Scandinavian Travel Quotes

I had forgotten to bring anything to read with me, so I passed the time waiting for my pizza by staring thoughtfully at the emptiness around me, sipping a glass of water and making up Scandinavian riddles – Q. How many Swedes does it take to paint a wall? A. Twenty-seven. One to do the painting and twenty-six to organize the spectators. Q. What does a Norwegian do when he wants to get high? A. He takes the filter off his cigarette. Q. What is the quickest way in Sweden of getting the riot police to your house? A. Don’t take your library book back on time. Q. There are two staples in the Swedish diet. One is the herring. What is the other? A. The herring. Q. How do you recognize a Norwegian on a Mediterranean beach? A. He’s the one in the snowshoes.

today, the Danes are the world’s leading pork butchers, slaughtering more than twenty-eight million pigs a year. The Danish pork industry accounts for around a fifth of all the world’s pork exports, half of domestic agricultural exports, and more than 5 percent of the country’s total exports. Yet the weird thing is, you can travel the length and breadth of the country and never see a single sow because they are all kept hidden from view in intensive rearing sheds.

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.

I have never lost the thrill of travel. I still crave the mental and physical jolt of being somewhere new, of descending aeroplane steps into a different climate, different faces, different languages. It’s the only thing, besides writing, that can meet and relieve my ever-simmering, ever-present restlessness. If I have been too long at home, stuck in the routine of school-runs, packed lunches, swimming lessons, laundry, tidying, I begin to pace the house in the evenings. I might start to cook something complicated very late at night. I might rearrange my collections of Scandinavian glass. I will scan the bookshelves, sighing, searching for something I haven’t yet read. I will start sorting through my clothes, deciding on impulse to take armfuls to the charity shop. I am desperate for change, endlessly seeking novelty, wherever I can find it. My husband might return from an evening out to discover that I have moved all the furniture in the living room. I am not, at times like this, easy to live with. He will raise his eyebrows as I single-handedly shove the sofa towards the opposite wall, just to see how it might look. “Maybe,” he will say, as he unlaces his shoes, “we should book a holiday.

In 2008 geneticists at the University of York discovered that mice have left genetic trails in much the same way as humans. Rodents that traveled into Orkney on Viking ships ended up leaving much of their DNA in the mouse populations on the island. Indeed, the Scandinavian mice left a pattern so clear that scientists have found they can draw an accurate map of human movements based on mouse movements alone. A more recent study tracked marauding mice of the early tenth century into Greenland from Iceland and before that from either Norway or the northern part of Britain.

Before traveling to Iceland, I made a vow to myself that there were two subjects that I would not mention: Björk and elves.

The front ramp is gradually lowered, in slow electronic increments. A couple of dozen backpackers stand, inside the lower deck’s muted light, like an army of extraterrestrials. Paros is refilling with English, German, French, Italian, Scandinavian, Australian, and South African tourists. The town remains in motion. Some come. Some go. The cycle appears endless. The entire world appears to wash up on Paros.

Though the Finns’ taciturnity may work among themselves, problems arise when they travel or have to work with foreigners. The men, in particular, can be simply too frank, too direct, sometimes to the point of rudeness. They find it especially challenging to engage in the social lubricant of small talk, something even Norwegians can manage if they put their minds to it.

Maybe because there are so few Icelanders in the world, we know next to nothing about them. We assume they are more or less Scandinavian—a gentle people who just want everyone to have the same amount of everything. They are not. They have a feral streak in them, like a horse that’s just pretending to be broken.

The Nix were shape-shifters. Sometimes they appear as beautiful women, sitting combing their long blue hair, their voices luring sailors to death on the jagged rocks. Sometimes the Nix is a man playing a violin, a wild tune that the traveller must follow at his peril. The Nix can even appear as a horse, a brook horse it’s called in Scandinavian legend, a beautiful animal, snow white or coal black, that appears in the water by a ravine or a waterfall. If you climb on its back you can never dismount and the horse will gallop away to the ends of the earth. On dark nights you can hear the horse’s hoofbeats, steady and relentless, carrying its rider to hell.

However, there is also evidence that the Slavs were influenced by Germanic peoples - including the Norse - in their funerary customs. An interesting example of this is the adoption of the obol - a coin used to pay the ferryman to cross over the river of Styx. We naturally think of this as a Greek custom, and so it was originally. But by the early Middle Ages, it was actually fairly widespread among various Germanic peoples, as well as former Roman provinces. For this reason, the East Slavs seem to have adopted the practice gradually due to Scandinavian influence. Initially it was limited to the far north - precisely in those regions were Norse travelers penetrated. Gradually, however, it became fairly widespread among the East Slavs. It was also adopted by the Moravians, around the modern-day Czechia, at an early date. Even among some Christian Russians and Ukrainians, we can still see that the concept of the obol has survived. In East Slavic folk tradition, the ferryman of the dead is often called “St. Nicholas” but the custom has persisted.

In the year 970, the Greek historian Leo Diaconus witnessed a band of far-traveling beserkers as they fought against an army of the Byzantine emperor, his employer. He says that they fought in a burning frenzy beside which ordinary battle rage paled in comparison. They roared, growled, bayed, and shrieked like animals, and in an especially eerie and uncanny way. They seemed utterly indifferent to their own well-being, as if lost to themselves. Their leader, who embodied all of these traits to an extreme degree, was thought by Leo to have literally gone insane. Leo and Byzantine forces were veterans of countless battles, so the reactions elicited by the Scandinavian's behavior in Leo and his companions strongly suggests that what they witnessed in that battle was something unique to the Scandinavians, and something which chilled Leo and the Byzantines to their core.