On "The Manila Rope" by Veijo Meri ***

This short humorous war novel reminded me of Hasek's The Good Soldier Švejk, particularly in how its obvious attempts at humor didn't really translate to my own intellect. Meri's world is rather slapstick, which doesn't tend to be the kind of comedy I like.

This isn't to say that I began the novel thinking it would be funny. It start with a soldier named Joose finding a rope in the road. He decides to keep it, but because German overseers will likely think he stole it, he decides that he needs to conceal it during his trip home, his temporal leave. So far, the piece seems to be about Finn poverty and German overbearingness. There are tragic, realistic, sad tones.

Joose conceals the rope by having it wrapped around his torso. As such, he appears a very portly man. The rope, however, is too tight, and once Joose boards his train home, he finds himself passing out frequently; others think he is drunk.

The train itself becomes an avenue for storytelling, and various short humorous tales about the arm are told between soldiers as they proceed across the country, Joose growing sicker all along the way.

The humor is a kind of gallows humor, which is most evident in the incidents of trains visiting a particular station. An officer who fails to board on time runs after the train; failing to catch it, he eventually steals a hand trolley and wheels after the train only to be hit by another train down the tracks. He breaks several limbs and is demoted. Later, Joose's train enters the station, and seemingly without a commanding officer, the station master is unable to order the troops back onto the departing train; as a result, the train simply sits in the station, till an angry officer finally shows up to ask why the train still hasn't left.

This also happens to be the station where Joose's home is, so here he disembarks, walking "drunkenly" home, where his wife mistakes him for being sick--very sick. Then she realizes that the lesions around his midsection aren't lesion but a rope, and she cuts it off down the middle. Lot of good sneaking the rope has done. Joose seems to have gotten some bad gangrenely growths in the meantime, so sick, he sits at home listening to visitors tell yet more funny war stories of a gory nature.

On "People in the Summer Night" by F. E. Sillanpaa ****

When I was describing this book to a friend last night, he said it sounded like an Ingmar Bergman film. And I suppose, in its focus on everyday life, it is. And were I to focus on the major theme of this work, it would seem hopelessly cliche, because essentially the book is about the cycle of life and death. Ho hum. Let's go read something with a little more pizzazz.

But what makes this work more than its rather perfunctory theme is its execution. And really, isn't that the case with all works of fiction? There really aren't more than seven major themes available, one professor of mine once noted. Unfortunately, I've forgotten what those themes were, but I can totally understand the argument. Human life, even amid constant technological change, still centers around a stable and limited number of concerns.

Sillanpaa chooses to tell his story over the nights surrounding a weekend, mostly Saturday and Sunday. He focuses not on a single character but on a town. I was in some ways reminded of Susan Orlean's Saturday Night early on. During the first thirty pages, all Sillanpaa seems to do is introduce character after character and what they're doing. No plot seems evident. If he weren't such an amazing descriptivist, one would quickly put down the book. So many people thrown at a reader at once means any one of them is hard to follow or to feel much for.

But then, the characters start to settle out, and so does the story. If the first and last thirty pages are each focused on mundane descriptions, the middle one hundred and packed with plot. A young man arrives from out of town to court a young lady, and together with another couple, they rush off to a party. A man's pregnant wife goes to check on a sick cow and ends up in labor, the midwife not to be had and the doctor needing to be fetched. The problem is that that doctor is off on another visit: elsewhere in town one man has stabbed another to death and struggles in vain to bring the man to life. That dead man's wife, meanwhile, dallies with other men in her house, serving them beer and looking out for the husband who will fail to return.

The events don't really come to an end so much as they become subsumed in the general ebb and flow of life itself. These intense moments of love, birth, death, Sillanpaa seems to be saying, fade into the general mundanity of existence.

On "The Kalevala" by Elias Lonnrot ****

Based loosely on ancient epics and folktales, this Finnish epic poem runs from a creation of sorts to a Christ child of sorts, with all its strange tales in between. It is, so I read in the introduction, really the beginning of Finnish literature, insofar as it was the great epic written at a time when Finland was really coming to its own, pressing for its own national identity. One certainly couldn't do much better--it's a marvelous work. The particular translation I read as well, by Keith Bosley, is a lot of fun. Bosley notes that Finnish poetry is heavily alliterative, more even than Old English poetry. Placing rhyme or metric measures onto the work in translation would be to do a disservice to it, as would be trying to mimic completely  the Finnish poetic devices. Instead, he settles on a purely syllabic verse (nine syllables--sometimes five or seven to a line); it seems to work well, especially as lines often repeat, as they would in a rhyming kids' tale (think, for example, of the repetition and refrains in "The Three Little Pigs").

Summing up The Kalevala is difficult, and while I'll try here mostly so that I can one day return to this write-up to refresh my memory, it'll be a sorry recounting. The beauty of the piece is really in the language mixed in with the plot itself, which at times as a bit fuzzy to me.

We start with a kind of creation of sorts, from which springs the old man Vainamoinen. I say "old man," because by the time he gets around to doing anything in the narrative, which is fairly quickly, he is already old in the eyes of others. One of his first acts is to try to find a wife. Unfortunately, in what will become a constant theme for him, the woman, whose father he convinces let him have her, rejects him because he is to old. She chooses, rather, to jump into the sea and kill herself. Vainamoinen builds a boat and goes to sea, and while at sea, finds a mermaid, who turns out to be this woman reincarnated, but he doesn't get the mermaid either.

Enter now the blacksmith Ilmarinen, who goes north to find a woman of his own. After settling in the north country, he goes about his job of forging metal into tools for the people around--and, it seems, of creating the sky. He doesn't get his lady until sometime later, however, when Vainamoinen comes calling. The latter is the better match, the family feels, as Vainamoinen is well off, but the young lady is none to smitten of the idea of being paired with an old man, and so she chooses to marry Ilmarinen.

One more would-be lover yet enters the tale, Lemminkainen. He marries a lady, promising never to go to war if she never runs off to go visiting. The promises, however, are broken on both sides, and Lemminkainen goes off again to find another lady. In the process of trying to woo a lady of the north, he manages to get killed. His mother goes searching for him and, finding him, reconstructs him. He's warned to be more careful, but again he wanders off, this time to Ilmarinen's wedding, where he manages to kill the brother of Ilmarinen's bride. More revenge follows, so Lemminkainen flees his home and wanders a far island for a while, sleeping with various women. When he returns home, finally, after a few years, he finds his home burned.

Ilmarinen, meanwhile, loses his wife to murder. And now the three of them, all sorrowful, Vainamoinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkainen wander toward the northlands to seek a certain vengeance of their own. There, they steal something called the Sampo. They do it by use of a pike's comb--the bones of a great fish that Vainamoinen manages to catch. The music puts the people asleep. But Lemminkainen's desire to sing--Vainamoinen, known for his musical abilities, refuses--wakes a bird who wakes the people of the north, who then come chasing after the three thieves. In vengeance, the hag, the northern queen, steals the sun and moon, which the three then go in search of. Ilmarinen tries to forge a new moon and sun, then tools to help Vainamoinen free them, but the hag of the north senses her eventual likely loss and frees them of her own accord.

The story of these men ends there and turns toward the birth of a young child to a virgin, who has eaten a berry that has made her pregnant. Vainamoinen's days are noted as being numbered. The narrator bard exhorts others to join his song and write yet other epics, setting up the Finns for yet more literature.

Alternate translations can be found here, here, here, and here.

On "The Shadow Girls" by Henning Mankell ***

I came to Mankell looking for contemporary Swedish crime fiction as part of my ongoing Scandinavian reading list, opting for Mankell's work because I figured it less likely to be recalled in the middle of my reading than Steig Larsen's. The Shadow Girls, I suppose, is crime fiction of a sort; the girls are illegal immigrants, and the book is about a man who tries to give them voice. There is no illegality beyond their national/border status and a bit of pick-pocketing, which is mostly made light of. There are no real thrills, and the mystery to be answered is mostly, Who are these women?

I found myself most drawn to the main character and his life. Joseph Humlin is a poet. How a poet can make enough to live off of writing books would be a very good question in the United States, but I would assume that in Sweden, Humlin is likely the recipient of various generous government grants meant to keep Swedish literature and arts alive, since any writer or artist would have a very limited national audience. Nevertheless, Humlin's publisher is not immune to wanting sales, and sales these days come from crime novels, so that is what the publisher wants Humlin to write.

Humlin won't have it. Sure, his poetry books barely clear one thousand copies, but he's not going to write what every other person in Sweden seems to be putting together, including his stock broker and his mom. Instead, he decides to focus on illegal immigrants, to tell their story, an idea that comes to him one day when he meets a certain woman from Africa named Tea-Bag (or Florence).

What follows is an account of Humlin's attempt to teach these immigrants how to write, how to find their own voices, while Humlin struggles to find his own peace. He's lost most of his money on the stock market; his overbearing girlfriend wants to have a kid; he's not sure he's really a good writer.

The characters surrounding Humlin's everyday life are fascinating and fun. I wish I could have felt the same about the immigrant women. The women are in the shadows, which means that they often change identities. They live on the edge, trying to avoid being caught by police--or by anyone who might transport them back to the world from which they come. Where that world is is slowly shared with us . . . sort of. That they so often change stories and seem so enigmatic as to be almost incomprehensible means that I never felt much kinship with them, and their stories, as they unfolded, didn't much hold me as enthralled as they hold Humlin (or indeed Mankell).

On "Barabbas" by Par Lagerkvist ****

Another novel focused on religion from one of Sweden's great writers, Barabbas tells the hypothetical story of what happened to the thief Barabbas after he was set free in exchange for Jesus Christ. One could look at the biblical account as being a microscale metaphor for the larger concept that Christ gave his life for all. Barabbas the thief lives on because Christ died in his stead. I can't help but think that Lagerkvist is playing off this idea as he tells of the follow-up events.

The difference is that Lagerkvist is writing in the twentieth century when high thinkers no longer believe that such an event could have occurred. So now we have all the miraculous events of the Bible brought down to the physical sphere. Barabbas witnesses one of the miracles: the darkness after Christ dies. And he get first-person testimony of a couple of others: one who has seen Christ risen and one who was dead and now lives. The darkness, Barabbas comes to question the reality of; he had lived so long in dungeons and so many others didn't notice the darkness that he wonders if the state of the sky was merely an illusion of the mind (though later others testify of seeing the darkness). The first-person testimonies are told, but how, without witnessing such events himself, can he believe?

It is not for want of belief that Barabbas doesn't manage to come to belief. At some point, after spending some time among Christians and witnessing the martyrdom of one (Barabbas--always one to act in this world rather than to hope for the "next"--kills the man who casts the first stone and later helps burn Rome, when he believes that Christ has returned to destroy the city), this Barabbas ends up, late in life, a slave in the copper mines, where the man chained to him proves to be a Christian. When this Christian finds out that Barabbas was in Jerusalem when Christ died, he is astounded--especially when Barabbas adds to said account by claiming to see the very resurrection of Christ (contributing to the doubts we might have regarding the first-person testimonies Barabbas has heard from others). The man's Christianity eventually leads them out of the copper mines into the fields as slaves--an unheard-of blessing--but also it leads eventually to the Christian man's demise. For one day, it is found that the man will not worship Caesar, only Christ. Barabbas who was saved from the mines by the man's testimony of Jesus to their superior now betrays his friend; Barabbas denies Christ when the man is taken away for declaring Christ. Asked by the master, "Are you a believer?" Barabbas's answer is "No, but I want to believe." He wants--but he cannot.

And in this is the crux of the problem for Barabbas, a man who wanders the earth wanting desperately to believe in something greater than himself, wanting to believe in God, but who ultimately is unable to come to have such understanding or faith. Barabbas's fate is that, I would venture to guess Lagerkvist is saying, of modern man.

Others dies for Christ; Barabbas can only die for death itself.

On "The Dance of Death" by August Stringberg **

Here's Strindberg's extremely negative take on life and marriage. For him, it seems, marriage is full of the most intense of hates and the most intense of loves--but the play focuses almost entirely on the hate. Why stay together, if there is so much hate? Because, it seems, the characters fear worse being alone.

The play revolves around an army captain and his wife, Alice. The captain, in the first half of the play, is growing sick. A friend named Curt comes to visit. It turns out that the captain has in times past fathered Curt's children and had a relationship with Curt's wife. Alice is not allowed to talk on the phone--the captain has installed a telegraph machine, believing she won't understand it. Alice and Curt begin an affair, once the captain notes some particularly horrible things he's done or doing to both of them. Turns out the captain is lying, and then Curt regrets his fling; Alice, however, claims that the captain is lying about lying. In the end, once Curt goes off, the captain and Alice sort of reconcile.

Part two involves the captain and Alice's daughter Judith and Curt's son Allan. The latter has a crush on Judith, who plays the constant tease. Her interest, however, is in men who have higher positions in the army, one of whom the captain is to set her up with. The captain warns Curt of an impending financial disaster; Curt ignores the warning, knowing that were he to heed it, he'd be ruined. He is ruined anyway. More horrible stuff ensues until finally the captain dies, and Curt and Alice look back on his life--the life this man they've hated--with fondness (they once loved him after all). I'm okay with cynicism, but this one was even too cynical for me.

On "The Miracles of Antichrist" by Selma Lagerlof *****

Something I enjoy about many pre-1945 novels is the kind of explicitly philosophical bent that they take. Of course, contemporary novels don't necessarily eschew philosophical ideas. Rather, those ideas don't seem to me to be as on the surface either because I, as a contemporary, am too close to the material to see what the author is doing within a historical perspective or because contemporary novels, bound within the morass that is postmodernism, are a-philosophical (there is no discussion of belief, morality, etc., because such things do not exist--there is only, ultimately, the personal).

Lagerlof is of an earlier era. In Miracles she explores the contours of belief and how belief in and of itself shapes our world. The world, for Lagerlof, is still split between two camps, the Christian and the anti-Christian, the spiritually focused and the earthly focused. And what we believe--which one we believe in--ultimately colors our perception of that world. Is a miracle a miracle or merely happenstance that we correlate as miracle? And even if it is a miracle, what does that miracle mean?

To bring this story to bear, Lagerlof uses what really to me felt like a narrative from the fantastic realist school of writing, yet which predates those Latin American geniuses by half a decade or more. The tale is that of a statue--a Christchild statue that sits in a cathedral and does miracles for those who pray to it. One English woman, so swept up by the beauty of the statue, steals it and replaces it with a cheap replica, the crown of which reads, "My kingdom is only of this world." (The statue itself miraculously returns to the cathedral on its own and deposes the fake, but the fake lingers on in the possession of various collectors. Much, in the book, counterposes the mythic era of the distant past with our own tawdry one, as if miracles are best explained in the distant past.)

Step in many decades later, and that fake statue has now somehow made its way into yet another cathedral. It arrives with the tolling of bells that no one has pulled. Are the bells a miracle, a sign for Donna Micaela as she believes even though everyone else can hear them? Or are they in fact a warning about what is to unfold?

The story is set around the actions of Gaetano, a young man who eventually converts to socialism--to working for the good of the poor people of the world--and of Micaela, a believer who falls in love with Gaetano but who sees Gaetano's lack of faith as a great evil. One night, after Gaetano is sent to prison for his socialist activity, Micaela receives a vision that she believes is key to gaining Geatano's release, as well as restoring his faith in God. She must build a railroad to the town. The railroad will bring riches to the town's poor people. Each time something in her plan fails, she returns to the statue, prays, and seemingly miraculously the trouble is lifted and the next stage in building the rail is able to go forward. Soon the townspeople themselves begin to believe, and the Christchild garners a huge following.

Perhaps one of the best examples of this focus on belief comes in the character of the man with the evil eye. He is a man around which bad luck seems to congregate. People come to believe he has an evil eye, and eventually, despite his own best thinking, he comes to believe such also and becomes a hermit. Micaela, knowing the man's railroad skills, seeks him out, and though evil seems to come with his appearance, when the two step before the Christchild, all evil is lifted. Or is it merely all perception of evil, for the evil-eyed man himself claims that his evil eye is merely superstition. In the end, it doesn't matter. Either way, belief is what makes the man evil, and belief in the Christchild's healing power is what makes the man good.

But what is the antichrist, if this Christchild can change so much in the world? In fact, we learn, after the railway is built, that not much really does change. It is the world outside that causes things to continue on as before, those who don't believe in the Christchild, those of the town come to believe. But when the real identity of the Christchild is exposed as being that of the fake, all faith is spurned. If these were not miracles performed by the Christchild, what were they?

Antichrist looks like the Christ, Lagerlof notes. They both perform miracles. But antichrist, like the socialists, concerns himself with the things of this world, while Christ focuses on the things of the next world. Antichrist is a replica of Christ--one concerned only with physical well-being. Is the Church better off pointing people to the true Christ and spurning movements like that of socialism, or is it better to embrace the concern for the physical well-being of people and use that to point toward the greater spiritual well-being that even antichrist must bow to?

On "The Journey Home" by Olaf Olafsson ***

Like Halldor Laxness's Atom Station, this book revolves around a lot of the fallout from World War II as it involved Iceland; only here the focus is even more personal. The narrator is a woman on her way home--though not for the first time. It's a testament to Olafsson's skill that he was able to weave several plotlines involving the same characters but in different eras together so seamlessly.

I say "seamlessly," but the book was definitely easier to read in long sittings than it was to read in shorter ones. Because each section might pick up in a different time period, and because various plots involve journeys back to Iceland, I did have difficulty sometimes, when I had been away from the book for a day or so, figuring out what was going on, where I was, which plotline I was following.

In standard order, the plot goes something like this: the narrator is an Icelandic woman whose parents want her to get a good business education. Instead, she takes up cooking as a side job and falls in love with it. This leads her eventually to, against her parents wishes, move to Britain, where she learns more about being a chef and has a job. There, she falls for a young Jewish man whose parents still reside in Germany during the lead-up to World War II. The letters from his mom become more ominous (that is, vaguer), so he returns to Germany to check in on them--and, of course, never returns.

Meanwhile, the narrator's parents (especially her mom) are having conniptions about her living with a man out-of-wedlock. When she more or less knows that her beau Jakob is not coming back, she packs up to return to Iceland for a visit. There, she gets a job as a private chef for a housebound woman and her family. There also, that family's son returns from Germany and, one night, essentially rapes the narrator. She becomes pregnant, and she returns to her family (by now her mother is recently dead), and her dad takes care of her and gets a family to adopt the baby the narrator will have. Meanwhile, a friend back in England, Anthony, has some ideas about turning his family inheritance--a big, old house--into a bed and breakfast and persuades the narrator to move back to be the cook and half-proprietor. They live together there for decades, serving others, until the baby that she had is graduating from school, which necessitates a visit to Iceland to see him as an adult, though she's not known him since his adoptive parents came into his life.

Told in straightforward fashion, the tale, I see here, is not as engaging as it is in its weaving of multiple time periods. What's also missing is this summary is Olafsson's pretty firm handle on the central character. Oddly, she's not someone I particularly liked. She seems very sure of herself, very stubborn, and very snobbish; others around her make all kind of mistakes, but she is always in the right. She reminded me a bit of Olive Kitteridge, though perhaps not quite as annoying or as interesting.

On "The Atom Station" by Halldor Laxness **

Set in a time shortly after World War II when Iceland was debating allowing NATO to place nuclear defense materials on its soil, Laxness's novel is mostly about a seemingly naive country girl from the north part of the country coming of age in the South. Politics, though, is a loud backdrop. The people don't want the bombs. The politicians, however, are working on a way to make the deal happen.

Meanwhile, the girl comes south to work as a nanny and to take harmonium lessons. The mistress in charge of her wants to make sure that the girl does not get involved with the communists, whose influence the woman sees as being pervasive among the young in the city. Such warnings prove to have the opposite effect, as the girl takes an immediate interest in going to a cell meeting. That said, she remains mostly politically uninvolved throughout the first portion of the novel.

Her real interest is the club that forges around her harmonium teacher, which features several men and ladies who like to discuss art, culture, and occasionally politics. One of these men accompanies the girl home one evening, and having lost her key, she ends up spending the night at his place--and losing her virginity in the process.

Meanwhile, the children she cares for are growing up as well. The mom runs off to America. The dad, a politician himself, takes an interest in the nanny. The children drink to excess, party, sleep around.

Somewhere in the book's center both the girl and one her charges end up pregnant. The charge gets an abortion at the urging of her father. The girl, however, returns north to have her child, Gudrun. There, the dad, a policeman, comes calling, now in the money.

The girl grows restless and returns to the south to the father who she was a nanny for (and who has fallen in love with her, to the point that he works on legislation to her liking), to her organ instructor, to her club, and finally to the father of her child, who she finally decides is worthy of her and her daughter (once his riches prove less than real and he is carted off to prison). She wants to make something of herself, to be a woman who is not simply a slave or a harlot. But what is there to be made into, when all the world is likely to blow up and start over again?

On "The Sagas of the Icelanders" ***

This anthology provides a taste of what Icelandic peoples were writing in the Middle Ages. Most of the sagas here were written down between 1200 and 1400, with the actual tales taking place around 900 to 1100, as Iceland moved from being heathen to Christian. This puts an interesting spin on many of the stories, as the authors sometimes find a need to put a good word in for Christianity, yet they do so largely without saying too much negative about the former ways: those before Christianity were heroes living large. Interestingly, their often murderous actions don't seem all that different after their conversion. Still, I can see why the Icelandics were viewed as perhaps the greatest poets of the era among the Scandinavian peoples. For such a small population, they put together a remarkably interesting body of work.

An interesting trait of all of the sagas is how they weave in history and genealogy. This weaving makes them seem like actual histories, while in fact, so the introduction notes, most of them were to a large extent fiction.

The longest of the sagas in the book is Egil's Saga. It recounts the heroic life of Egil Skallagrimson, but really, the tale starts several generations earlier, with a family in Norway and a man who remarries in old age. By this young wife, he has two children who, upon his death, are disinherited by the family of the first wife. This sets up much of the violence that follows--and the family's move to Iceland. On the death of the holder of the father's land, a man named Thorolf takes over, but the disinherited portion of the family is not given a portion of the land. Two members of this family take positions in the king's court thereafter and spread vicious rumors about Thorolf. Though loyal to the king to the nth degree (paying great amounts of tribute on various raids that he goes on), Thorolf falls into disfavor. It is believed that Thorolf is keeping back riches for himself and is plotting to become king of the northlands of Norway. Eventually, the king invades Thorolf's land and kills the man. His relatives take vengeance, including Skallagrim, and after this, they banish themselves to Iceland for safety. Finally, Egil enters the story, as a child. His father marries back into the Norwegian line, but his descendents are denied inheritance of the land, and Egil reaps revenge. Various viking raids are recounted. And finally, Egil grows old and settles down to full-time life in Iceland, where in one of his last acts he banishes another family who tries to steal his son's land. The Norwegian family disputes that largely escaped Iceland now come to rest in the new country.

The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal focuses more on a community (i.e., a family or group thereof) than any one person. As such, I found it a bit difficult to follow insofar as there was no center around which to focus my interest. Some individual chapters were engaging. Of the most pleasing were the tales of Ingimund and his sons Thorstein and Jokul (causing much confusion here, many relatives bear the same name). Ingimund lives in Norway and has no interest in moving to Iceland, but a seer prophesies that he will, and eventually, he lets destiny persuade him act accordingly. Once there, he builds a notable homestead and later in the narrative, in kindness, takes in a man no neighbors want living with them. This man one day kills Ingimund when he casts a spear at him, others having previously bothered the man about fishing in a certain river. Ingimund returns home, half a spear still in him, and dies. His sons Thorstein and Jokul decide to exact revenge. Thorstein throughout is the reasoned one, Jokul the hothead. Luckily, the brothers get to the man before his mother, a witch, can cast a spell on them--the brothers kill both. Despite such violence, by and large, Thorstein's more reasoned way of living generally wins out, and the family has peace. (In one interesting episode, a haughty man nearly bumps Thorstein into a fire at a festival Thorstein himself hosts. Jokul knocks the man down. For the insult, the men decide to duel. Thorstein, in an effort to put off the duel, in a manner characteristic of his general generosity, actually places himself under the man's onerous conditions for peace, but when the man insults the family in the process, Thorstein's proffered peace is rescinded. Weather keeps the duel from occurring, and later, when the man and his cohorts attempt to exact more ruin, Thorstein and Jokul gather more men and, with mere threats, send the ruffians packing.) Overall, this saga seemed more concerned with families finding peaceful means to live together than with heroic accounts of battles and adventures.

Like the other long sagas, The Saga of the People of Laxardal involves several generations of a family, but unlike those others, it seems to have a more-unifying feature to keep all the parts working together. That feature involves, fairly early on, a prophecy that is made to a young woman in the tale: Gudrun. And unlike the other tales, the women, especially Gudrun, have a a prominent role here. Gudrun is told that she will marry four men and what the features of each man will be and how they will die. The saga then brings each of those to pass, as she marries a not-so-good man, a rich man, and man of great fame, and so on. But she also has much to do with bringing about the events that happen in her life and in the life of the community. Also of note in the story is Olaf. the son of a woman of noble birth--an Irish queen who was sold into slavery. His children, notably two sons, along with a foster child would divide an inheritance. The foster child would prove to be of some trouble, as he would be the object of jealousy among the various heirs. As long as Olaf is alive, he keeps the peace in the community, but his death brings about a constant striving that happens thereafter. And this is where Gudrun and other women come in. For the fights between the men are often not simply male one-upsmanship. They are inspired by--even pushed upon the men--by the women, who will not stand by to allow their husbands, their children, their heirs to be dishonored. Revenge is often sought at the bequest of the women in the story, rather than initially that of the men. This is my favorite of the longer sagas in the book.

The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey's Godi is a shorter saga centered around one event and as such memorable reading. Essentially, it tells the tale of a man who vows to kill anyone who rides a certain horse of his that he has dedicated to a god. (It reminds me a bit of a similar incident in the book of Judges, wherein a man promises to sacrifice the first thing that exits his house upon his return from battle if he wins: that thing turns out to be his daughter.) The man ends up regretting his vow, but nonetheless he kills the man who rides the horse in an effort to salvage the owner's sheep. Here, the story becomes the familiar one of revenge by feuding families, as the family of the man killed refuses a very generous offer to pay for the death, instead taking the killer to court, and then, instead of that, eventually killing many of the killer's servants and forcing the killer from his land. Time passes, the killer becomes richer in a new land and returns to take his own revenge and retrieve his land.

The Saga of the Confederates is largely a legal drama, with various peoples taking each other to court rather than fighting things out. The hook here, however, is that the court is hardly a place of justice. Odd is a self-made man who ventures off to travel, leaving his farm and his job as the overseer of his community under the management of his friend Ospak. On Odd's return, Ospak does not relinquish his management role until Odd nearly forces him into it, which leads to some bitterness. Ospak handles things by attempting to kill Odd, but instead kills Odd's brother. They go to court to resolve the situation. However, a couple of people at court are jealous of Odd's success, so they dismiss Odd's suit against Ospak on technical grounds (not unlike, it seems, the way our own American system often works). Odd's father steps in and bribes a couple of judges and Ospak ends up getting his just punishment anyway, to the disgust of the two men who tried to dismiss Odd's suit. These two men learn of the bribe and take Odd to court themselves for bribery. Once again, Odd's father bribes a couple of judges, and Odd comes out ahead. Father and son, who early on do not get along well, are reconciled. This piece reads more like a short story than most of the sagas, focused around a distinct set of events and characters as it is. The author obviously didn't think much of Iceland's legal system in the early Middle Ages.

Gisli Sursson's Saga is a tale of revenge that I could see being easily adapted into a movie (albeit a violent one). It starts off rather predictably, with an account of the various families and with a killing. In other words, it's not unlike the other sagas. However, not too far into it, the story settles on Gisli as the main protagonist, a man who avenges the killing at the start of the tale and who then suffers the consequences. The rest of the saga, which is the majority, recounts Gisli's life in hiding, as the relatives of the dead man continually seek him out. In the end, Gisli has to make one final heroic stand, which cannot be said for most of the relatives, who remain more prone to hire bounty killers--most of whom meet death--to do their deeds than to risk their life to avenge the dead man with their own hands.

The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue is the tale of a love triangle that ends in tragedy (and starts, as many sagas do, with a prophecy that comes true). The Saga of Ref the Sly made for lively reading, but by the time that I got to it, it hardly seemed that unique (Ref kills a man in revenge, sails from Iceland off to Greenland for safety, is slandered as gay, kills some men in revenge, is sought out, but ducks away from his pursuers, killing a few in the process, repeat revenge plot in Norway, live to old age and die).

The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red's Saga are mostly nonfiction and are interesting as primary documents regarding the Viking exploration of the New World. They don't have quite the rich uniform quality of narrative that some of the better sagas have, however.

The book closes with several tales. I found these interesting, but as long as the sagas sometimes could be, I actually enjoyed those more. The tales seemed like short stories without a lot of character development; the sagas seemed somehow richer.

Introductions and appendixes frame the sagas and tales and provide some very useful background information.

On "The Bridal Wreath" by Sigrid Undset *****

The first volume in the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, The Bridal Wreath essentially tells of Kristin's three would-be loves. But the novel is much more than that. It is a study of medieval Norway, at a time when Christianity has only recently taken hold, when pagans still roam some areas of the country, when the Norwegians still think of themselves as Danes. And it is a story of love versus duty and faith.

Kristin grows up the daughter to two very religious parents, the first surviving offspring, after four brothers have died early on in their lives. She grows up next to a young boy named Arne, a child from a not-so-well-to-do family. Her own family is of vaguely noble birth, and her father is the kind of hard worker that good fortune comes to the family. Kristin is not a match for her friend Arne.

Instead, she is matched by her father with a kind and dutiful man named Simon. At first, she is enthused by this betrothal. But some displeasure arises when Arne expresses an interest in her. It is impossible, of course, since he is of low birth. He decides, heartbroken, to set off to foreign lands, but before he leaves, he asks that Kristin meet him one final time. This she does, to her own downfall, for on her return from the meeting place, a man decides to take advantage of her. Though she escapes her would-be rapist, her honor is compromised, the man claiming that she's done inappropriate things with Arne, and her own absence, caused by the troubles created in her escape, lend a kind of credence to his words. Simon and her father decide it is best to send her to a nunnery for a year, till the scandal dies down.

But the medieval world is full of unsavory men, and while there, Kristin has yet another run-in with another set of bad fellows, and this time she is saved by the so-called knight in shining armor, a man of noble birth who soon begins to pine for her. But his armor isn't so shiny as we soon learn. He has lived much of his youth with a married woman and fathered two children by her, and in the process he has been banished from his family and squandered most of his wealth. No matter, Kristin likes a dangerous dude and quickly falls in love.

And herein yet more complications ensue. She's already betrothed to Simon, and getting out a wedding proves not to be so easy, for it will bring dishonor to herself and to Simon and will be much to her parents economic disadvantage as well. Nevertheless, Simon agrees to let her go, much to his own hurt, hiding many of things that would ruin his betrothed's reputation. In all, Simon seems a man of great honor whose attention to duty is unfortunately rewarded by a less-savory partner in life, an older, sickly woman who struggles to give him children.

Meanwhile, Kristin works hard to convince her father to let her marry the disreputable Erland, a man who can't seems to lack all self-control and can't even manage to return the family cart in good repair. He cheats with another man's wife (he was young, his excuse) and deserts her (she's married, his excuse--only when she is freed, he fails to live up to his promise to her to marry her) in favor of Kristin. He may be a swaggering hero, but he is untrustworthy and irresponsible and likely a lot of trouble. And somehow, eventually, her father is persuaded to give Kristin to this bad man, to allow this love match to go forward, even though he suspects it will lead to much sorrow for them all.

The story ends with the reflections of her parents, in which secrets from their own parental match are exposed, calling into question not only what constitutes love but what constitutes duty.

The translation of Undset's original language reads awkwardly, in what I assume is a deliberate attempt to mimic an ancient language, and after a short bit of getting used to the tongue, it works quite well. Appendixes explain some of the traditions of the medieval Norwegian world. In all this proved a fine start to a trilogy that I'll be sore tempted to return to in order to know the future sections of the story.

On "Hedda Gabler" by Henrik Ibsen ****

What a strange play this one is. As with Ibsen's trilogy centering around social issues, this one also deals, to some extent, with societal propriety and morals. But it's not so didactic as those others, and while the main character, Hedda, wants so badly not to conform to societal expectations, her desires hardly fall in a moral line. For her, freedom is everything--and everything she feels she can't get. She longs for an ideal world, in fact pushes others toward it (to their own peril), which she fears doing anything that would shock others.

As the play opens, Hedda has just gotten married to a scholar whom she finds a bore and with whom she's just gone on an extensive six-month honeymoon (made up in part by her husband's continuing research). She is consumed with taste and money, and as such, she has gotten her husband to purchase a house way beyond his means (and this, mostly just for a joke to her). Men, by turn, are consumed by her, dropping by to be the third wheel, wanting her to commit unbecoming acts with them and shocked that she would marry whom she has.

One of these is another scholar who has lived the life of a libertine and has repented and now has written a couple of fantastic books. He also once dated Hedda, before he got on the straight and narrow. As such, she has been disappointed by him, and she aims to get him back into the ideal world of total freedom, where societal opinions matter not at all. In the end, she manages to corrupt him again, but perhaps not in the manner that she had hoped, and the last act of "courage" becomes her own.

The introduction noted that Hedda is a character without a play, struggling to find the role in which she is to act. It seems a good observation, for indeed, like many of Ibsen's women, she is a showy figure meant to amuse but lacking substantial place in a male-dominated world, and the results are not pleasant. You can read the play here.

On "An Enemy of the People" by Henrik Ibsen ****

The last in Ibsen's trilogy that includes A Doll's House, this one also attacks hypocritical Norwegian (yea, all) society, but unlike the first two plays, it does not focus on the role of women. Here, the centerpiece is a doctor who discovers that a town's main tourist attraction--its baths--is polluted by sewer water that is causing various diseases. Confronted with this truth, he lets others in town know. He starts with the leadership, who reject his charges on the basis that the town depends too much on the baths, and any bad publicity would turn tourists away and it would cost too much money and time to fix them.

The press, however, is very ready to jump on the doctor's side. However, those involved with the paper have their own agendas, whether power, money, or love. When these motivations prove not to look to bear any fruit when taking the doctor's side, the press quickly turns on the doctor to uphold the interests of the townspeople. After all, who wants to pay higher taxes to fix a problem or see less revenue from tourism?

With leadership and the press squarely backing a do nothing philosophy, the doctor is shunted by all. He loses his job, because he refuses to retract his report regarding the baths. His family loses its home; his children are kicked out of school and lose their jobs; his wife loses her inheritance. The situation is hopeless. What's more, rumors are rife that the doctor is in on a deal for himself (his father-in-law has bought shares in the baths at cheap prices and now insists his son-in-law retract his report so that he can make a killing in the market, and some dubious members of the press insist they want a cut of the profits--or the doctor's name will be mud). So what does the doctor do? He chooses to help the poor.

The latter is the doctor's heroic end, but is it realistic? The family may now have a "job" to do, but where exactly is it going to get the money to pay for the food and clothes?

I like to see a person of great virtue stand up to society, but as the play brings out, it's a rare person that does so. Even the so-called moderates prove unwilling to really sacrifice for the common good. However, I guess the play is a bit more optimistic than I am about people and about the human race. Were this something I'd have written, the doctor would have eventually buckled, justifying his compromised actions with lame excuses and feeling guilty the whole way. And if the doctor had remained true? He'd have ended up like Corey at the end of Arthur Miller's The Crucible--defiant but crushed dead beneath a set of stones.

This play hits hard at situations that, as adults, we face all too often. Remaining true to convictions inevitably comes up against everyday living, and often pits one conviction or concern against another (supply for family or refuse to be silent regarding an evil). Money makes the world go round. You can read the play for yourself here.

On "Ghosts" by Henrik Ibsen ***

I now see why A Doll House is anthologized so much more often than Ghosts, the second in a trilogy of plays about Victorian-era Norway. The themes are similar, but where A Doll House carries a certain realness to it, Ghosts to me seemed overwrought and even a bit silly (especially its instantaneously disastrous end). Like A Doll House, Ghosts indicts Norwegian society for thoughtless slavery to a societal morality that is all about appearance rather than heart.

Mrs. Alving is an older woman who gives generously to her church and who does her duty to family. Married for a long-time philanderer, she kept quiet about his affairs so as to keep the man's reputation intact. The personal cost of this adherence to duty is about to take a deeper toll than she could have ever imagined, even now after her husband has died.

The pastor comes off as the least respectable of the characters, as well as the most hypocritical. In one passage, he becomes incensed that a layperson in his congregation married a fallen woman for money. And yet, Mrs. Alving points out, she married a fallen man--out of duty to her family, and at the urging of the pastor himself. The pastor claims that circumstances are different. (Later, when the pastor learns that the layperson didn't marry for money, the pastor accepts the man back into fellowship, only later to praise the man when he volunteers to take the fall for the pastor with regard to something the pastor has done in exchange for a favor involving monetary compensation.)

The "ghosts" of the title references the idea that one's ancestors' sins come back to haunt you (to the third and fourth generation, as the Bible would say). Here, Mr. Alving Sr.'s ghost haunts the characters in numerous ways. Their son, as it turns out, learns that he has contracted syphilis from birth. A woman the son falls in love with turns out to be Mr. Alving's own daughter by another woman. Mrs. Alving, who finally deigns to recognize, reveal, live by the truth, is redeemed too late and loses all, bound, again, by her duty to family. The play is in the public domain and can be read here.

On "Captain Mansana and Other Stories" by Bjornsterne Bjornson ***

Bjornson was a contemporary of the better-known Norwegian Henrik Ibsen. I was pulled to Bjornson for the Norwegian portion of my Scandinavian reading list because he is known as a writer of short stories about the common person, and such subject matter has often been of interest to me (going back to my high school reading of John Steinbeck).

This little book, however, does not start off with a tale of commoners but rather with one about nobility. The title story, Captain Mansana delves into the life of a man who fights for the revolution for the common people and whose father died doing the same. The story itself is set mostly in Italy. But it is hardly about the revolution either. It is, by and large, a love story, as we follow Captain Mansana as he falls for first one woman and then another. The first woman he falls for is a noblewoman known for breaking men's hearts, who in fact relishes in this reputation and in maintaining her cold front. Mansana, however, is up to the challenge and, like any leading men, does exactly what he sets out to do, winning her in a race she does not exactly voluntarily submit to. Soon, it is the woman who is pestering Mansana, begging to spend time with him. And Mansana, feeling cornered, wanders off to a village in Italy, where he finds himself falling for a common girl--and truly, it is a girl, barely into adulthood. He defends her honor, as her cousin sports with her but without serious intentions. This defense, however, exposes his own true feelings, as well as the feelings of the cousin, who begins to take the young woman seriously. The two fight for the gal's attentions, while the woman who has broken many a heart begins to wonder where her fiance has wandered off to. It takes some family intervention to get things back on the right track.

Surprisingly, given that Mansana is the title story and apparently had some fame in the near term, I found the other two stories in this collection more interesting. Not surprisingly, they had more to do with common Norwegians in the second half of the nineteenth century. "The Railroad and the Churchyard" explores the enmity and friendship between two men who struggle for power in a rural township. "Dust," meanwhile, explores religious and moral themes.

In the latter story, a traveler goes to visit a couple who has two young boys. The husband feels that it is impossible for people to raise children; the wife meanwhile finds that she has no way to reason with her husband. Likewise, the wife and housekeeper have some beliefs in immortality and in the divine, while the men in the story--especially the husband (but possibly the narrator as well)--tend to believe only in physical existence. These two ideas pair off against one another when another young boy in the neighborhood drowns in a nearby iced-over lake. The children are assured that the boy has gone to a better life with God by the housekeeper. The husband comes to the conclusion that the children must be sent away for education, sparking unrest from the mother and from the boys themselves, who when punished, run away. The search for the boys takes up much of the story, but suffice it to say that when they are found, not all is well. Have them fallen prey to the immortality myth, choosing death and life with God rather than to the harsh treatment of their father? Or has God answered the housekeeper's prayer and sent the boys away so that the father can learn that they must not be separated from the mother for schooling? A final irony closes the tale, calling into question the eternal order ("mysterious are the ways of God," notes the housekeeper), a far cry from Hans Christian Andersen's overtly religious fairy tales.

A major motif in "Dust" is in fact dust. It settles on the elements in the couple's house, impossible to be gotten rid of, just as stone accumulates in graveyards without ceasing or snow on the trees in winter. Does the snow come down from the heavens, as the mother at one point explains, or does it come from the earth and fall back to the earth, as the narrator explains? And what is immortality? Is it the ancient Nordic concept of fame and great deeds carried on in stories of one's descendents, or is it some kind of life eternal in the heavens? Where is our final resting place?

On "Seven Gothic Tales" by Isak Dinesen ***

Each of Dinesen's seven tales revolves in some way around the difference between appearance and reality. In the opening story, "The Deluge at Nordeney" a flood threatens an area of the country, and one set of people--including a priest with a grand reputation--return with a last boat to save a family stuck on its rooftop. The boat won't fit all, so some people have to stay behind, on the roof, and hope that the waters don't rise overnight so far that they don't survive. In the midst of this, the various roofgoers tell stories about their lives, including the famed priest, who turns out not to be who he is thought to be. Add to that a woman, an old maid, who was thwarted at any attempt to love--only, she rejected all suitors and accepted only one suitor she knew would fall away before the marriage could be consummated, thus to win the sympathy of others.

In "The Old Chevalier" a spurned lover walks out to the street after being dumped and is accosted by a beautiful woman who simply wants to spend time with him to ease her own mind and self. In the process, the eases the lover's grief--until she asks for money for spending the night!

In "The Monkey" a man tells his aunt he want to be married, and his aunt suggests a woman, who, it turns out, refuses. She will not marry. The aunt cannot let this stand, so--in a series of events that would likely never be put to print in the current surrounding--invites the woman to dinner and instructs her nephew to rape the woman. He does not, though much can be assumed, since the woman was made so drunk that she does not remember the night. Add to this another element: the man's reputation in town has become such that if he does not marry in a hurry, he will never.

In "The Roads Round Pisa" a count, married to a woman who is jealous, not of other women but of her own riches (and thus refuses to wear them), is caught up in a series of events that puts him into contact with a young man, who it turns out is not a young man at all but a woman. This woman stood in for another in a marital bed, the supposed wife not interested in consummating a marriage to a man much older than herself, especially as she is in love with another. (Ironically, the impotent old man had also employed another to fulfill his obligations, hoping to get his wife pregnant.) A duel results. This seemed to me perhaps the story the most typical of this theme of illusion in the book.

"The Supper at Elsinore" recounts the story of a man and his two never-married sisters. The man, who enjoys life at sea, especially as a pirate, leaves his bride-to-be just before his wedding and never again reappears. Various tales float about regarding his life--or death. The sisters, meanwhile, spurn various lovers as youths and relish complaining of their "old-maid" fate; thus, they are greatly relieved when their brother's former fiancee marries, leaving them as the sole objects of tragedy. In the end, the brother returns, in the form of a ghost.

Three men on a boat serve as the frame in which the main story of "The Dreamers" takes shape, which proves to be a story with yet other stories within. Three men fall for a single lady at various times. And each time, she wanders off and leaves the men, to grieve and search for their lost love. In the end, we discover that each of them love is the same woman and that she is not the same woman that any of them loved at all. Identity, the woman notes, is made to be cast aside. We should be more than one person; we should be many people. Thus the woman, when these three men meet her again, no longer recognizes the men, for she is a different woman altogether. And yet, we also learn the story--the true story--of her life and why she wishes never to be herself again.

"The Poet" concerns a old man who falls in love with a young woman. A problem ensues when a young protege of his also falls for the woman. But who does the woman love, the old man she is to marry or the young man can't stand to leave her. Add to this the idea that this man's "leave taking" is actually a planned suicide (unbeknownst to his acquaintances) and that the suicide turns instead into a jealous murder. Has the old man, all along, been living in a dream world?

The writing throughout was exquisite. Yet I found myself often lost in these tales, not up, at the current moment, for the concentration that is required of stories within stories within stories, as so many of these tales involved. The stories comment on one another and often end up having quite a bit to do with the overall story itself, but this is one collection--as I noted when rereading "The Poet" just to figure out how the details added up--that bears a second reading, even perhaps demands it.
 

On "The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories" by Hans Christian Andersen **

There can be too many tales. That's how I felt by the time that I was about halfway through this more than one-thousand-page collection. More Andersen that I ever imagined reading before I picked up this book.

There are reasons that Andersen is famous. At his best, his tales have a magical quality. Most of those tales have become movies, animated ones, courtesy of Disney: "The Little Mermaid," "The Ugly Duckling." A few, surprisingly have not. I would love to see the one about the girl whose brothers are turned into swans every night turned into a movie. Fascinating tale.

But those tales seem to fall mostly near the first third of the collection. As I read the collection, other themes became apparent, other obsessions. Andersen was a devout Christian, and many of the tales are strange treatises on the glory of the Protestant God. They wouldn't necessarily be too bad if they weren't so didactic. But I guess that is normal for a tale meant for kids. (Still other earlier tales seemed oddly [im]moral: the opening one, for example, in which a jealous man ends up killing himself; only the man he is jealous of isn't exactly a moral citizen himself--he's a liar, whose lies lead to the killing.)

In a few of these Christian tales, the story takes an almost medieval turn, with complex plotlines in which Christianity seems almost an add-on to what would otherwise be a very violent and horrifying tale. I'm thinking specifically of a convoluted tale in which swans rescue a miniature girl from a bog. The girl grows into a regular girl, except that during the day she is a girl with a mean disposition, and during the night she is a frog with a kind disposition. Enter a missionary. The girl looks to kill him, the frog to save him. Somewhere in here, love enters and a death and resurrection and the rescue of the girl's real mother and then a return to Egypt. Etc. Etc.

There are a lot of talking animals and a lot of talking objects. Frogs and teapots and streetlamps each impart lessons. It got a bit tiring after a very short while to read such pieces.

Still other tales are very clearly commentaries on Danish society or politicians. They were interesting from that perspective, and some of the lessons hold up well for political discourse today. I have read that in fact many of the tales were in fact commentaries on politics, and were I more of a Scandinavian scholar, I'd have likely enjoyed my reading more, being able to ferret out such connections.

As it was, I enjoyed the occasional story--and at 156 in the book, there were many to enjoy. But also many, many more to simply wad through.

What did I learn about Denmark? It's a land that should be prouder of its history and traditions, perhaps? Certainly, Andersen believes so.

On "Fear and Trembling" by Soren Kierkegaard ***

It's been a long time since I read any Kant and I've never read Hegel directly, so I come to this book with a certain deficit of necessary background. Still, Kierkegaard is one of the heavies among Danish writers, so I couldn't well skip him, even if his subject matter isn't one normally to my taste. On the whole, for a work of philosophy, this text was fairly approachable.

The introduction provided by C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Welsh provides some of the necessary background information. In it, they discuss Kant's and Hegel's views of ethics. Both contend, in a way, that the ethical stems from the universal. Kant sees ethics as derived from reason apart from experience. Hegel, however, says that this reason gets embodied in customs, laws, and traditions, and that people don't necessarily a priori have knowledge of what is moral via their reason.

Enter Kierkegaard, who dispenses with both views through a discussion of faith--and in particular through the actions of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac at the behest of God. Faith cannot fall under "normal" rules of ethics, Kierkegaard says, for a number of reasons. First is the fact that the man of faith is not in touch with the universal but with the absolute. Faith skips the universal. What might seem ethical to everyone else, the person of faith doesn't care about--he cares only about what's ethical to God, and as such, he speaks with God directly, via the self. The "glorious" act is performed for one alone, though it makes no sense to everyone else and isn't in their eyes glorious at all.

Kierkegaard also discusses the difference between resignation and faith, and between tragedy and faith. In the case of resignation, one might perform a glorious act knowing that one has no other choice. But the act of faith is not done out of a mere acceptance of a tragic end. It is done with a full belief in the "glorious" end. Hence, the man who accepts his death to save his comrades might be resigned to his fate, but the man, like Abraham, who kills his son knowing that God will take care of the promise he has already afforded him (to give him nations through that son) is a man of faith--a believer in the "absurd."

These are interesting distinctions that I'm not so sure make a heap of difference in the world and that, on some level, I can't help but be a bit uncomfortable with, in a world where men crash planes into buildings and kill thousands of others in the name of their faith. And while a person of faith myself, I understand how mad we might appear to be to others, I can't help but wonder about the ethics of certain actions done in the name of others' faith. Does faith then resign us to a world of continual subjectivity, each person listening to his own version of the absolute no matter the consequences for others? This isn't to say that I think Hegel or Kant are correct either; societal customs can be immoral, and reason is only good if the premise one starts with is correct--and given that we often start with the wrong premise (see societal customs), we often end up with immoral conclusions (witness, for example, the ways in which different times have rendered different verdicts regarding a number of moral issues--it's not that humans progress, for in many cases we regress on one thing as we progress on another).

On "An Introduction to Scandinavian Literature" by Elias Bredsdorff, Brita Mortensen, and Ronald Popperwell **

This fairly short guide, written in 1950, provides a summary of Scandinavian literature from the earliest times to just after World War II. Like most such guides, its brevity is both its strength and its weakness, more the latter than the former. In the effort to be comprehensive, readers are often presented more with a list of names and one sentence commentary than something of substance that really delves into what makes the literature or the times unique, that really tells how that literature had an influence on the society.

On the whole, the earliest sections on the foundations of Danish literature (and Icelandic sagas), the last section on Norway, and the Danish sections in general tend to be the best. I think the first is probably the most interesting because there's so little of it, and so it's easier to summarize. We are given the story of the runes, of Elder Edda (a pre-Christian tale of the gods of the ancient Nordics), and of the family sagas. The last section on Norway proved to be interesting to me mostly because I was still looking for writers from Norway to add to my list of Scandinavian authors to read. And the sections on Danish lit in general seemed best because the author of those sections seemed more often to hit on the right balance of brevity and depth, often quoting important passages (rarely done for the Swedish or Norwegian lit), and more inclined to focus on important individuals.

Unfortunately, too often the book is merely a note on particular authors: so-and-so is an important author of the 1850s, best known for such-and-such. His other such-and-such is highly overrated. And what exactly did I learn from such a passage?

The book focuses primarily on the Danes and the Swedes. Finland is completely ignored; Norway becomes of concern only in the nineteenth century, with its near independence. Iceland, outside of the early sagas, is generally ignored as well. Still, the book did give me a few writers to focus on in the coming months. What I'd have really preferred is a general anthology of Scandinavian literature, but I have been unable to find one.

On "The Scandinavians" by Donald S. Connery *****

The one drawback to this wonderful introduction to post-World War II Scandinavian culture is that it is fifty years old and, thus, in many ways out of date. And yet, my general impressions of Scandinavia before coming to this text would have matched those of mid-1960s Scandinavia as well. Connery terms the basic stereotype of the nations of this area as being involved heavily in sex, socialism, and suicide, and his text goes about both debunking and confirming these general impressions.

After a general introduction to these themes, Connery presents chapters on each of the Scandinavian nations respectively: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, with a short postcript on Iceland. Denmark emerges as a country fun partygoers, Norway as a country of naive outdoorsmen, Sweden as a land of stern and hardy workers, and Finland as a land of quiet depressives. Iceland is the land of the original Vikings (indeed, even the language is more akin to original Danish than contemporary Danish, as if the area is frozen in time). All of these impressions are true, and all of them are false, which is what Connery brings out.

The chapters of each part delve into consistent themes: general cultural impressions, the physical geography, history, contemporary government and economy, famous people, and the arts. By remaining more general, Connery is able to give a better understanding of why each nation did what it did in World War II than someone who focuses on the nitty-gritty details, though he is perhaps a bit hagiographic (uncritical) with regard to each nation. Finland emerges in a particularly sympathetic light, the loser of over twenty wars who has somehow managed to survive despite all that. Indeed, for much of its history it was either part of Sweden or part of Russia, and when not, it has been under threat from its larger neighbors.

The welfare system in each of these countries emerges in a particularly interesting light. Although each nation is generous in how it treats its sick and aged and poor, and although each country has high taxes to enable such, the idea that they are truly socialist falls by the wayside when one considers how much of the private sector is owned by the government--indeed, very little in most cases.

Connery covers in some detail the Danish penal system, which focuses more on rehabilitation than on confinement. He seems won over by the idea that treating such prisoners in a humane way works better than denying them comforts. He makes me think our own American system--so often focused on punishment and "revenge" for wrong deeds--needs quite a bit of reform. But there is a balance, and it strikes me as a bit naive in some ways to think that would work for all peoples confined to prison.

Another startling government feature in most Scandinavian countries, including Denmark, is the "ombudsman." His role is to investigate government wrongdoing. If there is an accusation, a complaint, the ombudsman looks into it and then, if the troubles prove to have foundation, makes recommendations accordingly. The role seems similar to the consumer bureau that the United States has lately attempted to set up to guard against corporate wrongdoing. I get a sense the U.S. version will get bogged down in red tape and corporate buy-offs.

Sweden comes off as a country with strong strictures on drinking as does Finland. Both countries own all the liquor stores (though in the former case, the intent was mostly to make money for the king originally). This allows Sweden, for example, to prevent certain known drunks from purchasing liquor. Bars close by one a.m. Taxes on liquor are exorbitantly high, which keeps it from heavy purchase. And yet, at the same time, attitudes toward sex are comparatively open. In Finland, even in the sixties, out-of-wedlock babies were common as were couples living together; even so, pornography and the like was frowned upon. Women were more often in government and more likely to hold jobs comparable to men. In Sweden, the church was something all Swedes become members of and render income to from birth, unless they actually apply to become nonmembers; most don't bother to deregister, even though few people actually attend services. Such odd juxtapositions are what make Scandinavia unique.