Norway Quotes

Well, I certainly don't," said Percy sanctimoniously. "I shudder to think what the state of my in-tray would be if I was away from work for five days." "Yeah, someone might slip dragon dung in it again, eh, Perce?" said Fred. "That was a sample of fertilizer from Norway!" said Percy, going very red in the face. "It was nothing personal!" "It was," Fred whispered to Harry as they got up from the table. "We sent it.

This is the only country in the world," said Wednesday, into the stillness, "that worries about what it is." "What?" "The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are.

Kiss eight hundred and nineteen was the kiss that changed it all. The kiss that proved that a long-haired brooding boy from Norway and a quirky girl from the Deep South could find a love to rival the greats.

Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.

November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.

Jealousy over some big, dumb bear flew out the window as he stared at Ronnie. “You…you were banned from Norway? The country?

In Norway they’re watching a TV show that’s just twelve hours of nonstop knitting: “from sheep to sweater.” To promote the notion of “Slow TV.

Countries with a high percentage of nonbelievers are among the freest, most stable, best-educated, and healthiest nations on earth. When nations are ranked according to a human-development index, which measures such factors as life expectancy, literacy rates, and educational attainment, the five highest-ranked countries -- Norway, Sweden, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands -- all have high degrees of nonbelief. Of the fifty countires at the bottom of the index, all are intensly religious. The nations with the highest homicide rates tend to be more religious; those with the greatest levels of gender equality are the least religious. These associations say nothing about whether atheism leads to positive social indicators or the other way around. But the idea that atheists are somehow less moral, honest, or trustworthy have been disproven by study after study.

Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.

Aren't I going back to England?" "No," she said. "I Could never do that. Heaven shall take my soul, but Norway shall keep my bones".

It is also November. The noons are more laconic and the sunsets sterner, and Gibraltar lights make the village foreign. November always seemed to me the Norway of the year. ------ is still with the sister who put her child in an ice nest last Monday forenoon. The redoubtable God! I notice where Death has been introduced, he frequently calls, making it desirable to forestall his advances.

Oh, Lucia the captain said softly, you are so little and so lovely. how I would have liked to have taken you to Norway and shown you the fiords in the midnight sun, and to China- what you've missed, Lucia, by being born too late to travel the Seven Seas with me! And what I've missed, too.

What a beautiful name,” Kimberly said. “Does it mean anything? I love multicultural names because they have such wonderful meanings, from wonderful rich cultures.” Kimberly was smiling the kindly smile of people who thought “culture” the unfamiliar colorful reserve of colorful people, a word that always had to be qualified with “rich.” She would not think Norway had a “rich culture.

A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and flagrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway.

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.

Death is a tragedy whether it is in the death of one girl-woman in London or seventy-seven men, women, and children in Norway. We know this, but perhaps it needs to be said over and over again so we do not forget. I have never considered compassion a finite resource. I would not want to live in a world where such was the case.

They say every snowflake is different—but the blizzard, it covers us all the same. A friend in Norway told me a story about a painter who went out during a storm, searching for the right shade of green, and never returned.

Incestuous, homogeneous fiefdoms of self-proclaimed expertise are always rank-closing and mutually self-defending, above all else.

Norway...looked to Roosevelt "as funny a kingdom as was ever imagined outside of opera bouffe....It is much as if Vermont should offhand try the experiment of having a king.

England and America owe their liberty to commerce, which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But let them beware of the consequences: the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.

Possibly, I too shall take the train at that station one day, and go and seek around thy lakes, O Norway, O silent Scandinavia... Possibly, someday, I shall hear the lonely echoes of the North repeat the singing of her who knew the Angel of Music...

Take any parliamentary country, from America to Switzerland, from France to England, Norway and so forth - in these countries the real business of the 'state' is preformed behind the scenes and is carried on by the departments, chancelleries and General Staffs. Parliament itself is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the 'common people.

Switzerland didn’t exactly work out. Neither did France. Or Norway.” “Three schools?” Hale asked. “Well, technically, five schools—three countries.

Kiss eight hundred and nineteen was the kiss that changed it all. The kiss that proved that a long-haired brooding boy from Norway and a quirky girl from the Deep South could find a love to rival the greats. It showed that love was simply the tenacity to make sure that the other half of your heart knew he, or she, was adored in every way. In every minute of every day. That love was tenderness in its purest form. Rune

I want to go away, oh so far, far away.

You think we live in Norway or something? Amir Jordan is Pakistani. There's also an Asian guy, some Puerto Ricans, and the starting left wing has, like, carrot-hair. he must be Irish. It's the whole UN over there.

In the supermarket Harry had bought a pizza grandiosa which he heated in the oven. He thought how odd it was to be sitting in Sweden, eating Italian food made in Norway.

(...)There’s the cab, Hopkins, and you can remove your man. If you want me for the trial, my address and that of Watson will be somewhere in Norway –I’ll send particulars later.

We Almost Become a Norwegian Tourist Attraction

Pretty didn't do it justice. I felt like we'd sailed into a world meant for much larger beings, a place where gods and monsters roamed freely.

You must remember that here in Norway we are used to that sort of thing. There are witches everywhere.

We actually do have a lot of guns. There's a lot of hunting in Norway. But there's almost no gun violence." "Why do you think that is?" "On a fundamental level," says Sigrid, "I think it's because we don't want to shoot each other." "That could be our problem right there," says Melinda

Did you ever go to a place . . . I think it was called Norway?” “No,” said Arthur, “no, I didn’t.” “Pity,” said Slartibartfast, “that was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges. I was most upset to hear of its destruction.

Kiss eight hundred and nineteen was the kiss that changed it all. The kiss that proved that a long-haired brooding boy from Norway and a quirky girl from the Deep South could find a love to rival the greats. It showed that love was simply the tenacity to make sure that the other half of your heart knew he, or she, was adored in every way. In every minute of every day. That love was tenderness in its purest form.

Norge er ikke noe godt land å ha til fedreland, navnlig ikke om vinteren.

Next year he would suggest they hire a chalet on the edge of an icy fjord in Norway, as far away from the Jacobs family as possible.

But I hope you’re not about to give me some kind of conspiracy theory. This is Norway, not America.

Norway is the new Scotland!

Trump said, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” He had just met with the prime minister of Norway. Why not more Norwegians?

By lunchtime the valley was lightly coated, like a cake with confectioner's sugar...there was white fur on the antlers of the iron deer and on the melancholy boughs of the Norway spruce.

Good stories are never about a string of successes but about spectacular defeats,” Støp had said. “Even though Roald Amundsen won the race to the South Pole, it’s Robert Scott the world outside Norway remembers. None of Napoleon’s victories is remembered like the defeat at Waterloo. Serbia’s national pride is based on the battle against the Turks at Kosovo Polje in 1389, a battle the Serbs lost resoundingly. And look at Jesus! The symbol of the man who is claimed to have triumphed over death ought to be a man standing outside the tomb with his hands in the air. Instead, throughout time Christians have preferred the spectacular defeat: when he was hanging on the cross and close to giving up. Because it’s always the story of the defeat that moves us most.

We want to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. Our soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact. Hjalmar Söderberg, Doktor Glas, 1905

The Netherlands, for all its faults, was happier than Britain, more efficient than France, more tolerant than America, more worldly than Norway, more modern than Belgium and more fun than Germany.

Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on [E]arth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Insofar as there is a crime problem in Western Europe, it is largely the product of immigration. Seventy percent of the inmates of France's jails, for instance, are Muslim. The Muslims of Western Europe are generally not atheists. Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' [H]uman [D]evelopment [I]ndex are unwaveringly religious. Other analyses paint the same picture: the United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious adherence; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality. The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms.

Researchers at the University of Missouri had found a “gender equality paradox” when they studied 475,000 teenagers across the globe. They noted that hyperegalitarian countries such as Finland, Norway, and Sweden had a smaller percentage of female STEM graduates than countries such as Albania and Algeria, which are considered less advanced

IT IS STARTLING to think that all Europe once looked like this Puszcza. To enter it is to realize that most of us were bred to a pale copy of what nature intended. Seeing elders with trunks seven feet wide, or walking through stands of the tallest trees here—gigantic Norway spruce, shaggy as Methuselah—should seem as exotic as the Amazon or Antarctica to someone raised among the comparatively puny, second-growth woodlands found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Instead, what’s astonishing is how primally familiar it feels. And, on some cellular level, how complete.

Thinking more than a move ahead never got me anywhere in life. Only in chess. And even then it was sometimes a burden. I saw fifteen moves ahead once, in Norway, but there was a much easier path to victory, and I missed it. Looking into the future too hard, I've found can be paralyzing.

¡Dios bendiga los tiempos antiguos, en que existían cosas raras...!

Without the aid of the imagination all the pleasures of the senses must sink into grossness.

What if one were up there, drifting about among suns and feeling the tails of comets fan one's forehead! How small the earth was and how puny the people; a Norway of two million provincial souls and a mortgage bank to help feed them! What was life worth at such a rate? You elbowed yourself ahead in the sweat of your face for a few mortal years, only to perish all the same, all the same!

I met you under the balloon, on the occasion of your return from Norway; you asked if it was mine; I said it was. The balloon, I said, is a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure, having to do with the unease I felt at your absence, and with sexual deprivation, but now that your visit to Bergen has been terminated, it is no longer necessary or appropriate. Removal of the balloon was easy; trailer trucks carried away the depleted fabric, which is now stored in West Virginia, awaiting some other time of unhappiness, some time, perhaps, when we are angry with one another.

My immediate neighbourhood will not be palmy Norway – my first choice on account of its gigantic sovereign fund and generous social provision; nor my second, Italy, on grounds of regional cuisine and sun-blessed decay; and not even my third, France, for its Pinot Noir and jaunty self-regard. Instead I’ll inherit a less than united kingdom ruled by an esteemed elderly queen, where a businessman-prince, famed for his good works, his elixirs (cauliflower essence to purify the blood) and unconstitutional meddling, waits restively for his crown. This will be my home, and it will do. I

The Andersons are from Norway. The McNeelys are Irish. Johann Gruber is from Germany. You’re part Indian, and I’m a widow.” She shrugs. “We all need each other. We can all live side by side peaceably, can’t we? We don’t all have to be exactly the same.

To reach Greenland, turn left at the middle of Norway, keep so far north of Shetland that you can only see it if the visibility is very good, and far enough south of the Faroes that the sea appears half way up the mountain slopes. As for Iceland, stay so far to the south that you only see its flocks of birds and whales. So, ROUGHLY PARAPHRASED, run the navigational directions in an Icelandic manual of the Middle Ages,

Well, the Earth Mark Two in fact,” said Slartibartfast cheerfully. “We’re making a copy from our original blueprints.” There was a pause. “Are you trying to tell me,” said Arthur, slowly and with control, “that you originally…made the Earth?” “Oh yes,” said Slartibartfast. “Did you ever go to a place…I think it was called Norway?” “No,” said Arthur, “no, I didn’t.” “Pity,” said Slartibartfast, “that was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges. I was most upset to hear of its destruction.

I On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping White Ophelia floats like a great lily; Floats very slowly, lying in her long veils... - In the far-off woods you can hear them sound the mort. For more than a thousand years sad Ophelia Has passed, a white phantom, down the long black river. For more than a thousand years her sweet madness Has murmured its ballad to the evening breeze. The wind kisses her breasts and unfolds in a wreath Her great veils rising and falling with the waters; The shivering willows weep on her shoulder, The rushes lean over her wide, dreaming brow. The ruffled water-lilies are sighing around her; At times she rouses, in a slumbering alder, Some nest from which escapes a small rustle of wings; - A mysterious anthem falls from the golden stars. II O pale Ophelia! beautiful as snow! Yes child, you died, carried off by a river! - It was the winds descending from the great mountains of Norway That spoke to you in low voices of better freedom. It was a breath of wind, that, twisting your great hair, Brought strange rumors to your dreaming mind; It was your heart listening to the song of Nature In the groans of the tree and the sighs of the nights; It was the voice of mad seas, the great roar, That shattered your child's heart, too human and too soft; It was a handsome pale knight, a poor madman Who one April morning sate mute at your knees! Heaven! Love! Freedom! What a dream, oh poor crazed Girl! You melted to him as snow does to a fire; Your great visions strangled your words - And fearful Infinity terrified your blue eye! III - And the poet says that by starlight You come seeking, in the night, the flowers that you picked And that he has seen on the water, lying in her long veils White Ophelia floating, like a great lily.

Trump wonders why we can’t have more people coming from places like Norway? Why would they come? They live better there. Europeans come to America like you go to the circus to see the fucking animals. That’s why. You come to shop, take a picture where Brad Pitt slept, and to see the fucking animals. It’s a tour. You’re not coming to live here.

Out in the fjord I dragged myself up at once, wet with fever and exhaustion, and gazed landwards, and bade farewell for the present to the town – to Christiania, where the windows gleamed so brightly in all the homes.

Similarly, though the United States is one of the world’s richest economies by per capita income, it ranks only around seventeenth in reported life satisfaction. It is superseded not only by the likely candidates of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which all rank above the United States but also by less likely candidates such as Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Indeed, one might surmise that it is health and longevity rather than income that give the biggest boost to reported life satisfaction. Since good health and longevity can be achieved at per capita income levels well below those of the United States, so too can life satisfaction. One marketing expert put it this way, with only slight exaggeration: Basic Survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn’t cost much, but showing off does.

The insurance companies involved had all claimed that this was, by any reasonable standards, an act of God. But, Dirk had argued, which god? Britain was constitutionally a Christian monotheistic state, and therefore any “act of God” defined in a legal document must refer to the Anglican chap in the stained glass and not to some polytheistic thug from Norway.

Cowan son of Branieucc, you're the only one of my people that I know for sure still lives.

I only had two real tasks [while in Norway]: gathering dead trees to burn from the surrounding small forest and getting water from a hole in a frozen stream. The rest of the time I wandered around, obsessed over my life dramas, stared into space, read books, wrote letters, made up songs, went crazy and eventually snapped out of my misery and noticed the dawn

A little patience, and all will be over.

social media addict? This is a very real problem—so much so that researchers from Norway developed a new instrument to measure Facebook addiction called the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale.[3] Social media has become as ubiquitous as television in our everyday lives, and this research shows that multitasking social media can be as addictive as drugs, alcohol, and chemical substance abuse. A large number of friends on social media networks may appear impressive, but according to a new report, the more social circles a person is linked to, the more likely the social media will be a source of stress.[4] It can also have a detrimental effect on consumer well-being because milkshake-multitasking interferes with clear thinking and decision-making, which lowers self-control and leads to rash, impulsive buying and poor eating decisions. Greater social media use is associated with a higher body mass index, increased binge eating, a lower credit score, and higher levels of credit card debt for consumers with many close friends in their social network—all caused by a lack of self-control.[5] We Can Become Shallow

Erik the Red left Norway for frontier Iceland ‘on account of some killings’ and after a while he had to leave Iceland on account of some more killings; he needed a fresh start after his first fresh start.

Finally—and this is the seventh familiar theme of Venezuelan socialism—there is getting rich off politics. Once again, that does not occur in Scandinavia. There is not a single politician in Norway, Sweden or Denmark who has gone from zero to $10 million—or $200 million—while largely employed in the public sector.

When news of the false alarm leaked to the press, the Air Force denied that the missile warning had ever been taken seriously. Percy, who later became a Republican senator from Illinois, disputed that account. He recalled a sense of panic at NORAD. A subsequent investigation found the cause of the computer glitch. The BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.

The guys from Norway, Magnus and Magnus, had little bits of fur on their robes as trim, which wasn’t necessary, as the shell made sure they were never cold. They were from the late nineties, and had both chosen their names to honor the world’s strongest man, Magnus Ver Magnusson. Their interests included Vikings, heavy metal, and fulfilling stereotypes.

Go back to bed, Cowan. I want no promises from you.

There was a sense of being in the midst of something having prodigious weight and volume but no form, of being utterly unable to utilize past experience.

A refugee is someone who survived and who can create the future.

I then supped with my companions, with whom I was soon after to part for ever - always a most melancholly, death-like idea - a sort of separation of soul; for all the regret which follows those from whom fate separates us, seems to be something torn from ourselves.

Gjøa was later presented as a gift to the city of San Francisco, remaining on display in Golden Gate Park until 1972, when it was returned to Norway. It now resides in Oslo harbour, next to two other famous Norwegian ships, Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram and Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki.

Finally, Rønneberg, the leader of Gunnerside and the last surviving saboteur, who was ninety-six years old in 2016, often spoke eloquently about why he braved the North Sea to be trained in Britain and why he then returned, twice, by parachute, to Norway. “You have to fight for your freedom,” he said. “And for peace. You have to fight for it every day, to keep it. It’s like a glass boat; it’s easy to break. It’s easy to lose.

I returned to my book—Bewick’s History of British Birds: the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of “the solitary rocks and promontories” by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape—

Long ago, when faeries and men still wandered the earth as brothers, the MacLeod chief fell in love with a beautiful faery woman. They had no sooner married and borne a child when she was summoned to return to her people. Husband and wife said a tearful goodbye and parted ways at Fairy Bridge, which you can still visit today. Despite the grieving chief, a celebration was held to honor the birth of the newborn boy, the next great chief of the MacLeods. In all the excitement of the celebration, the baby boy was left in his cradle and the blanket slipped off. In the cold Highland night he began to cry. The baby’s cry tore at his mother, even in another dimension, and so she went to him, wrapping him in her shawl. When the nursemaid arrived, she found the young chief in the arms of his mother, and the faery woman gave her a song she insisted must be sung to the little boy each night. The song became known as “The Dunvegan Cradle Song,” and it has been sung to little chieflings ever since. The shawl, too, she left as a gift: if the clan were ever in dire need, all they would have to do was wave the flag she’d wrapped around her son, and the faery people would come to their aid. Use the gift wisely, she instructed. The magic of the flag will work three times and no more. As I stood there in Dunvegan Castle, gazing at the Fairy Flag beneath its layers of protective glass, it was hard to imagine the history behind it. The fabric was dated somewhere between the fourth and seventh centuries. The fibers had been analyzed and were believed to be from Syria or Rhodes. Some thought it was part of the robe of an early Christian saint. Others thought it was a part of the war banner for Harald Hardrada, king of Norway, who gave it to the clan as a gift. But there were still others who believed it had come from the shoulders of a beautiful faery maiden. And that faery blood had flowed through the MacLeod family veins ever since. Those people were the MacLeods themselves.

torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

I followed many conversations about what happened in Norway and the death of Amy Winehouse because they happened one after the next. Too many of those conversations tried to conflate the two events, tried to create some kind of hierarchy of tragedy, grief, call, response. There was so much judgment, so much interrogation of grief—how dare we mourn a singer, an entertainer, a girl-woman who struggled with addiction, as if the life of an addict is somehow less worthy a life, as if we are not entitled to mourn unless the tragedy happens to the right kind of people. How dare we mourn a singer when across an ocean seventy-seven people are dead? We are asked these questions as if we only have the capacity to mourn one tragedy at a time, as if we must measure the depth and reach of a tragedy before deciding how to respond, as if compassion and kindness are finite resources we must use sparingly. We cannot put these two tragedies on a chart and connect them with a straight line. We cannot understand these tragedies neatly.

But what will happen, and I got this from reliable sources, is that the International Monetary Fund will skedaddle from D.C., possibly to Singapore or Beijing, and then they're going to make an IMF recovery plan for America, divide the country into concessions, and hand them over to the sovereign wealth funds. Norway, China, Saudi Arabia, all that jazz.

È davvero divertente quello che sta succedendo in questa stagione! Non si vedono che coppie! La gente cammina solo per due...

Thus do we wish as we float down the stream of life, whilst chance does m

Could this approach to public health have something to do with the fact that the incarceration rate in Norway is 71/ 100,000, in the Netherlands 81/ 100,000, and the US 781/ 100,000, while the crime rate in those countries is much lower than in ours, and the cost of medical care about half? Seventy percent of prisoners in California spent time in foster care while growing up. The United States spends $ 84 billion per year to incarcerate people at approximately $ 44,000 per prisoner; the northern European countries a fraction of that amount. Instead, they invest in helping parents to raise their children in safe and predictable surroundings. Their academic test scores and crime rates seem to reflect the success of those investments.

Companies also pay a heavy price for imposing a long-hours culture. Productivity is notoriously hard to measure, but academics agree that overwork eventually hits the bottom line. It is common sense: we are less productive when we are tired, stressed, unhappy or unhealthy. According to the International Labour Organization, workers in Belgium, France and Norway are all more productive per hour than are Americans. The British clock up more time on the job than do most Europeans, and have one of the continent’s poorest rates of hourly productivity to show for it. Working less often means working better.

Trolls have existed on this planet for as long as humans. This is what I was told and what I translated to Tub. The first mention of them in recorded history is from ninth-century Norway, when the nefarious creatures began showing up in song, verse, and bedtime stories to keep misbehaving children in line. According to Norse folklore, trolls are one of the Dark Beings, the purest embodiments of evil, and they scurried from between the toes of Ymir, the mythic six-headed Frost Giant whose murdered body became the universe in which we live; his bones became the mountains, his teeth boulders, and so forth.

His day is done. Is done. The news came on the wings of a wind, reluctant to carry its burden. Nelson Mandela’s day is done. The news, expected and still unwelcome, reached us in the United States, and suddenly our world became somber. Our skies were leadened. His day is done. We see you, South African people standing speechless at the slamming of that final door through which no traveller returns. Our spirits reach out to you Bantu, Zulu, Xhosa, Boer. We think of you and your son of Africa, your father, your one more wonder of the world. We send our souls to you as you reflect upon your David armed with a mere stone, facing down the mighty Goliath. Your man of strength, Gideon, emerging triumphant. Although born into the brutal embrace of Apartheid, scarred by the savage atmosphere of racism, unjustly imprisoned in the bloody maws of South African dungeons. Would the man survive? Could the man survive? His answer strengthened men and women around the world. In the Alamo, in San Antonio, Texas, on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, in Chicago’s Loop, in New Orleans Mardi Gras, in New York City’s Times Square, we watched as the hope of Africa sprang through the prison’s doors. His stupendous heart intact, his gargantuan will hale and hearty. He had not been crippled by brutes, nor was his passion for the rights of human beings diminished by twenty-seven years of imprisonment. Even here in America, we felt the cool, refreshing breeze of freedom. When Nelson Mandela took the seat of Presidency in his country where formerly he was not even allowed to vote we were enlarged by tears of pride, as we saw Nelson Mandela’s former prison guards invited, courteously, by him to watch from the front rows his inauguration. We saw him accept the world’s award in Norway with the grace and gratitude of the Solon in Ancient Roman Courts, and the confidence of African Chiefs from ancient royal stools. No sun outlasts its sunset, but it will rise again and bring the dawn. Yes, Mandela’s day is done, yet we, his inheritors, will open the gates wider for reconciliation, and we will respond generously to the cries of Blacks and Whites, Asians, Hispanics, the poor who live piteously on the floor of our planet. He has offered us understanding. We will not withhold forgiveness even from those who do not ask. Nelson Mandela’s day is done, we confess it in tearful voices, yet we lift our own to say thank you. Thank you our Gideon, thank you our David, our great courageous man. We will not forget you, we will not dishonor you, we will remember and be glad that you lived among us, that you taught us, and that you loved us all.

Kiev became a linchpin of the medieval world, evidenced by the marriage ties of the ruling house in the second half of the eleventh century. Daughters of Yaroslav the Wise, who reigned as Grand Prince of Kiev until 1054, married the King of Norway, the King of Hungary, the King of Sweden and the King of France. One son married the daughter of the King of Poland, while another took as his wife a member of the imperial family of Constantinople. The marriages made in the next generation were even more impressive. Rus’ princesses were married to the King of Hungary, the King of Poland and the powerful German Emperor, Henry IV. Among other illustrious matches was Gytha, the wife of Vladimir II Monomakh, the Grand Prince of Kiev: she was the daughter of Harold II, King of England, who was killed at the battle of Hastings in 1066. The ruling family in Kiev was the best-connected dynasty in Europe.

In Norway, you may select any individual around the table and skaal him or her in a small private ceremony. You first lift your glass high and call out the name. ‘Bestemama!’ you say. ‘Skaal, Bestemama!’ She will then lift her own glass and hold it up high. At the same time your own eyes meet hers, and you must keep looking deep into her eyes as you sip your drink. After you have both done this, you raise your glasses high up again in a sort of silent final salute, and only then does each person look away and set down his glass.

One problem with most current governments is that they prioritize economic growth (as mismeasured by GDP per capita) over citizens’ happiness, quality of life, efficiency of trait display, and breadth and depth of social networks. The latter outcomes are not actually any harder to measure than GDP per capita. For example, the UN Human Development Index (HDI) measures overall quality of life fairly well by taking into account life expectancy, literacy, and educational attainment; this index puts Iceland, Norway, Australia, and Canada at the top, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the bottom.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

Hence the real problem in understanding China’s loss of political and technological preeminence to Europe is to understand China’s chronic unity and Europe’s chronic disunity. The answer is again suggested by maps (see page 399). Europe has a highly indented coastline, with five large peninsulas that approach islands in their isolation, and all of which evolved independent languages, ethnic groups, and governments: Greece, Italy, Iberia, Denmark, and Norway / Sweden. China’s coastline is much smoother, and only the nearby Korean Peninsula attained separate importance. Europe has two islands (Britain and Ireland) sufficiently big to assert their political independence and to maintain their own languages and ethnicities, and one of them (Britain) big and close enough to become a major independent European power. But even China’s two largest islands, Taiwan and Hainan, have each less than half the area of Ireland; neither was a major independent power until Taiwan’s emergence in recent decades; and Japan’s geographic isolation kept it until recently much more isolated politically from the Asian mainland than Britain has been from mainland Europe. Europe is carved up into independent linguistic, ethnic, and political units by high mountains (the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, and Norwegian border mountains), while China’s mountains east of the Tibetan plateau are much less formidable barriers. China’s heartland is bound together from east to west by two long navigable river systems in rich alluvial valleys (the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers), and it is joined from north to south by relatively easy connections between these two river systems (eventually linked by canals). As a result, China very early became dominated by two huge geographic core areas of high productivity, themselves only weakly separated from each other and eventually fused into a single core. Europe’s two biggest rivers, the Rhine and Danube, are smaller and connect much less of Europe. Unlike China, Europe has many scattered small core areas, none big enough to dominate the others for long, and each the center of chronically independent states.

The scariest thing is that nobody seems to be considering the impact on those wild fish of fish farming on the scale that is now being proposed on the coast of Norway or in the open ocean off the United States. Fish farming, even with conventional techniques, changes fish within a few generations from an animal like a wild buffalo or a wildebeest to the equivalent of a domestic cow. Domesticated salmon, after several generations, are fat, listless things that are good at putting on weight, not swimming up fast-moving rivers. When they get into a river and breed with wild fish, they can damage the wild fish's prospects of surviving to reproduce. When domesticated fish breed with wild fish, studies indicate the breeding success initially goes up, then slumps as the genetically different offspring are far less successful at returning to the river. Many of the salmon in Norwegian rivers, which used to have fine runs of unusually large fish, are now of farmed origin. Domesticated salmon are also prone to potentially lethal diseases, such as infectious salmon anemia, which has meant many thousands have had to be quarantined or killed. They are also prone to the parasite Gyrodactylus salaris, which has meant that whole river systems in Norway have had to be poisoned with the insecticide rotenone and restocked.

Bjørnskov, an expert in the fields of social trust, subjective well-being, and life satisfaction, told me about some other, highly revealing experiments that had been carried out in the field. “Back in the nineties there was an experiment done [in 1996, by Reader’s Digest] where wallets were left around in various cities and they counted how many were returned. And the cool thing is that in the places where more people say they can trust others, the more wallets were returned. I think they did an experiment with about forty wallets and the only two countries where all forty were returned were Norway and Denmark. I thought it was too good to be true, but TV2 [a Danish TV channel] did the same experiment again four years ago in Copenhagen Central Station, and they literally could not even leave the wallets—people would instantly pick them up and come running after them, so they had to give up!

Until recently it has been assumed that in similar cases in the Scandinavian homelands, exotic and imported artefacts buried with women were gifts from men. This is especially so in western Norway, where artefacts looted from Britain and Ireland have mostly been found in women’s graves. But the new isotopic and genetic evidence on migration has forced us to rethink the interpretation of these burials. The recurring problem is trying to work out whether it was the object or its owner who travelled. When it comes to women in the Viking Age, the conclusion has almost always been the former, which has had an enormous impact on how we have viewed women’s agency – their involvement and individual participation – in the entire period. Partly the issue is that the interpretation of the objects has been based on a number of assumptions that lead to circular arguments, a serpent biting its own tail, going right the way back to the start of the Viking Age.

Their greatly reduced circumstances bound the Danes together more tightly as a tribe than any of the other Nordic countries. As historian T. K. Derry writes (about the accession of Norway to Sweden), “The Danish king and people resigned themselves to the loss … as a common misfortune which drew them together in a desire to avoid all further changes.” The territorial losses, sundry beatings, and myriad humiliations forced the Danes to turn their gaze inward, instilling in them not only a fear of change and of external forces that abides to this day, but also a remarkable self-sufficiency and an appreciation of what little they had left. No longer the great European power it had once been, Denmark withdrew, mustered what few resources remained within its much-reduced boundaries, and decided never again to have ambitions in that direction. What followed was a process of what you could call “positive parochialization”; the Danes adopted a “glass half full” outlook, largely because their glass was now half full, and it is an outlook that, I would argue, has paved the way for the much trumpeted success of their society to this day.

Musk burst in carrying a sink and laughing. It was one of those visual puns that amuses him. “Let that sink in!” he exclaimed. “Let’s party on!” Agrawal and Segal smiled. Musk seemed amazed as he wandered around Twitter’s headquarters, which was in a ten-story Art Deco former merchandise mart built in 1937. It had been renovated in a tech-hip style with coffee bars, yoga studio, fitness room, and game arcades. The cavernous ninth-floor café, with a patio overlooking San Francisco’s City Hall, served free meals ranging from artisanal hamburgers to vegan salads. The signs on the restrooms said, “Gender diversity is welcome here,” and as Musk poked through cabinets filled with stashes of Twitter-branded merchandise, he found T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Stay woke,” which he waved around as an example of the mindset that he believed had infected the company. In the second-floor conference facilities, which Musk commandeered as his base camp, there were long wooden tables filled with earthy snacks and five types of water, including bottles from Norway and cans of Liquid Death. “I drink tap water,” Musk said when offered one. It was an ominous opening scene. One could smell a culture clash brewing, as if a hardscrabble cowboy had walked into a Starbucks.

The national curriculum for the Swedish preschool is twenty pages long and goes on at length about things like fostering respect for one another, human rights, and democratic values, as well as a lifelong desire to learn. The document's word choices are a pretty good clue to what Swedish society wants and expects from toddlers and preschoolers. The curriculum features the word "play" thirteen times, "language" twelve times, "nature" six times, and "math" five times. But there is not a single mention of "literacy" or "writing." Instead, two of the most frequently used words are "learning" (with forty-eight appearances) and "development" (forty-seven). The other Scandinavian countries have similar early childhood education traditions. In Finland, formal teaching of reading doesn't start until the child begins first grade, at age seven, and in the Finnish equivalent of kindergarten, which children enroll in the year they turn six, teachers will only teach reading if a child is showing an interest in it. Despite this lack of emphasis on early literacy, Finland is considered the most literate country in the world, with Norway coming in second, and Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden rounding out the top five, according to a 2016 study by Central Connecticut State University. John Miller, who conducted the study, noted that the five Nordic countries scored so well because "their monolithic culture values reading.

During World War II, there had been a project to sabotage the Nazi nuclear weapons program. Years earlier, Leo Szilard, the first person to realize the possibility of a fission chain reaction, had convinced Fermi not to publish the discovery that purified graphite was a cheap and effective neutron moderator. Fermi had wanted to publish, for the sake of the great international project of science, which was above nationalism. But Szilard had persuaded Rabi, and Fermi had abided by the majority vote of their tiny three-person conspiracy. And so, years later, the only neutron moderator the Nazis had known about was deuterium. The only deuterium source under Nazi control had been a captured facility in occupied Norway, which had been knocked out by bombs and sabotage, causing a total of twenty-four civilian deaths. The Nazis had tried to ship the deuterium already refined to Germany, aboard a civilian Norwegian ferry, the SS Hydro. Knut Haukelid and his assistants had been discovered by the night watchman of the civilian ferry while they were sneaking on board to sabotage it. Haukelid had told the watchman that they were escaping the Gestapo, and the watchman had let them go. Haukelid had considered warning the night watchman, but that would have endangered the mission, so Haukelid had only shaken his hand. And the civilian ship had sunk in the deepest part of the lake, with eight dead Germans, seven dead crew, and three dead civilian bystanders. Some of the Norwegian rescuers of the ship had thought the German soldiers present should be left to drown, but this view had not prevailed, and the German survivors had been rescued. And that had been the end of the Nazi nuclear weapons program. Which was to say that Knut Haukelid had killed innocent people. One of whom, the night watchman of the ship, had been a good person. Someone who'd gone out of his way to help Haukelid, at risk to himself; from the kindness of his heart, for the highest moral reasons; and been sent to drown in turn. Afterward, in the cold light of history, it had looked like the Nazis had never been close to getting nuclear weapons after all. And Harry had never read anything suggesting that Haukelid had acted wrongly.

With the lessons learned from the Mike SSN disaster in the North Sea off Norway, the Typhoon’s captain decided to remain where he was to await rescue. Mack knew the Russian captain had lost his cool; he was now in the South China Sea, where no Russian ships could come to his rescue. What’s more, Cheyenne had finally picked up the last Akula, whose captain had elected to pull off to be able to fight another day and which had managed to distance itself from the fray. Cheyenne was there as the Typhoon reached the surface. The Russian submarine had been severely damaged, but Mack ordered four more torpedoes into the defenseless Typhoon. There was seldom mercy in wartime, and Cheyenne’s and Mack’s orders were clear. If he had allowed the Typhoon to survive, its crew would have cut the missile hatches open with blow torches and completed their launch against Taiwan. The result of the additional four torpedoes exploding beneath the Typhoon caused major seawater system flooding. The ensuing scene was similar to the devastation experienced by the Yankee class SSBN southeast of the Bermudas years before. Only this time there was no capability to protect and remove the crew. Life rafts were put over the side, only to be attacked by the South China Sea shark population, so the crew watched helplessly from the huge, flat missile-tube deck. The oversized submarine started settling slowly deeper, the water level rising to within meters of the missile- tube deck, with the crew topside. The captain—the admiral-to-be-had already sent a message to his North Fleet Headquarters concerning the impending demise of his capital ship and the lack of help from his Akula escorts by name, two of which had been sunk. He had not been given any means to communicate with the Chinese, so he resorted to calling home. After that he went topside to be with his men, sat down, and held hands in a circle as their submarine slid beneath the surface of the sea, sailors to the end, for eternity.

Nobody ever talked about what a struggle this all was. I could see why women used to die in childbirth. They didn't catch some kind of microbe, or even hemorrhage. They just gave up. They knew that if they didn't die, they'd be going through it again the next year, and the next. I couldn't understand how a woman might just stop trying, like a tired swimmer, let her head go under, the water fill her lungs. I slowly massaged Yvonne's neck, her shoulders, I wouldn't let her go under. She sucked ice through threadbare white terry. If my mother were here, she'd have made Melinda meek cough up the drugs, sure enough. "Mamacita, ay," Yvonne wailed. I didn't know why she would call her mother. She hated her mother. She hadn't seen her in six years, since the day she locked Yvonne and her brother and sisters in their apartment in Burbank to go out and party, and never came back. Yvonne said she let her boyfriends run a train on her when she was eleven. I didn't even know what that meant. Gang bang, she said. And still she called out, Mama. It wasn't just Yvonne. All down the ward, they called for their mothers. ... I held onto Yvonne's hands, and I imagined my mother, seventeen years ago, giving birth to me. Did she call for her mother?...I thought of her mother, the one picture I had, the little I knew. Karin Thorvald, who may or may not have been a distant relation of King Olaf of Norway, classical actress and drunk, who could recite Shakespeare by heart while feeding the chickens and who drowned in the cow pond when my mother was thirteen. I couldn't imagine her calling out for anyone. But then I realized, they didn't mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers and purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women in barstools. Not those women with their complaints and their magazines, controlling women, women who asked, what's in it for me? Not the women who watched TV while they made dinner, women who dyed their hair blond behind closed doors trying to look twenty-three. They didn't mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they'd never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition, get used to it. They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for is when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us. Yvonne was sitting up, holding her breath, eyes bulging out. It was the thing she should not do. "Breathe," I said in her ear. "Please, Yvonne, try." She tried to breathe, a couple of shallow inhalations, but it hurt too much. She flopped back on the narrow bed, too tired to go on. All she could do was grip my hand and cry. And I thought of the way the baby was linked to her, as she was linked to her mother, and her mother, all the way back, insider and inside, knit into a chain of disaster that brought her to this bed, this day. And not only her. I wondered what my own inheritance was going to be. "I wish I was dead," Yvonne said into the pillowcase with the flowers I'd brought from home. The baby came four hours later. A girl, born 5:32 PM.

You seem surprised to find us here,’ the man said. ‘I am,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t expecting to find anyone.’ ‘We are everywhere,’ the man said. ‘We are all over the country.’ ‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but I don’t understand. Who do you mean by we?’ ‘Jewish refugees.’ [...] ‘Is this your land?’ I asked him. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘You mean you are hoping to buy it?’ He looked at me in silence for a while. Then he said, ‘The land is at present owned by a Palestinian farmer but he has given us permission to live here. He has also allowed us some fields so that we can grow our own food.’ ‘So where do you go from here?’ I asked him. ‘You and all your orphans?’ ‘We don’t go anywhere,’ he said, smiling through his black beard. ‘We stay here.’ ‘Then you will all become Palestinians,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps you are that already.’ He smiled again, presumably at the naïvety of my questions. ‘No,’ the man said, ‘I do not think we will become Palestinians.’ ‘Then what will you do?’ ‘You are a young man who is flying aeroplanes,’ he said, ‘and I do not expect you to understand our problems.’ ‘What problems?’ I asked him. The young woman put two mugs of coffee on the table as well as a tin of condensed milk that had two holes punctured in the top. The man dripped some milk from the tin into my mug and stirred it for me with the only spoon. He did the same for his own coffee and then took a sip. ‘You have a country to live in and it is called England,’ he said. ‘Therefore you have no problems.’ ‘No problems!’ I cried. ‘England is fighting for her life all by herself against virtually the whole of Europe! We’re even fighting the Vichy French and that’s why we’re in Palestine right now! Oh, we’ve got problems all right!’ I was getting rather worked up. I resented the fact that this man sitting in his fig grove said that I had no problems when I was getting shot at every day. ‘I’ve got problems myself’, I said, ‘in just trying to stay alive.’ ‘That is a very small problem,’ the man said. ‘Ours is much bigger.’ I was flabbergasted by what he was saying. He didn’t seem to care one bit about the war we were fighting. He appeared to be totally absorbed in something he called ‘his problem’ and I couldn’t for the life of me make it out. ‘Don’t you care whether we beat Hitler or not?’ I asked him. ‘Of course I care. It is essential that Hitler be defeated. But that is only a matter of months and years. Historically, it will be a very short battle. Also it happens to be England’s battle. It is not mine. My battle is one that has been going on since the time of Christ.’ ‘I am not with you at all,’ I said. I was beginning to wonder whether he was some sort of a nut. He seemed to have a war of his own going on which was quite different to ours. I still have a very clear picture of the inside of that hut and of the bearded man with the bright fiery eyes who kept talking to me in riddles. ‘We need a homeland,’ the man was saying. ‘We need a country of our own. Even the Zulus have Zululand. But we have nothing.’ ‘You mean the Jews have no country?’ ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ he said. ‘It’s time we had one.’ ‘But how in the world are you going to get yourselves a country?’ I asked him. ‘They are all occupied. Norway belongs to the Norwegians and Nicaragua belongs to the Nicaraguans. It’s the same all over.’ ‘We shall see,’ the man said, sipping his coffee. The dark-haired woman was washing up some plates in a basin of water on another small table and she had her back to us. ‘You could have Germany,’ I said brightly. ‘When we have beaten Hitler then perhaps England would give you Germany.’ ‘We don’t want Germany,’ the man said. ‘Then which country did you have in mind?’ I asked him, displaying more ignorance than ever. ‘If you want something badly enough,’ he said, ‘and if you need something badly enough, you can always get it.’ [...]‘You have a lot to learn,’ he said. ‘But you are a good boy. You are fighting for freedom. So am I.