All things Scandinavian

Our connection to Scandinavia as children was limited to my uncle Hans who came from Denmark (he was married to my father’s sister and they settled in Maryland) and to Hans Christian Andersen, the children’s story writer from Denmark. My uncle used to make us pancakes for breakfast when we visited our cousins. I don’t remember exactly how they were made or even if they were really Danish, but he sprinkled them with sugar when they came out of the frying pan instead of serving them with maple syrup and that made them different—not American. They were excellent.

We read a lot of Andersen’s fairy tales as children. ‘The Little Match Girl’ comes to mind—you would have to search very hard to find a sadder story than that one. ‘The Little Mermaid’ story also stands out. When I finally saw the Little Mermaid sculpture on the waterfront in Copenhagen, I thought it was lovely but actually quite small, not at all as I had imagined. I guess I thought it would be larger than life.

I don’t remember anything particular that stood out about Norway, Finland or Iceland when I was a child. I don’t think I had heard much about Norway before I moved here. I paid more attention to small news items about Norway once I met my husband-to-be, but before that Norway could have been Denmark or vice versa for all I really knew about it. I do remember that Continental Airlines and SAS formed an international partnership in 1988 and that meant that SAS would fly into and out of Newark airport in NJ. The prime minister of Norway at that time, Gro Harlem Brundtland (a woman), was pictured in the NJ Star Ledger newspaper visiting Newark airport for the celebration ceremony, if memory serves me correctly. I do remember Sweden being held up as a very secular and liberal country in the USA, especially when it came to filmmaking. The Swedes stretched all the censorship rules. Vincent Canby reviewed movies for The New York Times for many years, and I can remember that he wrote about the controversies connected with some of the Swedish movies that made it to America when I was a pre-teenager and teenager. But I don’t remember the names of the films. And of course there was the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, but I never saw any of his films until I was an adult, and most of them I have seen while living here in Norway. I remember hearing about the Vikings, but they never really interested me that much. What I now know is that the Vikings were from Denmark, Sweden and Norway (and even Greenland), not just from one country.

In 1985 I saw the film ‘Out of Africa’ and became fascinated by the Danish writer Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) and her life. Visiting her house in Rungsted in Denmark was one of the first things I wanted to do when we first visited the country. I also read her biography by Judith Thurman (‘Isak Dinesen—The Life of a Storyteller’) which I can recommend. We combined that visit with a trip to Roskilde (in 1991) to attend one of the biggest annual European four-day rock concerts. That trip was a mixture of good and bad happenings—the concert started out well, we had pitched our tent and were enjoying ourselves. Then about two days into the concert, all hell broke loose. A major storm with high winds and pelting rain hit that area of Denmark. My last semi-comfortable memory before the storm really hit was listening to Billy Idol at midnight sing ‘White Wedding’ under one of the big tents. The following days saw us sinking into mud up to our knees and watching our parked car sink down about as far as that as well. But seeing Karen Blixen’s home did save the trip from being a complete washout.

My father, who was a great reader, was a fan of the Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset. She won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1928. I have not yet really explored her writing, but I know that she converted to Catholicism during her adult life, and that fascinated my father. I have read the works of other Norwegian writers and poets—the novelists Knut Hamsun and Sigurd Hoel and the poet Rolf Jacobsen. They are definitely worth reading.