NORWAY
During the early part of the ninth century they plundered Paris not less than three times. They sailed up the river Rhine and got as far as Cologne and Mayence. As for England, Saxons and Danes fought each other for the possession of that country, as in later times nations have made war upon each other for a particularly desirable territory.
About the same time that Iceland was discovered Norsemen had founded the first Russian State, of which they themselves were to be the rulers for almost seven entire centuries. Still later, a plundering expedition of two hundred boats (small boats which could be carried overland whenever necessary) had travelled from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and had caused such consternation in Constantinople that the Emperor of the eastern Roman Empire had hastened to take these wild men into his service as a special bodyguard.
Entering the Mediterranean from the west, they had established themselves in Sicily and on the coasts of Spain and Italy and Africa, and had repeatedly rendered the most valuable services to the Papacy in its wars upon the rest of the world.
What has become of all this glory of the ancient Norse nation?
All that remains to-day is a highly respectable little kingdom which catches and exports a lot of fish and engages in the carrying trade and fights bitter political quarrels about the language the people should speak—quarrels of which the world at large would never notice anything if the Norwegian authorities did not have the fatal habit of changing the names of their most important cities and railway stations about once every two or three years.
As for those cities of Norway, most of them are merely overgrown villages where everybody’s dog knows everybody else’s dog. Trondheim (formerly Nidaros) was the capital of the old Norwegian kingdom. It has an excellent harbour, and as soon as the Baltic is covered with ice Trondheim becomes the port from which a great deal of Swedish wood is shipped to the rest of the world.
The present capital, Oslo, is built near the ruins of a very old Norwegian settlement which had been burned down. It was built by the Danish King Christian IV and therefore called Christiania until the Norwegians decided to purge their language of all Danish souvenirs. Oslo is situated in the richest agricultural part of Norway at the head of the Oslofjord, which runs into the Skagerrak, the broad sound which separates Norway from Denmark, and which is really a branch of the Atlantic Ocean.
Such cities as Stavanger or Aalesund or Christiansand only come to life when the whistle of the nine o’clock steamer blows. Bergen, the old Hansa settlement which looked after the commercial needs of the entire Norwegian coast, is now connected with Oslo by means of a railway. So is Trondheim with a branch road that leads to the Baltic coast of Sweden. Further north, well above the Arctic Circle, lies Narvik, the harbour for the Swedish iron ore from Lapland. Tromso and Hammerfest smell everlastingly of fish. These names occur here because it rarely happens that one finds human beings living comfortably at latitude 70°.
AND THE GULF STREAM DID IT
ALASKA HAS 590,000 SQ. MILES OF TERRITORY AND A POPULATION OF 60,000. NORWAY, SWEDEN, AND FINLAND WITH ONLY 430,000 SQ. MILES HAVE A POPULATION OF 12,000,000
It is a strange land. It is a hard land, a land that has driven hundreds of thousands of its sons and daughters away from its shores, bidding them shift for themselves—a land that nevertheless has somehow or other managed to keep their love and loyalty. Take a boat some time if you have a chance and travel northward. Everywhere it is the same. Some godforsaken little village, clinging to a bit of grass, just enough for a single goat, and five or six houses and a few ramshackle boats and one steamer a week and people weeping because they see it again—because it is home—because it is their home—because it is part of their flesh and blood.
The International Brotherhood of Man is a noble dream.
It takes on queer aspects in Bodo or in Vardo, ten days away by steamer from nowhere.
Sweden, the other side of the mountain-range that remained after the great Arctic plateau had disappeared beneath, the waves of the Atlantic, is a very different country from Norway. People often wonder why these two nations are separate. It would mean a great saving in the cost of administration if they could live together as one happy family. On paper such an arrangement appears eminently practicable. But the geographical background of the two countries makes it difficult. For whereas Norway on account of the Gulf Stream enjoys a mild climate with lots of rain and little snow (in Bergen, they say, the horses shy whenever they meet a man without an umbrella), Sweden has a continental climate, with long, cold winters and a heavy snowfall. Whereas Norway has deep fjords that penetrate for miles into the interior, Sweden has a low coast with few natural harbours, none of which has achieved the importance of Gothenburg on the Cattegat. And whereas Norway has no raw materials of its own, Sweden is possessed of some of the most valuable ore deposits of the world. The unfortunate absence of coal still forces Sweden to export a great deal of these ores to Great Britain, Germany, and France, but during the last twenty years the taming of many important waterfalls has made Sweden increasingly independent of coal, while the forests that cover such a great part of the kingdom account for the enormously rich Swedish match trust and the far-famed Swedish paper factories.
LOOK AT A MAP OF THE ARCTIC AND THIS IS ALL YOU SEE
The Swedes have unbounded trust in the potentialities of the human intellect. Her scientists are therefore given free scope, and as a result her chemists have discovered and developed a large number of by-products which are derived from the wood industry and which otherwise would have gone to waste, such as celluloid and artificial silk. But her agriculture, although much more highly developed than that of Norway, suffers from the unfavourable climatic conditions which are the result of being situated on the cold and exposed side of that high mountain-range which divides the Scandinavian peninsula so sharply into two halves. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why the people are so fond of flowers. The winters are so very long and dark. Every Swedish home therefore tries to keep bright with flowers and evergreen shrubs.
In a great many other respects also Sweden is different from Norway. In Norway the feudal system of ancient times died out with the Black Death—that terrible plague of the late Middle Ages. In Sweden, on the other hand, the continued existence of large land-holding interests has allowed the country nobility to maintain itself up to the present time. And although the country is now being ruled by a socialist Government, Stockholm is still a city with an aristocratic background, in sharp contrast to Oslo and Copenhagen, where the utmost democratic simplicity is as rigidly maintained as courtly manners are practised in the Swedish capital.
Perhaps this development too is a direct result of Sweden’s curious geographical position. For whereas Norway faces the Atlantic, Sweden is essentially a country that looks out upon an inland sea, and its entire economic well-being, together with its history, is interwoven with that of the Baltic.
As long as Scandinavia was still a half-settled wilderness, there was little to choose between the Norsemen of the western coast and those of the east. To the outside they were all of them ‘Norsemen,’ and the famous old prayer “From the fury of the Norse, good Lord, deliver us,” was chanted without specifying what particular sort of Norsemen the humble supplicants had in mind.
But after the tenth century there was a change. Then there arose a great and bitter civil warfare between the Swedes of the north, of Svealand, whose capital was situated on the Malar lake on which the modern capital of Stockholm is situated, and the Goths of the south or Götaland. They were closely related, these two tribes, and worshipped their gods near the same shrine, the City of the Gods, which was built on the spot where the town of Upsala rises to-day, the oldest and most important university town of northern Europe. These quarrels, which lasted more than two centuries, greatly strengthened the position of the nobility while at the same time weakening that of the kings. During this period, too, Christianity had made its entrance into the Scandinavian peninsula,
and the clergy and the monasteries took the side of the nobles, until finally the Swedish monarchs became so weak that for a century and a half Sweden had to recognize the sovereignty of Denmark.
Europe had almost forgotten that Sweden existed when in the year 1520 the western world was shocked by the tale of one of the most ghastly and inexcusable murders that has disgraced the history of man. In that year King Christian II of Denmark had invited all the heads of the Swedish nobility to a great banquet—a sort of love-feast which once and for all would settle all difficulties between the King and his beloved Swedish subjects. At the end of the festivities all the guests were seized and were either beheaded or drowned. Only one man of any importance escaped—fortunately for him he was abroad at the time. That was Gustavus, the son of a certain Erik Vasa, who perished along with the rest of King Christian’s guests. On his way northward Gustavus received news of the massacre, and he returned to his native land. By starting a revolution among the ancient yeomen he finally forced the Danes to return to their own country, whereupon he himself was crowned King of Sweden.
That was the beginning of that extraordinary era of national and international adventure which not only made this small and poverty-stricken land the champion of the Protestant cause in Europe, but which turned Sweden into the last bulwark against the ever-increasing threat of a Slavic invasion. For the Russians, after centuries of oblivion, had at last gone on the war-path and had commenced that famous march to the sea which has perhaps not yet come to an end.
Sweden apparently was the only country which recognized the menace. During two whole centuries all her energies were concentrated upon one single purpose—to keep Russia within bounds and away from the Baltic. In the end, of course, Sweden was bound to lose. The struggle completely exhausted her exchequer, and it merely retarded the progress of the Russian steam-roller by a few decades. When it was over, Sweden, which had owned the greater part of the Baltic Sea coast, which had ruled Finland and Ingermanland (where Leningrad is to-day), Esthonia, Livland, and Pomerania, had been reduced to a kingdom of the second rank, with an area of 173,000 square miles (nearly twice Great Britain) and a population slightly exceeding 6,000,000.
Half of this territory is still covered with forests, which in turn supply the timber needs of almost one half of the European continent. These trees are cut down in the winter and allowed to lie until after the beginning of spring. They are then dragged over the snow to the nearest river and are dumped into the gorge. When summer comes and the ice of the inland mountains begins to thaw, the rivers, turned into torrents, pick up the logs and carry them down into the valleys.
The same river which has thus far acted as a railway now becomes the source of power for the saw-mills, which collect the logs and turn them into anything desired, from a match-stick to a four-inch plank. By this time the Baltic has become free from ice, vessels can once more reach the different parts of the western coast, and the finished wood products, which thus far have cost very little, except for the wages of the lumbermen and the mill-hands, are now entrusted to the sailing-ships and steamships, which carry them to English and other foreign ports.
These vessels serve a twofold purpose. They would be obliged to return in ballast unless they could pick up some sort of return cargo. Often they are unable to charge much for these return cargoes, and as a result Sweden gets most of its imports at a very reasonable rate.
The same system is followed in handling the iron ore which is of such excellent quality that it is in high demand even in countries which have ore deposits of their own. As the country is nowhere wider than 250 miles, it is always comparatively easy to reach the coast. In northern Sweden, in Lapland near Kiruna, and Gällivara there are immense deposits of iron which Nature for some mysterious reason has planked down there right on the surface of the earth in the form of a couple of low mountains. In the summer the ore is taken to Lulea on the Gulf of Bothnia (the northern part of the Baltic) and in the winter, when Lulea is frozen fast, to Narvik in Norway, which, due to the North Atlantic Drift, remains open all the year round.
Not far from these iron deposits lies one of Sweden’s highest mountains, Kebnekaise (almost 7000 feet high), and there also stands one of the most important power houses of Europe. It is situated well within the Polar Circle, but since electricity seems to be indifferent about geographical latitudes, this station is able to run both the railways and the machinery of the surface mines at a very small cost.
The southern part of Sweden, which got a little of that soil scraped off by the glaciers of the north, is of course the most fertile part of the entire Scandinavian peninsula and therefore the most densely populated. It has a great many lakes. As a matter of fact, Sweden, next to Finland, is the ‘lakiest’ country in the world; 14,000 square miles of it are covered with water. By connecting these lakes with canals, the Swedes have provided that whole part of their country with cheap means of communication, which greatly benefits not only the industrial centres like Norrköping but also the harbours, of which Gothenburg and Malmö are the most important.
There are countries in which Man has submitted to the dictates of Nature until he has become her abject slave, and there are countries where Man has destroyed Nature so completely that he has lost all touch with that great living mother who for ever must remain the beginning and the end of all things. And finally there are those where Man and Nature have learned to understand and appreciate each other and have agreed to compromise for their mutual benefit. If you want an example of the last named, go north, young man, and visit the three Scandinavian nations.
Chapter XX
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THE NETHERLANDS, THE SWAMP ON THE BANKS OF THE NORTH SEA THAT BECAME AN EMPIRE
The word ‘Netherlands,’ which is only used on very official occasions, means exactly what it implies, a combination of ‘low’ localities situated from two to sixteen feet below the level of the sea. A single good flood of prehistoric dimensions, and Amsterdam and Rotterdam and all the most important cities would disappear from the face of the earth.
But this apparent natural weakness of the country has also been the source of its greatest strength. For among these marshes along the banks of the North Sea it was not sufficient for Man to take hold of the country. Ere he could do that, he was obliged to create it, and in that uneven conflict between human ingenuity and the relentless forces of Nature, the Dutch people were triumphant. It taught them to be hard and watchful. In the sort of world in which we happen to live those qualities are not without merit.
When the Romans visited this distant and lonely part of Europe (which they did about fifty years before the beginning of our era), the entire region consisted of bogs and marshes, protected against the ravages of the North Sea by that slender row of sand dunes which stretched all the way from Belgium to Denmark. These dunes were interrupted at irregular intervals by a large number of rivers and rivulets. Most important among the rivers were the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheldt. Left entirely to their own devices and not hindered by any dikes, these three rivers did exactly what they pleased, and every spring they altered their course and created islands where no islands had been before, and swept away vast tracts of land that had seemed as solid as the isle of Jersey. I am not exaggerating. Upon one memorable occasion in the thirteenth century, seventy villages and almost a hundred thousand people disappeared in the course of a single night.
Compared to their Flemish neighbours who lived on solid ground, these early Hollanders lived a very miserable existence; but a mysterious change, either in the temperature of the water or the salt percentage of the Baltic, gave them their chance. One day, absolutely unexpectedly, the fish known as the herring moved from the Baltic into the North Sea. In an age when all the people of Europe were obliged to eat fish on Fridays and when fish as a staple diet of the human race was of much greater importance than it is to-day, this meant absolute ruin to a large number of Baltic cities and the sudden rise of a corresponding number of Dutch towns, whic
h now began to supply southern Europe with that dried fish which then took the place of our tinned foods of to-day. Out of the herring fisheries came the grain trade, and out of the grain trade grew the commerce with the spice islands of India. There was nothing extraordinary in this. It was the normal development of a commercial State.
But when fate, regardless of all practical considerations, incorporated the Low Countries into the empire of the Habsburgs and decreed that a nation of lusty peasants and fishermen, without any of the graces of life, but tough-fisted and very practical-minded, should be administered by sour officials trained at the Court of an absolute monarch who dwelt somewhere in dignified loneliness among the bleak hills of his windswept Spanish castle-land, then there was bound to be trouble. That trouble expressed itself in a struggle for liberty which lasted eighty years and which ended with a complete victory for the inhabitants of the Low Countries.
The Home of Mankind Page 17