the stories. They, of course, wrote it the way the Church wanted the story to be told. And Snorre probably twisted it a little too.

Also, in the story of Harald Fairhair, we sense the influence from «Tristan and Isolde», the Celtic love story. I can't bring myself to believe that Harald decided to gather all of Norway under one king just because he wanted to marry a beautiful girl. Marriages at the time were not from love but from what would be convenient to your family.

The stories also tell about lots of comings and goings from east to west, north and south, and we come to realize that the people of the middle ages actually had quite a big play ground.

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Some hobby

Category: Ramblings | Posted: Fri Nov 02, 2007 9:03 am

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Norwegians are big about finding their roots. Almost every family has a hobby geneaologist digging about in old books and surfing the net to find as complete a family tree as one can. Why? I don't know, but it's fun.

Even though many really, really want to, it's hard to find lines dating further back than the 1600s. Before then, church books were poorly kept, and after that very many protocols have been lost along the way.

The State's archives are a treasure trove because they have managed to conserve the court protocols from the 1600s onwards. We didn't have a court in every town, and people often had to travel very far to get justice done. Property sales were also duly recorded. Of course these protocols won't include all kinds of facts, but one might find some nice tidbits.

Up until early 1900 people changed their surname if they moved from one place to another. It was common practice to use your home place's name as surname, a fact which can really make a geneaologist confused. The townies were an exception. They took their father's Christian name and added -sen which means son. As if that would make it any easier to find your ancestors.

Norway only had 440 000 people in 1665, and in 1822 we were one million, so the task of finding ones' kin should really not be too difficult providing someone with foresight already did the legwork and published a book about the small community where some of your relatives lived. But did they get their facts right? With people getting sick, dying in child birth, getting lost at sea or going away to war, re-marrying was a wide-spread practice. One man might have had three or four wives, and which one is the right one to record? And a newly widowed pregnant woman remarries, but who is the father of the child? Oops, somebody forgot to name her late husband.

The result of a several years-long search might be that one thread ends up around 1600, while another one stops in the early 1800s. One finds small holders, fishermen, traders, murderers and men of worth and status. They come from all over the country, even Sweden or Denmark. Your next-door neighbour might actually be a cousin 11 times removed. Nothing much is said about the women, of course, unless she did something extremely special. Maybe you've managed to pick up some useful knowledge along the way too.

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The Younger Sibling Syndrome

Category: Ramblings | Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2007 10:51 am

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Since Norway had been under both Danish and Swedish rule, we felt we had nothing much to be proud of. True, the national romantics of the 19th century made a wave of national feeling, but it didn't last. We had no world renowned painters, poets or scientists, and not a single noteworthy building. We had stone, wood and water.

When trying to find out what to do next, we looked to Sweden, Denmark, Germany and England, but when we tried to emulate them we did not succeed. Then foreigners started to notice our mountains and fjords. The first mountaineers to climb our highest peaks were English. The first fjord tourist was Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. English and Scottish nobility discovered that our rivers were teeming with salmon. The term «Salmon Lord» was established.

The Norwegians shook their head, thinking foreigners slightly mad for spending so much money and energy just to get closer to the scenery. And we kept looking for guidelines from Sweden and Denmark.

Then there was oil. American drillers and oil workers came, bringing their families with them. Several other Europeans found work here, and they looked around and exclaimed: «How beautiful! Oh, how quaint! This is very special!» And the Norwegian blushed, nodded and said, «Well, we've known that all along.»

And finally we lifted our eyes from our boots and started to grow up.

When we discovered that we could actually excel in something, our common inferiority complex started to disappear. We have the painter Edvard Munch. We have Sonia Henie, an ice skating star who became a movie star. We have great ski jumpers and cross country skiers, and even soccer pros. The Iraqui soccer team just hired a Norwegian trainer. And we have diplomats touring the globe for UN. It seems that no peace mission is complete without a Norwegian, probably because we're so small and harmless that we intimidate no-one.

Our stone, wood and water gives a good income now, and we've got sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Hopefully we won't end up being intolerably proud of ourselves.

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Making a living

Category: Ramblings | Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2007 4:08 pm

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With our very long coast line, Norwegians have always depended on the sea. We've found food there and used it for transport. We still do. Every small, inhabited place along the coast have sad stories to tell about all the people going out fishing and never returning. Often all men from one family perished, leaving their women and children behind.

The smallholder/fisherman existed until the mid-sixties, when industry finally spread out, giving people a chance to earn a living without risking their lives all the time. My grandparents were the proud owners of a rather big fishing boat, and had a couple of cows, a pig and some sheep that my grandmother tended while my grandfather was away. I'm able to remember their boat, their last pig and their sheep, so it's not too long ago. But now, this breed is all but extinct.

Further inland there were bigger farms and better climate, so farming was the main occupation. Farmers still grow wheat and such as their main livelihood, although most farm in addition to a full-time job. The full-time farmer is nearly gone. It's difficult to support a family on a Norwegian farm's income these days.

The towns had all kinds of occupations of course, to cater to the factory workers. Ours are no different from any other European towns, except they're much smaller.

Norwegians have always made boats, and that is a big industry in my part of the country. All the small ship wharfs are swallowed up by the big ones like Rolls-Royce, and they employ thousands of people. In one small valley the art of making wooden boats still lives on. Nice viking ship replicas are made there.

Now, some boring numbers:

35% of the population is working within higher education or are academics.
32% are in sales or service businesses.
19% are drivers, carpenters, masons and such.
And barely 3% are farmers or fishermen.
The ones missing are a bit here and a bit there.


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Language problems

Category: Ramblings | Posted: Mon Oct 29, 2007 9:06 pm

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I'm Norwegian in case somebody have missed it. My mother tongue is also Norwegian, and that's the language I think in. Joining a forum where English is the lingua franca is a brave deed in my eyes. Well, I'm normally not one to display bravery and occasionally I wonder if I'm in over my head. Then I comfort myself by reading a bit in a book called «Broken English spoken perfectly» by Stewart Clark. He's nailed some very typical errors foreigners make when trying to communicate in the English language.

English and Norwegian have a lot of words in common, but they don't always mean the same in the two languages. And then there are the grammatical errors. Infinite possibilities of getting things really wrong.

I'll give you an example: «In winter we have pigs in our rubber decks.» Translated: «In winter we use car tires with metal studs in them.» English pig is Norwegian stud or spike. English deck is Norwegian tire.

A classic is the phrase «Of course you can sleep with me.» No, that's not what it means! It means «Of course you can sleep over at my place.»

The late Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme had to cancel a press conference. The reason given was «he's got a very bad influence.» Meaning the flu... And when it comes to fairs or religious cermons, we call them a messe. So if somebody foreign thanks you for the mess, that's probably not what they really mean.

Nobody beats SAS when it comes to toilet signs: «Do not put foreign bodies into the lavatory.» And the Norwegian coastal steamer has its own specialty: «Do not throw strange things in the toilet». In Swedish or Norwegian it makes sense, but I think something got lost in the translation.

Also, we tend to have a rather strange pronounciation, so you won't be sure whether we mean moose, mouse or mousse. And are those black things in the mulled wine raisins or Russians? Did he say beer or bear? Is a pot plant exactly that or just a misspelled potted plant?

The worst of it all is that we think we're right. So please don't mock too much if I make the occasional error, will you?

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Cultural heritage

Category: Ramblings | Posted: Mon Oct 29, 2007 10:42 am

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The Vikings appeared out of nowhere in 793 when they attacked and sacked the Lindisfarne Monastery. Then they spread out, and are suddenly found all over Europe.

Dublin, for example, was the seat of Norse kings. They were a power to be reckoned with from 841 to 1014 when the legendary Brian of Boruma finally broke their hold of Ireland.

In France a big, strapping chap from my part of Norway decided to settle and make himself a kingdom in Normandie. History knows him as Rollo. We call him Walking Rolf. It is said he was too big for any horse. He was the great-great-great-grandfather of William the Conquerer who ruled England from 1066 until 1087.

William managed to beat the Saxon king Harald II Godwinsson in the Battle of Hastings in October 1066. Harald II was the great-great-grandson of Harald Blåtann, the first official Danish king. He also ruled parts of Norway.

Lots of Vikings went eastwards, up the big Russian rivers and far inland to plunder and trade. Others went south, and we know that the King of Constantinople had Vikings in his army. One even went on a crusade to Jerusalem, the first European king to do so, Sigurd I Magnusson also known (in Norwegian) as Sigurd Jorsalfare. He died in 1130. With all this coming and going, the Norse were quite up-to-date on what was going on in the world.

The Vikings also fought a lot among themselves. The Swedish and Danish were at it for centuries. The Norwegians were too busy with internal squabble to bother about the others. As Christian beliefs took hold, so the fighting and blood-shed stopped too. The sea-faring peoples of the north took to trade, which was far more lucrative and a lot less dangerous.

And from then on until far into the 1800s we really didn't do anything very exciting. This is probably why when I say «Norwegian» people think «Viking».

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Historical facts

Category: Ramblings | Posted: Sun Oct 28, 2007 2:52 pm

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... are boring! I dislike the way historians recite years page up and page down. They have finely tuned the art of making history uninteresting to anybody but themselves. But some numbers need reciting.

The Black Plague reached Norway in 1349 and killed 65% of the population, which wasn't very big to begin with. From the remains a strange community slowly grew, but nothing really exciting happened for centuries.

Around 1800 the Norwegians started looking for the real Norwegian way of life. The National Romantics collected Norwegian stories, made Norwegian music and painted Norwegian paintings. The music of Ole Bull and Edvard Grieg and the paintings of Tidemand and Gude are still tresured. The focus was all on the Norwegian farmer. The Danish King Frederik VI lost Norway to Sweden in 1814, but he forgot to return Greenland, a fact we still dislike him for.

Whilst under Swedish government the Norwegians were still trying to find out who they really were. The speech and grammar had been Danish, but now a movement to find the Norwegian language started to surface. Thanks to a chap called Ivar Aasen Norwegians have two official languages; Norwegian, which sound and writes a lot like Danish, and New Norwegian based on dialects all over the country, which the Swedish understand quite good in writing. When Aasen published his book in 1848 he started a language fight that is still very much alive, and all school children suffer under it.

When tearing ourselves loose from Sweden in 1905, we lost the areas called Jämtland and Härjedalen, and we still bear a grudge toward the Swedes for that. And we dived wholeheartedly into the art of being Norwegians. We didn't notice WWI much because we declared ourselves neutral and got to keep Svalbard because of that. Thank heavens!

Things took a real turn for the better after WWII, when our industry started growing and the welfare state was built. Being a hard working, proud people with no time for airs and graces, we've slowly built a system that is very equalitarian and built on trust. The taxes are quite high, but we all benefit from them at some point in our lives, so even though we all complain about them, we're not really making an effort to get rid of them. And now we've got time for airs and graces too.

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Why we love them so much

Category: Ramblings | Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 11:17 am

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How come a modern society like Norway keep a Royal house? Why, indeed. Norway was under Danish and Swedish rule for centuries, albeit we had a large degree of self-government. Finally, in 1905, we cut ourselves loose, removed the Swedish herring salad from our flag and started to build our own government.

And the Norwegian people wanted a King. Not any old King, mind, but someone with the proper ancestry. So we fetched Prince Carl from Denmark. He didn't want to come until the Norwegian people had voted, and Monarchy won with 79%. He changed his name to Haakon VII and moved here with his wife Maude from the English Royal house, and his small son, our future King Olav V.

The Swedish Royalty are mere upstarts compared to the rest of the European royals. Jean Baptiste Bernadotte was a Pontecorvo, France noble and one of Napoleon's generals. He ruled Sweden under the name Karl XIV Johan from 1818. One of their descendants became King Haakon's mother, so even the Swedish connection was in order.

King Haakon VII went wholeheartedly in for Norway, and his actions during WWII endeared him to all, even the staunchest anti-royalist. When he passed away, his son Olav had big shoes to fill.

He proceeded to do so admirably. He was wont to walk around with no sight of security guarding him. He boarded the tram to go skiing during the petrol crisis in the -70's, and insisted on paying his fare like everybody else. When visiting the USA he complained about the restrictions given him by the security people. « At home I don't need security guards, I've got four million of them!» When he passed away the Norwegian people flooded the Castle Square with candles, flowers, poems, drawings and other tokens of the loss we all felt. A totally un-Norwegian behaviour.

Our present king, Harald V, was very humble when taking up his work. He is overshadowed by two giants, but we watch him grow every year. He's both royal, human and humane. He's also very busy. Whenever Norway wants to send someone to some do or other, but don't rightly know who to send, we send the Royals. They're not political, but they are respected and open doors everywhere. And they're not too expensive to keep. They are ours, we elected them and most of us want to keep them!

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How nice to be popular

Category: Ramblings | Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 4:57 pm

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Since joining the Stew I've noticed that our collective knowledge and money are very sought-after. I've had a giggle or two at some very obvious and not-so-obvious tries at snaring us, and I've felt sadness at some of the more veiled attempts.

The good thing is that the admin-mod-team very quickly take action and remove unwanted advertising. The bad thing is that when new people register, I've started wondering whether this is a genuine Stewbee or another scammer.

Being hopelessly naive, I always believe that people are fair-minded, and I get my nose punched over and over. Ah, well, maybe I should learn to be more of a sceptic, even if I don't want to.

Then it suddenly occured to me: Maybe the same thoughts were applied to me when I registered? Yikes!

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Norway's most important laws

Category: Ramblings | Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 7:19 pm

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No, it's not what you think. I'm not starting legal classes here. ;-)

There are two laws that Norwegians live by. Bet you've never heard of the Law of Jante. Well, it goes like this:

1.You shall not believe that you are somebody.
2.You shall not believe that you are as worthy as us.
3.You shall not believe that you are any wiser than us.
4.You shall not imagine that you are any better than us.
5.You shall not believe that you know anything more than us.
6.You shall not believe that you are more than us.
7.You shall not believe that you are good at anything.
8.You shall not laugh at us.
9.You shall not believe that anyone cares about you!
10.You shall not believe that you can teach us anything!

This Law first appeared in writing in a novel by the Danish writer Axel Sandemose. He made up a small community called Jante, but all small Scandinavian communities might be called that, because you'll mainly find the law applied by the sceptical people living in them. The law has made many a talented person into a mediochre one, and unfortunately it still prevails in some areas. Norwegians living by this law like things to be well done, but please don't brag about it. Then you'll summarily be cut down to size. We've been trying to kill the mentality for ages, but so far with little or no success.

The second Law comes from Norwegian writer Thorbjørn Egner, who made up a community called Cardamom Town, where nothing bad ever happens, even though they have three robbers living there. Here it is:

You shall not bother others,
you shall be both fair and kind,
and whatever else you do I do not mind.

Egner wrote many books for children, and his Cardamom Town is built in our largest zoo/pleasure park in Kristiansand, southern Norway. This book is also published in English.

Last edited: Wed Oct 24, 2007 7:20 pm

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