AS SOMEONE IN THIS BOOK OBSERVES, THE COUNTRY THAT I moved to in the winter of 1983 was not the real Norway. It was a nineteenth-century dream of Norway, the creation of a remarkable handful of artistic geniuses: Knut Hamsun, Henrik Ibsen, Edvard Munch and Edvard Grieg, all of whom in varying degrees I admired. It was these giants of European and world culture who first drew my attention to this tiny community in the far north of the world. That was over thirty years now, and a digitally-driven globalization means the best-kept secret in Europe is a secret no more. A brilliant but obscuring cultural layer has gradually been overlaid by the slow-motion tsunami of change.
As of this writing, Norway is one of the richest nations on earth following the discovery of North Sea oil in the 1960s, and as a result of a canniness both rural and Lutheran in investing the profits from the state-owned industry that extracts it into an investment fund currently worth in the region of 6,650 billion kroner, or 1.3 million kroner per Norwegian. This is a society so wealthy that by the early twenty-first century its indigenous working class has all but disappeared and it has been obliged to import one to build and repair its houses and flats, drive its public transport and taxis, keep its hospitals and old people’s homes open, and sweep and wash the staircases of its communal apartment blocks. Back in 1983, when I first came to live here, the housekeeping was still done by the tenants themselves according to a rota system, and woe betide you if you forgot, for the local nabokjerring, a sort of socially responsible old battle-axe-cum-gossip, would come knocking at your door and more or less drag you out by the ear to do it. Today’s tenants farm the work out, and the last decade has seen a boom in cleaning agencies. Most of them are run by immigrants from Poland, Latvia, Estonia, bringing with them a Roman Catholicism that has been more or less absent from the country since the Reformation – so many of them that Catholic churches struggle to cope with the demand for seats on Sundays. My morning newspaper, which was once delivered at the crack of dawn by a Norwegian schoolboy saving for his first bicycle, now comes courtesy of a mournful-looking Eritrean who is going grey at the temples. Huge numbers of young Swedes, too, have arrived in Norway over the past decade, looking for work in the numerous Starbucks-cloned coffee bars that have sprung up all over the country, 55,000 of them in the catering trade alone. They comfort themselves by making ironic comments about their ‘only being here to take the country over again’, while the Norwegians exult at finding themselves finally, after a thousand years ‘below stairs’, living upstairs in their own version of Downton Abbey, their menial needs attended to by this army of Swedes and other immigrants.
Things have changed, and before they change out of all recognition I have felt an increasing desire to look back and see if I can in some way trace the outlines of a more permanent manifestation of Scandinavian identity, or spirit, or soul or heart, whichever of those unsatisfactory terms seems most appropriate, and allow myself to ponder freely questions that I have been too busy living to ponder before, such as: Is social democracy really Lutheranism disguised as rationalism? Why are Scandinavian prisons so luxurious? Why are their prison sentences so short? Are these examples of weakness, naivety, or are they the best way forward? Why have the Swedes been neutral for the past two centuries? Is it principles, timidity or the future of mankind? Why are the social services in Scandinavia so generous? Is it wealth, decency, guilt or a combination of all three? And what, in a historical sense, has been the inner dynamic of the relationship between Danes, Norwegians and Swedes over the centuries? Greater minds than mine have addressed such matters. The nineteenth-century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen once attempted to define the difference in status between the three peoples: ‘Between us, Swedes, Danes and Norwegians, we possess all the qualities needed to form a spiritually united, single people: Swedes are our spiritual aristocracy, Denmark our spiritual bourgeoisie, and Norway our spiritual lower class.’ How valid was Ibsen’s analysis? How valid is it today? Who are the Scandinavians?
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The sixth-century Gothic historian Jordanes saw in Scandza, by which he meant Scandinavia, the cradle of human life, ‘a hive of nations and a womb of peoples’. In the ‘Ynglingasaga’ chapter of the thirteenth-century Heimskringla, his history of the kings of Norway, the Icelandic chieftain, poet and historian Snorri Sturluson writes of a tribal emigration northwards led by the great chieftain Odin from the coast of the Black Sea in the time of the Roman Empire. European Christians such as Alcuin and Asser knew the Scandinavians only as Vikings – as terrorists, barbarians, thieves and conquerors; the more anthropologically objective contributions of the Arab travellers and scholars who encountered the Vikings on their travels include the observations of a fourteenth-century Syrian geographer, Shams al-din al-Dimashqi, who wrote of a ‘Frozen Ocean that lies beyond the Qibgaq-deserts at a latitude of sixty-three degrees. Its length is an eight-day journey and its breadth three days. A great island is located in this ocean, inhabited by tall people with white skin and fair hair and blue eyes.’ The seventeenth-century Spaniard Baltasar Gracián, in his categorization of the differences between the three peoples, drew particular attention to a fondness for cruelty among the Swedes. Montesquieu found in the cold climate a scientific explanation for the alleged superiority of the Scandinavians in intelligence, ethical standards, and sheer intellectual and physical energy. In the Lettres sur le Nord published in 1840, the Frenchman Xavier Marmier rebuked his fellow-countrymen for the way all their knowledge of the north failed once it reached the dim fogs of the Baltic.
As the nineteenth century progressed, democracy in the Scandinavian countries took root slowly and in a more stable and less dramatic fashion than in other parts of Europe. The absence of feudalism in Sweden and Norway meant that political tensions between the social classes were fewer, and the idea of a flat and egalitarian structure a less unnatural one. Mary Wollstonecraft, in her letters home from her Scandinavian travels in 1795, praised the generally high level of education in all three countries compared with her native England. She also found that Norwegians, in the midst of what many of Norway’s own historians continue to refer to as ‘the four-hundred-year night’ of dependence on Denmark and Sweden before the achievement of independence in 1905, seemed to her to ‘enjoy all the blessings of freedom’ and ‘a degree of equality which I have seldom seen elsewhere’. A ‘sensible, shrewd people,’ she called them, ‘with little scientific knowledge, and still less taste for literature,’ but who appeared to her to be ‘arriving at the epoch which precedes the introduction of the arts and sciences’. The inhabitants of the double monarchy Denmark-Norway seemed to her ‘the least oppressed people of Europe’. The Swedes she found to be courteous, but with a courtesy bordering on insincerity, the effect, she maintained, of a spirit softened rather than degraded by wretchedness. A nineteenth-century visitor, Captain Charles Frankland, noted that he ‘never saw anything yet to equal the laziness of those Swedes; they seemed to be as stupid as the Danes and twice as insolent’. Writing of a trip to Sweden in 1847, the novelist Selina Bunbury was more empathically inclined, but still effortlessly convinced of the superiority of the British way of doing things. She noted the primitive nature of the agricultural methods she witnessed, and ‘could not help thinking what a mutual-advantage system it might prove if English or Scotch farmers were encouraged to settle in this agricultural country’.
But gradually those outside Scandinavia began to see the advantages of the egalitarianism practised in the north, in which neither the traditional power of the aristocracy nor the power of new industry ever became too dominant. The high level of literacy and an ethic of hard work, diligence and responsibility created a revised image of these countries as notably progressive and, by the end of the nineteenth century, there was almost uniform agreement in the writings of travellers and visitors that Denmark, Sweden and Norway were, in very similar ways, outstanding examples of peaceful and prosperous societies. The admiration continues into the twenty-first century. Perhaps oddly, none of these travellers made particular mention of the melancholy that has always accompanied, shadow-like, the other image the outside world now has of Sweden, Norway and Denmark as clean, well-lit places. Yet, especially in literature and film, this trope is never far from the minds of observers of the region and its people. In time, the enormous success of such bright and shadowless entities as IKEA and Abba, and the explosion of interest in Scandinavians as writers of crime-fiction and television drama may put an end to the characterization; but for now it persists, and it is one of the myths I want to look at more closely as I embark upon what isn’t, strictly speaking, a history so much as a journey, a discursive and digressive stroll through the last thousand years of Scandinavian culture in search of the soul of the north.