The Millennium Experience

Denmark consists of one peninsula and more than 400 islands, half of them inhabited. Finland and Sweden used to dispute which country was really “the land of a thousand lakes.” Finland settled it, after counting almost 190,000. An island summer in the archipelago is part of every Stockholmer’s childhood memory. The mail packets of Norway’s Hurtigruten sail north from Bergen along the fjord-indented coast and turn around at Kirkenes on the Russian border, 2,000 km (1,242) later. Iceland is so dependent on the surrounding sea that it has been known to take on the British navy to protect its fishing limits.

Water has never separated the Scandinavian nations. In the early days it was far easier to cross a stretch of water than it was to penetrate dense and trackless forests. It was their mastery of shipbuilding that enabled the Vikings to rule the waves 1,000 years ago. Their ocean-going ships could be beached, and this gave them the advantage of surprise.

Viking exploration and conquests ranged from North America to the Black Sea and from Greenland to Majorca. These voyagers developed the angular Runic alphabet, ideal for carving in stone. In Sweden alone, more than 2,000 runic stones still stand, in memory of Vikings who fell in far-away battles. The Vikings also devised a complex mythology and created literature of such realism and immediacy that even today the Icelandic sagas can be read with admiration and enjoyment.

You might think that, with so much in common, the Scandinavians would keep peace among themselves, but this was not to be. By the 11th century the passion that had inflamed the Vikings was spent, and Christianity defeated the old beliefs. The Swedes departed on a dubious crusade to conquer the Finns and annex their land. The Norwegians, having colonized Iceland, squabbled among themselves and disappeared as a nation for 500 years. By the 16th century, Scandinavia was divided between Denmark and Sweden, bound together by mutual antagonism. The two countries were at war with one another for a total of 134 years.

What happened in the distant past has acquired the status of myth and deeply influenced the Scandinavians’ self-image. Modern history has left more obvious marks. Allegiances and dependencies were reshuffled early in the 19th century as a consequence of the Napoleonic Wars, which transformed the European landscape. Sweden lost Finland, which spent the next 100 years as a czarist province. Norway declared its independence from Denmark but was thrust into a union with Sweden.

Scandinavian cultures thrived throughout these years. Artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela painted the scenes of a mythical past that Jean Sibelius fashioned into tone poems. Norway experienced a cultural renaissance, led by artists such as Edvard Grieg, Henrik Ibsen, and Edvard Munch. From Denmark came philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, writer Hans Christian Andersen, and the composer Carl Nielsen. Sweden produced the painters Anders Zorn and Carl Larsson and dramatist August Strindberg.

In the early years of this century the Norwegians finally became masters in their own house. This could not have happened without strong nationalist sentiment, and it is to the credit of both Norway and Sweden that the divorce was amicable. The Russian revolution brought civil war to Finland, followed by independence, for the first time in that nation’s history. Finland was attacked again in 1939, by Stalin’s forces, and was eventually defeated but never occupied. Denmark and Norway, attacked by Germany in 1940, were not spared that fate. After the war had ended, Iceland declared its independence from Denmark.

Scandinavians, like the British, often talk of Europe as though they were not part of it. They see themselves as different. They dream of the joie de vivre that they believe all southerners enjoy, but maintain that the moral fiber and know-how of the Scandinavians are superior to anything you find south of the border.

The English language has influenced the Scandinavians, who are not bound by a native language. Iceland was colonized from Norway, but present-day Icelandic is incomprehensible to other Scandinavians. Finnish, like Hungarian, is one of the enigmatic Finno-Ugric languages. Danish, a language rich in glottal stops, is not understood by many Swedes, and Danish TV programs have to be subtitled. Norwegian, in pronunciation and vocabulary halfway between Danish and Swedish, sometimes serves as an intra-Scandinavian mode of communication. But get a group of Scandinavians together and what are they most likely to speak? English.

Stereotypes about national characteristics abound among Scandinavians. Danes believe the saving grace of humor will take the sting out of most of life’s vicissitudes. The Finns attribute their survival to their sisu, or true grit. Icelanders are known as a nation of hard workers, singers, and drinkers, who think there is always a way for things to get fixed. The Norwegians find virtue in being, like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, sig selv nok, which means self-reliant in all things. The Swedes, the most introspective of the lot, take pride in their reliability and admit to “Royal Swedish envy” as their principal vice.

The strain of melancholy that runs through the Scandinavian character becomes pronounced in the lonely north. In Finland, the most popular dance—one in which dance halls specialize to the exclusion of all others—is the tango, precisely because it is so sad. But there’s no need to look only to Argentine imports: Virtually all Scandinavian folk music, even when rhythms are rapid and gay, is in a minor key.

Perhaps this tendency to melancholia is natural in a region where solitude abounds. In northern Scandinavia the woods close in, pine and spruce mingling with white-trunked birches, with a clearing or a field here and there. Farther north the hegemony of the forest becomes complete, challenged only by the lakes. On a clear night, from an aircraft, the moonlight is reflected in so many lakes that it seems to cut a shining path to the horizon.

But the forest is not as silent and lonely as you might think. Walk along a Scandinavian country road on an evening in early summer, and you will hear the barking of roe deer at your approach and the forlorn hooting of loons from the lakes. You will see stately moose coming out of the woods to graze in the fields. Juniper bushes cast long, eerie shadows, and on a hilltop skeletal pines are silhouetted against a still clear sky. No wonder that in ages past, popular imagination peopled these forests with sprites and trolls and giants.