Scandinavia Quotes

I believe Western culture -- rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. -- is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.

Oh yes. I was telling you about my research into the old Norse sagas- the mythology of ancient Scandinavia. Have you read them?” “Uh no.” “You’d like them, Cassie.” He waved the hand with the chalk in it. “All sex and violence.” I frowned. “Why would you think that I’d-

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...

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’ In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances… and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

It’s not just dark in Scandinavia.

It was a day completely devoid of weather. During some weeks in winter in the central part of Scandinavia the sky doesn’t seem to bother even attempting to impress us, it greets us with the color of newspaper in a puddle, and dawn leaves behind it a fog as if someone has been setting fire to ghosts.

In Scandinavia the standard of education is not only the best in the world, but the opportunities it presents are available to all, free of charge. This is the bedrock of Nordic exceptionalism.

vegetables in your restaurants are not so good.” “Better in Russia?” Reynolds asked, interested. “I should say so,” Nadya said. “Also better in France, in Germany, in Scandinavia, in Italy, in Israel.

A most painful matter to me, as you can most readily imagine, Mr Holmes. I have been cut to the quick. I understand you have already managed several delicate cases of this sort, sir, though I presume that they were hardly from the same class of society' 'No, I am descending.' 'I beg pardon?' 'My last client of the sort was a King.' 'Oh really! I had no idea. And which king?' 'The King of Scandinavia' 'What! Had he lost his wife?' 'You can understand", said Holmes suavely, 'that I extend to the affairs of my other clients the same secrecy which I promise to you in yours.

A light elf guardian was in Ancient Scandinavia called a fylgja (follower, guardian spirit.). This was a spirit following you wherever you went, removing obstacles in your way, helping you find your way and avoid getting lost, protecting you from injury and death, from eating poisonous food and drinking bad water, from dangerous predators and so forth. It was your guardian angel. Some claimed that the fylgja even walked before you, in front of you, to spot any traps and harm before it could affect you. They were then, when seen by others walking before you, called vardeger (watchmen, guardians.).

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.

Thor has been banished from Scandinavia, Ra's sun has set in Egypt and Zeus lies buried in the snow at Mount Olympus. But the myths of lord Ram reign strong India, Lord Krishna has not ceasrd to dance in out hearts.

It is said, once a wise man from the far North told me; it is said that there are in certain parts of Scandinavia cities within cities like there are circles within circles; existent yet invisible. And those cities are inhabited by creatures more terrible than imagination can create : man-shaped but man-devouring, as black and as silent as the night they prowl in.

I'd always thought it was gaudy, but standing there watching him beside the gold and glass shrine, I realised that his was a candlelight faith. It didn't work in the clear unforgiving light in London or Scandinavia, where even the dust in the cathedrals showed. But in the warm dimness and the shadows, what would have been tasteless at home made sense. The shrine looked like an oil painting made into real substance. So did he. England's was a reading religion, one it was difficult to understand at the bleak unimpressive first glance, one that needed books to explain itself. But his was images and images, the same as the old stages, in a place where not everyone could read and good light was expensive.

It is probable, as Anthony Faulkes suggests, that the pagan religion was never systematically understood by those who practiced it. Different areas of Scandinavia worshipped different gods at different times in the pre-Christian era; the localized nature of cults and rituals produced neither dogma nor sacred texts, as far as we know. Rather pre-Christian religion was 'a disorganized body of conflicting traditions that was probably never reduced in heathen times to a consistent orthodoxy such as Snorri attempts to present'.

it is clear from the tone of his account that he really didn’t approve of the concept of female fighters, writing, as he did,

The things of Scandinavia tend to be secret, as if they were a dream. The Last Voyage of Ulysses

It's from Scandinavia!" This, we learned, was the name of a region, a cold and forsaken place where people stayed indoors and plotted the death of knobs.

It would be possible to sail from Scandinavia to Canada without once crossing more than 250 miles of open sea.

Ideas are like bananas. That bananas grow only in tropical regions doesn't make them any less delicious in Scandinavia.

Canada will bring us power for the future, Scandinavia the character, the steadiness…It’s the grand concept for survival…a union of know-how, that’s us, with power and character.

The ancient DNA revolution documented that the first farmers even in the most remote reaches of Europe—Britain, Scandinavia, and Iberia—had very little hunter-gatherer-related ancestry.

Conservatives point out the shortages, food lines, and outright famines in Venezuela, Stalin’s Russia, and Mao’s China, while American socialists stubbornly cling to the only “socialist” model left that has any claim to success—Scandinavia. Unfortunately for them, the so-called socialist success of Scandinavia is, in fact, due to good old-fashioned private property and capitalism!

(Segura) "...surely you realise there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement. ... Dr Hasselbacher does not belong to the torturable class." (Wormold) "Who does?" (Segura) "The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with emigres from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides....

They took the train one day from the northern railway-station of the world... Possibly, I too shall take the train at that station, one day, and go and seek around thy lakes, O Norway, O silent Scandinavia, for the perhaps still living traces of Raoul and Christine and also of Mamma Valerius, who disappeared at the same time!... Possibly, some day, I shall hear the lonely mountains of the north echo the singing of her who knew the Angel of Music!

The graph, unsurprisingly, reveals that differences across the world’s culture zones are substantial. The Protestant countries of Western Europe, such as the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom, are the world’s most liberal, followed by the United States and other wealthy English-speaking countries, then Catholic and Southern Europe, then the former Communist countries of central Europe. Latin America, the industrialized countries of East Asia, and the former republics of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are more socially conservative, followed by South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The world’s most illiberal region is the Islamic Middle East.

The myth of the dragon is a very peculiar one, precisely because it is a truly global myth. Giant serpents appear in mythologies from all over the world: China, Scandinavia, Greece, Persia, Germany, Central America, the United Kingdom, even Africa. There is no discernible reason for this. How could the myth of a large serpentine creature be so consistent across the ancient world? From: Dragons in History by Eleanor Lock (Border Press, London, 1999)

However, as in Scandinavia, the Church of England clergy are unionized and recently forced the Church to rescind a rule defrocking clergy convicted of felonies, on grounds that such convictions might have been miscarriages of justice.

HORKLUMP M.O.M. Classification: X The Horklump comes from Scandinavia but is now widespread throughout northern Europe. It resembles a fleshy, pinkish mushroom covered in sparse, wiry black bristles. A prodigious breeder, the Horklump will cover an average garden in a matter of days. It spreads sinewy tentacles rather than roots into the ground to search for its preferred food of earthworms. The Horklump is a favourite delicacy of gnomes but otherwise has no discernible use. H

Amos Oz, the late Jerusalemite writer, offered this droll solution: ‘We should remove every stone of the Holy Sites and transport them to Scandinavia for a hundred years and not return them until everyone has learned to live together in Jerusalem.

As best we can tell, the gods of Asgard came from Germany, spread into Scandinavia, and then out into the parts of the world dominated by the Vikings—into Orkney and Scotland, Ireland and the north of England—where the invaders left places named for Thor or Odin.

As Anne grew, so did her ambition to travel. Her dream destinations became further flung and more exotic. It did not satisfy her to leave England for a week or two; throughout her adult life she spent months at a time away from home, including periods of residence in Paris. Having also explored Italy, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland, in the summer of 1833 Scandinavia and the Baltics were in Anne’s sights. After months of indecision, she finally ‘determined to go north’ on 17th July that year, resolving to end her journey in Denmark.

Horklump M.O.M. Classification: X The Horklump comes from Scandinavia but is now widespread throughout northern Europe. It resembles a fleshy, pinkish mushroom covered in sparse, wiry black bristles. A prodigious breeder, the Horklump will cover an average garden in a matter of days. It spreads sinewy tentacles rather than roots into the ground to search for its preferred food of earthworms. The Horklump is a favourite delicacy of gnomes but otherwise has no discernible use. Horned Serpent M.O.M. Classification: XXXXX Several species of Horned Serpents exist globally: large specimens have been caught in the Far East, while ancient bestiaries suggest that they were once native to Western Europe, where they have been hunted to extinction by wizards in search of potion ingredients. The largest and most diverse group of Horned Serpents still in existence is to be found in North America, of which the most famous and highly prized has a jewel in its forehead, which is reputed to give the power of invisibility and flight. A legend exists concerning the founder of Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Isolt Sayre, and a Horned Serpent. Sayre was reputed to be able to understand the serpent, which offered her shavings from its horn as the core of the first ever American-made wand. The Horned Serpent gives its name to one of the houses of Ilvermorny.

Bee-keeping was no doubt important in many places in Scandinavia. Honey was the only known sweetener, was used as a preservative and was an important ingredient in alcoholic drinks, while beeswax was necessary for certain metal-casting processes and it was also the best material for candles.

More than half of Spanish women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine are single. The rate of marriage in Italy is much lower than in the United States. Japan shares with Scandinavia the distinction of having the highest percentage of unmarried women between age twenty and forty of anywhere in the world.44

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.

If a forty-year-old ex-drone pilot takes three years to reinvent herself as a designer of virtual worlds, she may well need a lot of government help to sustain herself and her family during that time. (This kind of scheme is currently being pioneered in Scandinavia, where governments follow the motto ‘protect workers, not jobs’.)

THE life of Snorri Sturluson fell in a great but contradictory age, when all that was noble and spiritual in men seemed to promise social regeneration, and when bloody crimes and sordid ambitions gave this hope the lie. Not less than the rest of Europe, Scandinavia shared in the bitter conflict between the law of the spirit and the law of the members.

The individual journey that people take down the funnel of misbelief reflects a societal journey into mistrust. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, and no matter where you are in the world (with the possible exception of Scandinavia), it is hard to escape the ways in which our society's level of trust is decreasing, with alarming consequences.

Now is probably a good time to make my confession about Finland, our next destination in this Nordic odyssey: I think the Finns are fantastic. I can't get enough of them. I would be perfectly happy for the Finns to rule the world. They get my vote, they've won my heart. If you ask me, they should just change the word 'fantastic' to 'Finntastic.' Helsinki? Heavensinki, more like.

Though I set out to redress the rose-tinted imbalance in the reporting on the Nordic region in the Western media, as well as to get a few things off my chest, I hope, too, that I have shed light on some of the more positive aspects of Scandinavia—the trust, the social cohesion, the economic and gender equality, the rationalism, the modesty, the well-balanced political and economic systems, and so on. Right now, the West is looking for an alternative to the rampant capitalism that has ravaged our economies, a system that might avoid the extremes of Soviet socialism or American deregulated neoliberalism. Really, as far as I am concerned there is only one place to look for the economic and societal role model of the future, and it is not Brazil or Russia or China. The Nordic countries have the answer

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night…’ In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented…It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty…“If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things- praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends…not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (any microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

In Sweden, nature is not an abstract concept that is taught only on Earth Day and through textbooks about bees and butterflies. It’s an integral part of everyday life. Daily interaction with nature has helped turn many children, myself included, into passionate advocates for the environment. Not surprisingly, Scandinavia is also a world leader when it comes to renewable energy, recycling, and sustainable living.

To summarise, the design of Nordic tax systems has over time created a ‘fiscal illusion’, whereby the public is not aware of the taxes they are paying. One can reflect on whether it is really in line with democratic principles to raise taxes in a way such that citizens are unaware of them. Interestingly, few proponents of introducing a Nordic model of high taxes in other countries stress that such a move would require hiding the true cost of taxation from the public.

A Tourist On a great rock by the Jaffa Gate sat a golden girl from Scandinavia and oiled herself with suntan oil as if on the beach. I told her, don’t go into these alleys, a net of bachelors in heat is spread there, a snare of lechers. And further inside, in half-darkness, the groaning trousers of old men, and unholy lust in the guise of prayer and grief and seductive chatter in many languages. Once Hebrew was God’s slang in these streets, now I use it for holy desire.

We have a lot more opportunities in Singapore now compared to the 1960s and 1970s. We have access to the same careers, receive the same education and compensation. Many also venture into industries that were formerly “men’s fields”. The last I checked we were ranked #55 out of 150 odd countries in terms of gender equality, according to World Economic Forum. We are still lagging behind Scandinavia and some European countries, but we are way above all the Asian countries. We are quite fortunate to be women in Singapore.

Sometimes, she said, she could recognize a place just by the quality of the light. In Lisbon, the light at the end of spring leans madly over the houses, white and humid, and just a little bit salty. In Rio de Janeiro, in the season that the locals instinctively call ‘autumn’, and that the Europeans insist disdainfully is just a figment of their imagination, the light becomes gentler, like a shimmer of silk, sometimes accompanied by a humid grayness, which hangs over the streets, and then sinks down gently into the squares and gardens. In the drenched land of the Pantanal in Mato Grosso, really early in the morning, the blue parrots cross the sky and they shake a clear, slow light from their wings, a light that little by little settles on the waters, grows and spreads and seems to sing. In the forests of Taman Negara in Malaysia, the light is like a liquid, which sticks to your skin, and has a taste and a smell. It’s noisy in Goa, and harsh. In Berlin the sun is always laughing, at least during those moments when it manages to break through the clouds, like in those ecological stickers against nuclear power. Even in the most unlikely skies, Ângela Lúcia is able to discern shines that mustn’t be forgotten; until she visited Scandinavia she’d believed that in that part of the world during the winter months light was nothing but the figment of people’s imagination. But no, the clouds would occasionally light up with great flashes of hope. She said this, and stood up, adopting a dramatic pose: ‘And Egypt? In Cairo? Have you ever been to Cairo?… To the pyramids of Giza?…’ She lifted her hands and declaimed: ‘The light, majestic, falls; so potent, so alive, that it seems to settle on everything like a sort of luminous mist.

Of course there are downsides even in almost nearly perfect societies: there are historical skeletons in every closet, and yes, countries with homogenous, monocultural tendencies do tend to be a little too safe and dull, and insular. Looking to the future, the Nordic countries are also facing some serious challenges—aging populations, creaking welfare states, the ongoing integration of immigrant populations, and rising inequality. But it’s still Scandinavia. It is still the enviably rich, peaceful, harmonious, and progressive place it has long been. It’s still The White Album.

To a great extent, friluftsliv is made possible by the Swedish common law of allemansratten (the right of public access), which grants anybody the right to walk, ride a bike or horse, ski, pick berries, or camp anywhere on private land, except for the part that immediately surrounds a private dwelling. In short, that means you can pick mushrooms and flowers, as well as light a campfire and pitch a tent, in somebody else's woods, but not right in front of their house... allemansratten relies on an honor system that can simply be summed up with the phrase "Do not disturb, do not destroy," and trusts that people will use their common sense.

America can still point to individual rags-to-riches stories of self-made men and women who leapfrog to success. But for all the glitz of sudden stardom on American Idol, for all the hoop stars and gridiron heroes from the inner city, and for every surprise Wall Street billionaire, the unpleasant truth is that a typical child born at the bottom of the heap in America has far less chance of rising into the middle class or above than one born in France, Germany, or Scandinavia. In fact, one study found that it would take five or six generations, 125 to 150 years, for a child from America’s poverty caste to rise to the middle of the middle class.

What made Europeans exceptional was their unparalleled and insatiable ambition to explore and conquer. Although they might have had the ability, the Romans never attempted to conquer India or Scandinavia, the Persians never attempted to conquer Madagascar or Spain, and the Chinese never attempted to conquer Indonesia or Africa. Most Chinese rulers left even nearby Japan to its own devices. There was nothing peculiar about that. The oddity is that early modern Europeans caught a fever that drove them to sail to distant and completely unknown lands full of alien cultures, take one step on to their beaches, and immediately declare, ‘I claim all these territories for my king!

In each area of Europe the Vikings settled, intermarried, and gradually became assimilated into the local population, with the result that Scandinavian languages and distinct Scandinavian settlements eventually disappeared outside of Scandinavia. Swedish Vikings merged into the Russian population, Danish Vikings into the English population, while the Vikings who settled in Normandy eventually abandoned their Norse language and began speaking French. In that process of assimilation, Scandinavian words as well as genes were absorbed. For instance, the modern English language owes “awkward,” “die,” “egg,” “skirt,” and dozens of other everyday words to the Scandinavian invaders.

Programming is not all the same. Normal written languages have different rhythms and idioms, right? Well, so do programming languages. The language called C is all harsh imperatives, almost raw computer-speak. The language called Lisp is like one long, looping sentence, full of subclauses, so long in fact that you usually forget what it was even about in the first place. The language called Erlang is just like it sounds: eccentric and Scandinavia. I cannot program in any of these languages because they're all too hard. But Ruby, my language of choice, was invented by a cheerful Japanese programmer, and it reads like friendly, accessible poetry. Billy Collins by way of Bill Gates.

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.

Finland is not Scandinavia, nor is it Russia. Nevertheless, Finnish tradition owes something to both cultures. But the modern Finn is staunchly independent. The long struggle for emancipation and the battle to survive in a harsh environment have engendered an ordered society that solves its own problems in its own way. They have also given birth to the Finnish trait of sisu, often translated as ‘guts’, or the resilience to survive prolonged hardship. Even if all looks lost, a Finn with sisu will fight – or swim, or run, or work – valiantly until the final defeat. This trait is valued highly, with the country’s heroic resistance against the Red Army in the Winter War usually thought of as the ultimate example.

The difference is that in Scandinavia fears regarding such dangers are fought with familiarity, both at preschool and at home. When you grow up going to the woods on a regular basis, climb those trees, roll down those hills, cross those creeks, scramble up those boulders, those activities don’t feel any more dangerous than sitting on your couch. (Which, it could be argued, is actually far riskier, considering the very real and serious effects of a sedentary lifestyle on children’s health.) “In the forest there are poisonous berries and mushrooms, but instead of telling the children that they can’t pick any of them, we teach them which ones are poisonous,” Linde says. “Otherwise they won’t know once they get out in the woods on their own.

Mapema, kabla ndege haijaondoka na baada ya kuagana na maafisa waliomsindikiza, Nanda aliingia katika ndege na kutafuta namba ya kiti chake. Alivyoiona, alishtuka. Msichana mrembo alikaa kando ya kiti (cha Nanda) akiongea na simu, mara ya mwisho kabla ya kuondoka. Alivyofika, Nanda hakujizuia kuchangamka – alitupa tabasamu. Alivyoliona, kupitia miwani myeusi, binti alitabasamu pia, meno yake yakimchanganya kamishna. Alimsalimia Nanda, harakaharaka, na kurudi katika simu huku Nanda akikaa (vizuri) na kumsubiri. Alivyokata simu, alitoa miwani na kumwomba radhi Kamishna Nanda. Nanda akamwambia asijali, huku akitabasamu. Alikuwa na safari ya Bama kupitia Tailandi, kwa ndege ya Shirika la Ndege la Skandinavia na Maxair kutokea Bangkok; sawa kabisa na safari ya kamishna.

The cascading terrorist attacks emanating from PLO-controlled areas did not cease for a moment. This blunted the effect on public opinion of the White House signing ceremony of the Oslo Accords, in which Rabin was clearly seen uncomfortably shaking Arafat’s hand. Equally, Palestinian terrorism cast a dark shadow over the august ceremony in Sweden, where Rabin, Arafat and Peres were given the Nobel Peace Prize. The Peace Prize was greatly devalued when, after Oslo, the arch-jihadist recipient of the prize, Arafat, steadfastly continued to foster terrorism. In my long tenure as prime minister I could never be tempted with a Nobel Prize to do things that I thought would endanger Israel. Posterity is a better judge of historic achievement than politically correct committees meeting in Scandinavia.

The spruce is sculpted by the elements, bottlebrush scrawny, topiaryed by the weather. This boreal forest stretches over eight thousand miles in an unbroken line around the circumference of the globe: 30 percent of the world’s tree cover, four million square miles, the planet’s single largest biome. A broad, evergreen brushstroke that encircles the north, running through North America, Scandinavia, Siberia, marking the band of the subarctic. Forests of moose, of lynx, of bear. Forests of thimbleberry, strawberry, nagoonberry, lowbush cranberry, highbush cranberry, watermelon berry, bunchberry, crowberry, huckleberry, blueberry, cloudberry, bearberry, salmonberry. Forests home to many of the world’s remaining hunter-gatherer societies, summers of wildfires and perpetual light, and winters of fifty below.

Yet beneath that seemingly similar surface, everything had changed. America may have been still largely rural, still largely agricultural, but now it was also largely commercial, perhaps the most thoroughly commercialized nation in the world. One measure of that commercialization was the level of literacy; for the strongest motive behind people’s learning to read and write, even more than the need to understand the Scriptures, was the desire to do business—to buy and sell real estate and other goods and to make deals involving signatures and written agreements. When in the early years of the nineteenth century people in New England, including even areas along the Connecticut River in rural Vermont, attained levels of elementary literacy that were higher than any other places in the Western world (with the possible exception of parts of Scandinavia),

Finnish women are dominant,' Roman Schatz enthused. 'Traditionally, on Finnish farms the woman was chief of everything under the roof, including the males, and the men were there to take care of everything outside. No Finnish man would ever decide anything without consulting his wife. Men do the dishes. We don't have housewives in Finland - no one can afford to live from one salary. Women don't stay at home and breast-feed, they have their own careers and bank accounts. It's great - my divorce only cost me a hundred euro.

Many scholars argue that the voyages of Admiral Zheng He of the Chinese Ming dynasty heralded and eclipsed the European voyages of discovery. Between 1405 and 1433, Zheng led seven huge armadas from China to the far reaches of the Indian Ocean. The largest of these comprised almost 300 ships and carried close to 30,000 people.7 They visited Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and East Africa. Chinese ships anchored in Jedda, the main harbour of the Hejaz, and in Malindi, on the Kenyan coast. Columbus’ fleet of 1492 – which consisted of three small ships manned by 120 sailors – was like a trio of mosquitoes compared to Zheng He’s drove of dragons.8 Yet there was a crucial difference. Zheng He explored the oceans, and assisted pro-Chinese rulers, but he did not try to conquer or colonise the countries he visited. Moreover, the expeditions of Zheng He were not deeply rooted in Chinese politics and culture. When the ruling faction in Beijing changed during the 1430s, the new overlords abruptly terminated the operation. The great fleet was dismantled, crucial technical and geographical knowledge was lost, and no explorer of such stature and means ever set out again from a Chinese port. Chinese rulers in the coming centuries, like most Chinese rulers in previous centuries, restricted their interests and ambitions to the Middle Kingdom’s immediate environs. The Zheng He expeditions prove that Europe did not enjoy an outstanding technological edge. What made Europeans exceptional was their unparalleled and insatiable ambition to explore and conquer. Although they might have had the ability, the Romans never attempted to conquer India or Scandinavia, the Persians never attempted to conquer Madagascar or Spain, and the Chinese never attempted to conquer Indonesia or Africa. Most Chinese rulers left even nearby Japan to its own devices. There was nothing peculiar about that. The oddity is that early modern Europeans caught a fever that drove them to sail to distant and completely unknown lands full of alien cultures, take one step on to their beaches, and immediately declare, ‘I claim all these territories for my king!

By the end of the 1970s, a clear majority of the employed population of Britain, Germany, France, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and the Alpine countries worked in the service sector—communications, transport, banking, public administration and the like. Italy, Spain and Ireland were very close behind. In Communist Eastern Europe, by contrast, the overwhelming majority of former peasants were directed into labour-intensive and technologically retarded mining and industrial manufacture; in Czechoslovakia, employment in the tertiary, service sector actually declined during the course of the 1950s. Just as the output of coal and iron-ore was tailing off in mid-1950s Belgium, France, West Germany and the UK, so it continued to increase in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the GDR. The Communists’ dogmatic emphasis on raw material extraction and primary goods production did generate rapid initial growth in gross output and per capita GDP. In the short run the industrial emphasis of the Communist command economies thus appeared impressive (not least to many Western observers). But it boded ill for the region’s future.

In the nineteen sixties and early seventies students wore buttons and headbands demanding equal rights for women, blacks, Native Americans and all oppressed minorities, an end to the war in Vietnam, the salvation of the rain forests and the planet in general. [...] College students boycotted class, taught in, rioted everywhere, dodged the draft, fled to Canada or Scandinavia. High school students came to school fresh from images of war on television news, men blown to bits in rice paddies, helicopters hovering, tentative soldiers of the Viet Cong blasted out of their tunnels, their hands behind their heads, lucky for the moment they weren’t blasted back in again, images of anger back home, marches, demonstrations, hell no we won’t go, sit-ins, teachins, students falling before the guns of the National Guard, blacks recoiling from Bull Connor’s dogs, burn baby burn, black is beautiful, trust no one over thirty, I have a dream and, at the end of it all, your President is not a crook. [...]Mechanics and plumbers had to fight while college students shook indignant fists, fornicated in the fields of Woodstock and sat in.

The radiant sun draws visitors from the cold climes of Scandinavia, Britain, and Germany, and lively tavernas and discotheques entice vacationers from Asia and the Americas. People come from all over the world to marvel at the breathtaking historical depth and breadth that greets the visitor at every turn. This very mix of nationalities is just the latest of the many waves that have washed upon the Greek Isles for millennia. As they have since ancient, seafaring times, the hospitable inhabitants of the Greek Isles welcome these strangers who come for the beaches and the antiquities--and leave with the gift of the joy of living. As sunset gives way to the blanket of night, the modest lights of a thousand tiny villages twinkle and flicker as if mirroring the star-studded sky. Against the darkness, the columns and stones of ancient temples and theaters glow with a secret whiteness. Sipping a sweet and aromatic coffee, as a mandolin player strums an ancient melody and waves lap up against fishing boats moored for the night, it is easy to understand why the ancients believed these magical islands to be the birthplace of the gods.

It helps, of course, that Denmark is essentially one giant middle class or, as the Danes would have you believe, effectively classless. The creation of this economically and gender-equal society has driven much of Denmark’s social and economic development over the last hundred or so years. One very well-known Danish quotation sums this up—it is another line, like Holst’s “What was lost without…” that every Dane knows by heart, and was written by N. F. S. Grundtvig: Og da har i rigdom vi drevet det vidt, når få har for meget og færre for lidt. (And we will have made great strides in equality, when few have too much and fewer too little.) It sounds like some kind of utopian fantasy but, by and large, the Danes have succeeded in achieving it. As historian Tony Hall writes in Scandinavia: At War with Trolls, Grundtvig’s Folk High Schools were founded on the principle of “teaching them, whenever feasible, that regardless of their social rank and occupation, they belonged to one people, and as such had one mother, one destiny and one purpose.” The result is that, according to the New Statesman, “90 percent of the population [of Denmark] enjoy an approximately identical standard of living.

Sitting next to a woman at a dinner party recently, she had explained how stifling she found the attitude in her hometown. 'On the [Danish] west coast, anyone who even slightly broke with convention, or or showed that they had any ambition, was frowned upon,' she told me. 'People really didn't like it. Everyone knew your business, everyone had an opinion about what you should be doing. I had to get away. I came to Copenhagen as soon as I could, and don't often go back.' It is common to have such feelings about one's hometown, I suppose, but they do often seem to be particularly keenly felt by people from Jutland.

Un altro viaggio al Nord è stato di più lunga durata e forse non finirà mai; i suoi porti e le sue stazioni si chiamano Kierkegaard e Jacobsen, Strindberg, Hamsun e così via; potrei tracciare la mappa dell'intera Scandinavia solo con i nomi di Brandes e Gjellerup, Geijerstam, Lagerlöf e Heidenstam, Garborg, Ibsen, Bjørnson, Lie, Kielland, Duun, Undset e non so chi altro; magari Per Hallström. Ma anche Ola Hansson, Johan Bojer e altri, altri come Andersen Nexø e via di questo passo. Se però ho vissuto un poco al Lofoten o nel Dalarna, se ho camminato lungo il Karl Johans Gate, è perché non c'è niente da fare, prima o poi l'uomo deve poter vedere di persona qualcuno di quei luoghi nei quali si sente a casa, per poi rimanere stupito, in un modo o nell'altro: o di averlo già visto una volta, o di non esser riuscito neanche a immaginarlo. È questa la particolarità della grande letteratura: di essere ciò che di più radicato possieda un popolo e, nello stesso tempo, di parlare una lingua comprensibile e intimamente vicina a ciascuno. Non c'è diplomazia, non c'è alleanza di popoli così universale come la letteratura, ma la gente non le attribuisce il giusto peso, è così. E per questo che gli uomini possono ancora odiarsi ed essere estranei tra loro.

the promise about the bruising of the serpent's head, recorded in Genesis, as made to our first parents, was actually made, and if all mankind were descended from them, then it might be expected that some trace of this promise would be found in all nations. And such is the fact. There is hardly a people or kindred on earth in whose mythology it is not shadowed forth. The Greeks represented their great god Apollo as slaying the serpent Pytho, and Hercules as strangling serpents while yet in his cradle. In Egypt, in India, in Scandinavia, in Mexico, we find clear allusions to the same great truth. "The evil genius," says Wilkinson, "of the adversaries of the Egyptian god Horus is frequently figured under the form of a snake, whose head he is seen piercing with a spear. The same fable occurs in the religion of India, where the malignant serpent Calyia is slain by Vishnu, in his avatar of Crishna; and the Scandinavian deity Thor was said to have bruised the head of the great serpent with his mace." "The origin of this," he adds, "may be readily traced to the Bible." In reference to a similar belief among the Mexicans, we find Humboldt saying, that "The serpent crushed by the great spirit Teotl, when he takes the form of one of the subaltern deities, is the genius of evil--a real Kakodaemon.

Tomoe Akagi is known in artistic circles for having beat Nam June Paik to be the first person to perform a work of art inside a whale. Though, I don't think Paik actually wanted to create work inside a whale. His work, Creep into the Vagina of a Live Whale, was about creating an impossible piece of performance art, one that wasn't to be attempted, and could exist only in the minds of the audience. As readers of that instruction, we inevitably imagine ourselves parting the soft flesh of a whale without her noticing, a corridor opening up, stepping inside, breaking through her hymen, creeping into her uterus. I couldn't work out how I felt about this work when I read it for the first time; I remember her thinking, Ugh, of course he has chosen a female animal, and of course he has us enter her without her realizing. I couldn't tell what the point of the work was. It seemed to only exist to be shocking. Akagi had sewn himself into the stomach of a deceased beached whale somewhere in Scandinavia, where whale meat is eaten, and, after that, he was known as the artist who beat Nam June Paik. Unlike that of the other Fluxus artists, Akagi's work wasn't completely nihilistic; he wrote a long letter to the whale, apologizing for his generation's mistreatment of the environment, and sewed it into the whale's stomach with himself.

Is It True? English is a really a form of Plattdeutsch or Lowland German, the way it was spoken during the 5th century. It all happened when Germanic invaders crossed the English Channel and the North Sea from northwest Germany, Denmark and Scandinavia to what is now Scotland or Anglo Saxon better identified as Anglo-Celtic. English was also influenced by the conquering Normans who came from what is now France and whose language was Old Norman, which became Anglo-Norman. Christianity solidified the English language, when the King James Version of the Bible was repetitively transcribed by diligent Catholic monks. Old English was very complex, where nouns had three genders with der, die and das denoting the male, female and neuter genders. Oh yes, it also had strong and weak verbs, little understood and most often ignored by the masses. In Germany these grammatical rules survive to this day, whereas in Britain the rules became simplified and der, die and das became da, later refined to the article the! It is interesting where our words came from, many of which can be traced to their early roots. “History” started out as his story and when a “Brontosaurus Steak” was offered to a cave man, he uttered me eat! Which has now become meat and of course, when our cave man ventured to the beach and asked his friend if he saw any food, the friend replied “me see food,” referring to the multitude of fish or seafood! Most English swear words, which Goodreads will definitely not allow me to write, are also of early Anglo-Saxon origin. Either way they obeyed their king to multiply and had a fling, with the result being that we now have 7.6 Billion people on Earth.

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.” In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors — anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

To achieve authentic, sustained happiness, above all else you need to be in charge of your life, to be in control of who you want to be, and be able to make the appropriate changes if you are not. This cannot merely be a perception, a slogan like the American Dream (the United States came way down on the LSE's social mobility scale, incidentally). In Scandinavia it is a reality. These are the real lands of opportunity. There is far greater social mobility in the Nordic countries than in the United States or Britain and, for all the collectivism and state interference in the lives of the people who live here, there is far greater freedom to be the person you want to be, and do the things you want to do, up here in the north. In a recent poll by Gallup, only 5 percent of Danes said they could not change their lives if they wanted to. In contrast, I can think of many American states in which it would probably be quite an uncomfortable experience to declare yourself an atheist, for example or gay, or to be married yet choose not to have children, or to be unmarried and have children, or to have an abortion, or to raise your children as Muslims. Less significantly, but still limiting, I don't imagine it would be easy being vegetarian in Texas, for instance, or a wine buff in Salt Lake City, come to that. And don't even think of coming out as a socialist anywhere! In Scandinavia you can be all of these things and no one will bat an eye (as long as you wait and cross on green). Crucial to this social mobility are the schools. The autonomy enabled by a high-quality, free education system is just as important as the region's economic equality and extensive welfare safety nets, if not more so. In Scandinavia the standard of education is not only the best in the world, but the opportunities it presents are available to all, free of charge. This is the bedrock of Nordic exceptionalism.

Germany’s rearmament was first met with a “supine”134 response from its future adversaries, who showed “little immediate recognition of danger.”135 Despite Winston Churchill’s dire and repeated warnings that Germany “fears no one” and was “arming in a manner which has never been seen in German history,” Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain saw Hitler as merely trying to right the wrongs of Versailles, and acquiesced to the German annexation of the Sudetenland at Munich in September 1938.136 Yet Chamberlain’s anxiety grew as Hitler’s decision to occupy the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 indicated his broader aims. Chamberlain asked rhetorically: “Is this the end of an old adventure, or is it the beginning of a new? Is this the last attack upon a small State, or is it to be followed by others? Is this, in fact, a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?”137 France, meanwhile, as Henry Kissinger explains, “had become so dispirited that it could not bring itself to act.”138 Stalin decided his interests were best served by a non-aggression pact signed with Germany, which included a secret protocol for the division of Eastern Europe.139 One week after agreeing to the pact with Stalin, Hitler invaded Poland, triggering the British and French to declare war on September 3, 1939. The Second World War had begun. Within a year, Hitler occupied France, along with much of Western Europe and Scandinavia. Britain was defeated on the Continent, although it fought off German air assaults. In June 1941, Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. By the time Germany was defeated four years later, much of the European continent had been destroyed, and its eastern half would be under Soviet domination for the next forty years. Western Europe could not have been liberated without the United States, on whose military power it would continue to rely. The war Hitler unleashed was the bloodiest the world had ever seen.

I flera hundra år hade hans förfäder sått säd. Det var en handling av andakt en tyst och mild, vindlös kväll, helst i ett litet beskedligt duggregn, helst så snart som möjligt efter det grågässen sträckt. Potatisen, det var en ny rotfrukt, det var inget mystiskt med den, inget religiöst, kvinnfolk och barn kunde vara med och sätta dessa jordpäron som kom från främmande land liksom kaffet, det var stor och präktig mat, men släkt med rovan. Säden, det var brödet. Säd eller icke säd, det var liv eller död. Isak gick barhuvad och sådde i Jesu namn. Han var som en vedkubb med händer på, men inom sig var han som ett barn. Han tänkte sig för vid varje kast, han var vänlig och undergiven. Se, nu gror nog dessa korn och blir ax och mera säd, och likadant är det över hela jorden när säd sås. I Palestina, i Amerika, i Gudbrandsdalen - å, vad världen var vid, och den lilla, lilla jordlapp som Isak gick och sådde låg i mitten av allt. Solfjädrar av säd strålade ut från hans hand. Himlen var mulen och blid, det såg ut att dra ihop sig till ett litet, litet duggregn.

Although they made it their own, the Vikings were not the first explorers of the North Atlantic. For at least two centuries before the beginning of the Viking Age, Irish monks had been setting out in their curachs in search of remote islands where they could contemplate the divine in perfect solitude, disturbed only by the cries of seabirds and the crashing of the waves on the shore. The monks developed a tradition of writing imrama, travel tales, the most famous of which is the Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis (The Voyage of St Brendan the Abbot). The Navigatio recounts a voyage purported to have been made by St Brendan (d. c. 577) in search of the mythical Isles of the Blessed, which were believed to lie somewhere in the western ocean. The imrama certainly show a familiarity with the North Atlantic–the Navigatio, for example, describes what are probably icebergs, volcanoes and whales–but they also include so many fantastical and mythological elements that it is impossible to disentangle truth from invention. There is no evidence to support claims that are often made that St Brendan discovered America before the Vikings, but Irish monks certainly did reach the Faeroe Islands and Iceland before them. Ash from peat fires containing charred barley grains found in windblown sand deposits at Á Sondum on Sandoy in the southern Faeroes has been radiocarbon-dated to between the fourth and sixth centuries AD. Although no trace of buildings has yet been found, the ash probably came from domestic hearths and had been thrown out onto the sand to help control erosion, which was a common practice at the time. As peat was not used as a fuel in Scandinavia at this time but was widely used in Britain and Ireland, this evidence suggests that seafaring Irish monks had discovered the Faeroes not long after Ireland’s conversion to Christianity. No physical traces of an Irish presence in Iceland have been found in modern times, but early Viking settlers claimed that they found croziers and other ecclesiastical artefacts there. There are also two papar place-names (see here) associated with Irish monks, Papos and Papey, in the east of Iceland. The monks, all being celibate males, did not found any permanent self-sustaining communities in either place: they were always visitors rather than settlers.

Today the cloud is the central metaphor of the internet: a global system of great power and energy that nevertheless retains the aura of something noumenal and numnious, something almost impossible to grasp. We connect to the cloud; we work in it; we store and retrieve stuff from it; we think through it. We pay for it and only notice it when it breaks. It is something we experience all the time without really understanding what it is or how it works. It is something we are training ourselves to rely upon with only the haziest of notions about what is being entrusted, and what it is being entrusted to. Downtime aside, the first criticism of this cloud is that it is a very bad metaphor. The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you know where to look for it. The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapor and radio waves, where everything just works. It is a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions. The cloud is a new kind of industry, and a hungry one. The cloud doesn't just have a shadow; it has a footprint. Absorbed into the cloud are many of the previously weighty edifices of the civic sphere: the places where we shop, bank, socialize, borrow books, and vote. Thus obscured, they are rendered less visible and less amenable to critique, investigation, preservation and regulation. Another criticism is that this lack of understanding is deliberate. There are good reasons, from national security to corporate secrecy to many kinds of malfeasance, for obscuring what's inside the cloud. What evaporates is agency and ownership: most of your emails, photos, status updates, business documents, library and voting data, health records, credit ratings, likes, memories, experiences, personal preferences, and unspoken desires are in the cloud, on somebody else's infrastructure. There's a reason Google and Facebook like to build data centers in Ireland (low taxes) and Scandinavia (cheap energy and cooling). There's a reason global, supposedly post-colonial empires hold onto bits of disputed territory like Diego Garcia and Cyprus, and it's because the cloud touches down in these places, and their ambiguous status can be exploited. The cloud shapes itself to geographies of power and influence, and it serves to reinforce them. The cloud is a power relationship, and most people are not on top of it. These are valid criticisms, and one way of interrogating the cloud is to look where is shadow falls: to investigate the sites of data centers and undersea cables and see what they tell us about the real disposition of power at work today. We can seed the cloud, condense it, and force it to give up some of its stories. As it fades away, certain secrets may be revealed. By understanding the way the figure of the cloud is used to obscure the real operation of technology, we can start to understand the many ways in which technology itself hides its own agency - through opaque machines and inscrutable code, as well as physical distance and legal constructs. And in turn, we may learn something about the operation of power itself, which was doing this sort of thing long before it had clouds and black boxes in which to hide itself.

Scandinavia, though, really is terra incognita. The Romans didn’t bother with it. Charlemagne couldn’t care less.

Scandinavia through the Viking Age was for all intents and purposes an oral society, one in which nearly all information was encoded in mortal memory—rather than in books that could be stored—and passed from one memory to another through speech acts.

the boreal forest is the largest terrestrial ecosystem, comprising almost a third of the planet’s total forest area (more than 6 million square miles—larger than all fifty U.S. states). Fully a third of Canada is covered by boreal forest, including half of Alberta. Continuing west, over the Rocky Mountains, through British Columbia, the Yukon, Alaska, and across the Bering Strait into Russia (where it is known as the taiga), the boreal forest stretches all the way to Scandinavia and then, undeterred by the Atlantic Ocean, makes landfall on Iceland before picking up again in Newfoundland and continuing westward to complete the circle, a green wreath crowning the globe.

I liked Finland for its absence of overt rage or street crime. This wasn’t the United States, this wasn’t Spain. It was calm here, and moody, a gorgeous, elegant place with slightly off-kilter serotonin levels. A depressed country: this was an easy diagnosis to make, given the suicide statistics, which Scandinavia sometimes tries to deny, just the way Cornell University tries to allay the fears of incoming students’ parents about the famous Ithaca gorge, which, like a harvest ritual each fall, claims the life of a few more hopeless freshmen. Don’t worry, the college brochure should say. Though some students do in fact leap to their deaths, most prefer keg parties and studying. All of Scandinavia was alluring, with its ice fishing and snowcaps, but everyone knew about the legend of ingrained unhappiness among Finns, Norwegians, and Swedes: their drinking, their mournful, baying songs, their muffled darkness smack in the middle of the day.

A cooperation between Germany, Scandinavia and England could have saved Europe from the war and from this mortal danger. But England betrayed. Instead of accepting Hitler's outstretched hand for honest Germanic cooperation, instead of supporting his efforts to form a bloc against the Red Peril, England in its blind selfishness chose to continue its abject policy of divide and conquer and allied itself with Judaism and Bolshevism dark forces to strike down the new Germany in the vain hope that it would thereby consolidate and promote its own greatness.

The Germanic race, to which we ourselves belong, in prehistoric times constituted the - northernmost part of the great Nordic race whose original home was apart from Scandinavia and Northern Germany, large parts of Central and Southern Germany, the areas of Eastern Europe which today constitutes Poland, certain parts of Russia. In this primeval world, the Nordic race has lived ever since the last ice age. In these areas, close to the great glacier and under the harsh climatic and natural conditions that then prevailed in these areas, it has gradually acquired, through hard selection, the distinct racial characteristics that characterize the Nordic-Germanic race. From this center of radiation, over the course of millennia, wave after wave of Nordic-Germanic conquerors pushed eastwards, southwards and westwards, thousands of years before the last great wave which we know as the great Germanic migrations at the beginning of our known historical era.

The archaic, kindred characteristics of the guardians of the good dead remain apparent in many peripheral areas of Europe to this day. (For example, in Eastern and Southeastern Europe storm-demon spirits protect the agricultural fertility of their villages. They are thought to fight battles in the clouds with the guardians of neighboring communities).{46} In several European regions— in the Balkans, Ireland, and Scandinavia—a few attributes of the good dead have endured even into the Modern Age in a characteristic fairy mythology connected with death

The second main source of lexical variation in Old English was Scandinavia;

The socialism Nietzsche referred to was not the relatively mild version later popular in Britain, Scandinavia, and Canada, with its sometimes genuine emphasis on the improvement of working-class life, but the full-blown collectivism of Russia, China, and a host of smaller countries.

Scandinavia is a great place in which to be born … but only if you are average. If you are averagely talented, have average ambitions, average dreams, then you’ll do just fine, but if you are extraordinary, if you have big dreams, great visions, or are just a bit different, you will be crushed, if you do not emigrate first.

Scandinavia, say, or to a lesser degree any of the “welfare states” where people concern themselves with one another’s … welfare. And it works. The World Happiness Report for 2018 found Finland the most cheerful country on earth, followed by Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. America came in eighteenth, “substantially below most comparably wealthy nations.

Every day was spent ticking off sights in the guide. Churches, castles, altarpieces, rare rock formations – if they featured in the Michelin guide we visited them. Normandy, Brittany, various other obscure parts of France and Scandinavia – my siblings and I saw them all, never questioning my father’s obsessive need to tick off every entry in the guide. Every night we’d arrive at a new campsite, erect our tent, usually in the dark, eat from our tins and go to sleep. In the morning, we’d pack away the tent, get back in the car and do it all again, every day for a fortnight, every year without fail, except when my father once got sunstroke and we stayed at one campsite for two nights. It was bliss.

Scandinavia the belief that fresh air is good for you applies to people of all ages, not least infants. Daily fresh air is seen as essential for babies, ranking just behind food, sleep, and the nurturing love of a parent.

The fact that Costa Rica comes top of the HPI is both surprising and interesting. The data tells us just how well they are doing. Average life expectancy is 78.5 years; this is higher than the US, where it is only 77.9 years. Its ecological footprint is only 2.3 gHa, less than half that of the UK and a quarter that of the US, and only just over its global fair share which would be 2.1gHa. Meanwhile, largely unnoticed, Costa Ricans actually have the highest life satisfaction score globally, according to the 2008 Gallup World Poll, at 8.5 out of 10.0. What are they doing right in Costa Rica? Why are they so satisfied with life? A full answer is worth a book of its own, but here some clues: – They have one of the most developed welfare systems outside of Scandinavia, with clean water and adult literacy almost universal. – The army was abolished in 1949 and the monies freed up are spent on social programs. – There is a strong “core economy” of social networks of family, friends, and neighborhoods made possible by a sensible work/life balance and equal treatment of women. – It is a beautiful country with rich, protected, natural capital. There is clearly much we can learn from Costa Rica, and that is before we consider its environmental credentials: 99% of electricity is from renewable resources (mainly hydro); there is a carbon tax on emissions; and deforestation has been dramatically reversed in the last 20 years.

Like the other giants in its class, the Marie Maersk was built for the profitable Asia-Europe route: from Busan and Kwangyang in South Korea, then along the eastern and southern Chinese coasts, down to Malaysia, across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal to Tangier and southern Spain, then up to Scandinavia by way of the Netherlands and Germany. Then back again; the round trip takes around six months. The kaleidoscopic cargo might include iPads, smartphones, cars, bulldozers, baseball caps and T-shirts from Chinese factories; then, on the return journey, fruits, chocolates, wine, watches and whisky.

It took a Polish author to inspire this American Jew, who named his daughter for a Greek Titan before being killed by a Vietnamese mine in an effort to please his Marine father, who was once a sniper in Korea—and was undoubtedly still being pursued by the North Koreans across the wilderness of Scandinavia.

With industrial capacity destroyed in Europe—except for Scandinavia—and in Japan and crippled in the United Kingdom, the United States produced approximately 60 percent of the world output of manufactures in 1950, and its GNP was 61 percent of the total of the present (1979) OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries. This was obviously a transitory situation.

Capitalism driven by hedonism, consumerism and globalisation is generally not restrained by the principles of social justice and legislation based upon them. One of the exceptions to this rule is the state of affairs in Scandinavia, where there is no uncontrolled population growth, and where egalitarian (between men and women) democracy has succeeded in implementing policies based on a free-market economy and social legislation.

It did, in Scandinavia. When I first became prime minister 15 years ago, it was a cultural shock to many Norwegians. Today, four- year-olds ask their mommies: "but can a man be prime minister?" -Fourth World Conference on Women

A likelier explanation for the increase in population was a change in the climate. Northern Europe was perceptibly warmer around 800 A.D. than it had been in preceding centuries. The glaciers receded all over Scandinavia. There was more land that could be used for crops or pasture. The winters were shorter and milder. So significant a factor was winter in the life of northern countries that the Vikings counted time not in years, but in winters. A long cold winter would mean that the provisions put away in the fall might run out while the weather was still too harsh to replenish them by hunting or fishing. It also would mean that the weak, the old, and the young would die. Gentler winters meant that more babies would survive, more would grow up to swell the active, turbulent pool of younger sons

A large Norwegian settlement known as Indielandet began around 1850 in Portage and Waupaca counties in northcentral Wisconsin. The pioneer settlers went first to the town of Scandinavia after a stop in Winnebago County. New and older settlements retained close relations, and a sense of Norwegian American commonality existed.

The birds?’ 
‘Yes. Brent geese from Svalbard and bar-tailed godwits from the Arctic tundra. Thousands of them, loads of different species. They’ve flown from Scandinavia to spend the winter here. At night, I can hear them honking. Pink-footed geese from Iceland, barnacle geese from Norway. When I lie in bed at night, I imagine I can hear the beat of their wings. Yesterday I walked along the beach. It was clear, for once, and the sun was starting to set. I saw a murmuration of plovers. Hundreds of them, making these strange, unearthly shapes across the sky; the light caught their wings, and the whole flock shone like gold. Every day I think about filling my pockets with stones and walking into the sea. I will aim for Iceland. I will never stop. But then I see a flock of golden plovers wheeling in the sunlight and, for a few brief moments, I forget who I am and why I’m here and what I’ve lost.

The birds were starting to leave for Scandinavia and Siberia. Long V shapes trailed across the sky and, at night, flocks of bar-tailed godwits wheeled above the beach. The e icy wind, straight off the Arctic tundra, had abated slightly, and the days were growing longer. One night there was a storm, and in the morning the beach was littered with debris: eel grass torn from the beds around Holy Island, bladderwrack encrusted with barnacles, scraps of fishing net and opaque plastic bottles. The blaze roared, orange and amber and red; sparks danced in the darkening sky. In the distance, the sea pounded on the shore and the wind wheeled about her; a curlew keened, calling like a lost child.