Norwegian Woods (OT)

Kerstin Ekman's book, Masters of the Forest (Herrarna i skogen, 2007), is about nature, and the multiple meanings we extract from it. In a determined move away from fiction, she has assembled a collection of essays on "the forest," following an inner compass to take her from topic to topic--literary, historical, scientific, political. Sometimes the easy, discursive writing becomes personal, almost intimate, sometimes argumentative and angry. As a whole, the book reads like one of the Inuit story maps of their wild landscape, the kind of map in which "human memory and natural form rebound endlessly upon each other," as Robert Macfarlane writes in The Wild Places (2007). In the same passage he quotes the anthropologist Richard Nelson on story maps: "A person moving through nature, however wild, remote ... is never alone. The surroundings are aware, sensate, personified. They feel."

There was no military support from Norway, Sweden or Denmark, but many volunteers arrived from various countries. By far the largest foreign contingent came from neighbouring Sweden, which provided nearly 8,760 volunteers during the war. The Swedish Volunteer Corps (Svenska Frivilligkåren), formed from the Swedes, the Norwegians (727 men) and the Danes (1,010 men), fought on the northern front at Salla during the last weeks of the war.

Volunteers arrived from Estonia, Italy and Hungary. Also, 350 American nationals of Finnish background volunteered, and 210 volunteers of other nationalities made it to Finland before the war ended. Max Manus, a Norwegian, fought in the Winter War before returning to Norway and achieving fame as a resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation of Norway. In total, Finland received 12,000 volunteers, 50 of whom died during the war.

Lotta Svärd was a Finnish voluntary auxiliary paramilitary organisation for women. Formed originally in 1918, it had a large membership undertaking volunteer social work in the 1920s and 1930s. During the Second World War, it mobilized to replace men conscripted into the army.

It served in hospitals, at air raid warning positions, and other auxiliary tasks in close cooperation with the army. The women were officially unarmed except for an antiaircraft battery in 1944. Virtanen argues that, their "accountability to the nation took a masculine and military form in public, but had a private, feminine side to it including features like caring, helping and loving."

The name comes from a poem by Johan Ludvig Runeberg. Part of a large and famous book, The Tales of Ensign Stål, the poem described a fictional woman named Lotta Svärd. According to the poem, a Finnish soldier, private Svärd - Swedish: svärd means a sword - went to fight in the Finnish War and took his wife, Lotta, along with him. Private Svärd was killed in battle, but his wife remained on the battlefield, taking care of wounded soldiers. The name was first brought up by Marshal Mannerheim in a speech given on 16 May 1918.

During the Finnish Civil War it was associated with the White Guard. After the war Lotta Svärd was founded as a separate organisation on 9 September 1920. The first known organisation to use the name Lotta Svärd was the Lotta Svärd of Riihimäki, founded on 11 November 1918.

The organisation expanded during the 1920s and it included 60,000 members in 1930. By 1944 it included 242,000 volunteers, the largest voluntary auxiliary organisation in the world, while the total population of Finland was less than four million.

I had the following demands at the tool that I was dreaming of:
It should be noiseless so I could hear surrounding sounds when I worked.
It should be effective, handy and interesting to work.
It should have no kind of engine, just my own muscles.
It should cost almost nothing to make because I had only little money to spend.

- 26/10-1892 Fram sjøsettes i Rekkevik ved Larvik.
 24/6-1893 Fram legger ut på ferden langs norskekysten - klar for ferden over Polhavet.
 21/7-1893 Fram forlater Vardø med kurs for de Nysibirske øyer.
 22/9-1893 Den første kontakt med polarisen.
 5/1-1895 Det er på nære nippet at Fram unngår å bli skrudd i stykker av isen
 14/3-1895 Fridtjof Nansen og Hjalmar Johansen forlater Fram for å ta seg til Nordpolen på ski.
 16/10-1895 Fram når sin nordligste posisjon 850 57' nordlig bredde.
 13/8-1896 Fram kommer ut av drivisen ved Danskeøya og ankommer Skjervøy 7 dager senere
 9/9-1898 Fram er klar for ny dyst, denne gang med Otto Sverdrup bak roret. Ferden går til nordvestkysten av Grønland.
 18/9-1902 Fram vender tilbake og ankommer Utsira.
 10/8-1910 Fram seiler ut på sin tredje ferd med kurs for Antarktis
 14/1-1911 Fram ankrer opp i Hvalbukta i Rosshavet.
 27/1-1912 Fram ankommer Hvalbukta og henter Roald Amundsen og hans menn etter en vellykket ferd til Sydpolen.
 7/3-1912 Fram ankommer Hobart på Tasmania
 16/7-1914 Fram vel hjemme igjen i Horten.
 1929 Fram leveres Framnæs Mek. Verksted for reparasjon
 1935 Fram slepes til Oslo og trekkes på land.
 Under arbeidet med å restaurere Fram sovner Oscar Wisting i 1936 inn i Roald Amundsens og Fridtjof Nansens køye om bord. "Trofast til det siste" skriver Roald Amundsens biograf Tor Bomann-Larsen. Odd Dahl, en av Amundsens menn om bord på Maud, sier det slik "Jeg tror ikke Wisting kunne ha tenkt seg en bedre død."
 20/5-1936 Fram Museet åpnes med Kong Haakon og Kronprins Olav som æresgjester.

Unlike Scandinavian farmers, descendants of the burnbeating Finns of eastern Finland had used hereditary family names for generations. These names are frequent in Norwegian records from the 17th century and more rare in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the Gottlund material shows that they were still in use, or at least remembered, in the l800's. Gottlund mentions about 160 family names in his 1821 diary. In the letter collection, 80 different family names are mentioned, 75 of which end in inen. Many are derived from first names, Greek orthodox or Scandinavian, others from names of domestic and wild animals or names of birds. Some names seem to have described a man's, or a family's, looks or personality. A few names have their origin in Sweden or Norway, often derived from place-names. The family names usually occur in the (Finnish) nominative, but also often in the plural partitive or in the plural combined with different forms of the word suku (= family). In the 19th century the Finns were taking over more customs from the surrounding Norwegians, including the use of names, but the letters from Finnskogen and other sources also mention Norwegians who moved to Finnskogen and adopted Finnish family names.

Pål Furuberg

In 1925 the volume of Norway’s forests was 300 million cubic meters of wood. Today it adds up to 900 million cubic meters.

The annual growth of Norwegian forests is 25 million m3, Minus the annual cutting (10 million m3), this gives the net growth of Norwegian forests of about 15 million m3 of wood per year. This is the equivalent of nearly 100 sacks of firewood for every one of Norway’s five million inhabitants, calculating with the standard 40-litre sacks or nets of firewood for sale which contain about 25 to 30 percent air.

The main reason why the forest has grown so much in the past decades is clear. In the 1960s nearly 100 million Norway spruce trees were planted annually. There was a reforestation campaign going and much of that was done by school children. These trees are now reaching maturity and are in a development phase with plenty of growth.

But the forests are growing much faster than can be explained by seeding and seedling-planting projects by schools and foresters. Researchers at the Norwegian Forest and Landscape Institute in Ås, a half-hour’s train ride southeast of Oslo, have models and tables showing how the forest actually should have grown. But spruce, pines and birches are not adhering to these trajectories and growing as expected. They are all growing faster. Forestry experts are not certain why.

What’s the cause?

Like detectives, the researchers have their list of usual suspects: Higher average temperatures, longer growth seasons, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and more nitrogen deposition from the air. Some also point to a decrease of grazing by domesticated and wild animals in the forest.

Bård Amundsen

«Swidden culture" means to burn the land to grow food. In its most developed and refined method, this slash and burn technique is called »Huuhta», in Swedish «storsvedjande» (slash and burn in a big way). The method for growing food is based upon a special kind of rye grain which grows in tussocks for two years and the understanding that the best soils (acidic--sour) for this rye are those in mature spruce forests and which can produce large amounts of grain.

After the first ascent of Katharsis in 2015 together with Marcin Tomaszewski, this January Polish alpinist Marek Raganowicz returned to the legendary north face of Trollweggen in Norway, better known as Troll Wall, to carry out the third winter ascent, and first solo ascent, of Suser gjennom Harryland. Put up in 1996 by Halvor Hagen and Kyrre Østbø, this right tackles the Trollryggen pillar and although it does not reach the main summit of Troll Wall, it is significantly steeper and more technical than the other routes on this part of the face. On his own for 16 days, Raganowicz climbed ground-up without ever returning to the base of the mountain and, in doing so, completed the first solo winter ascent of this inhospitable face.

Question: Marek - the first thing that springs to mind when looking at the photos: cold!

Troll Wall isn’t the warmest place in Europe!. But to be honest, the real cold I experienced was when it thawed, water dripped down like rain. I was absolutely soaked and frozen.

Question: Why this route?

My main aim was to do the first winter solo ascent of any route on Troll Wall. Suser Gjennom Harryland has the safest approach and that was important to me.

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