Norwegian Woods (OT)

Moa Martinson was born on 2 November 1890 in Vårdnäs, Linköping Municipality. Her mother was Kristina Swartz (sometimes spelt Christina Schwartz) who served as a maid wherever jobs were available. There are no legal records stating who her father was, but according to researchers Annika Johansson and Bonnie Festin, he was probably Anders Teodor Andersson, a farmhand who served at the Kärr farm in Motala at the same time as Swartz. Since she carried, what in those days was referred to as an illegitimate child, she had to go to her parents home for the birth. Swartz' father, Nils Peter Swartz, was a poor soldier who lived with his wife, Carin Olofsdotter, in a derelict croft in Vårdnäs. On 17 February 1891, Swartz sued Andersson for child support at the Motala district court, where two witnesses testified that they had seen her and Andersson in the same bed around the time the child would have been conceived. Andersson failed to appear in court in February as well as on the two following hearings. Swartz finally said that he had gone to America and the proceedings were stayed. The identity of her father was unknown to Martinson her entire life, but her speculations about who it could be were an inspiration for her work.

During the first years of her life, Martinson lived with her paternal grandparents and their youngest daughter Hulda while Swartz worked as a maid or in the textile mills in Norrköping. There are many discrepancies in the timeline of Martinson's early year between official records and her books. These are most likely due to that her stories built on the oral traditions of the family. In 1892, her grandfather became ill and died and her grandmother could no longer take care of Martinson so she went to live with her mother. There is no record of where they lived until 1894, when they moved to Norrköping. Swartz earned very little money. In 1894–1896, she worked at Norrköping's wool weaving mills, where working conditions were extremely bad and wages low. During her early school years, Martinson had a stepfather, Alfred Karlsson, who she described as an alcoholic. He was a sometime statare who worked odd jobs in the countryside outside Norrköping. He married Swartz on 11 March 1896, and they had three more daughters, but they all died within days of being born. After the years at the textile mill, the family moved several times to different locations in Östergötland, settling down for a time wherever work was available. This affected Martinson's schooling since they only stayed in one place for a couple of months. Despite this, she left school with high marks after six years in 1903. She was confirmated in 1905 in Risinge Church, Finspång Municipality, after which she got her first job at a farm in Vikbolandet.

In Martinson's book Kvinnor och äppleträd (Women and Apple Trees), which is set in Norrköping, she described the hard and ruthless situation she and her mother were in during the 1890s. In the novel we find Ellen who is being confirmed. She has several times been abused. During the confirmation the priest warns the girls and says that they must be submissive. Ellen thinks for herself:

“What does he know about fear and dark backyards? Does he know that no prayers can guard against rats? Full of himself he knows nothing...”

Because of this book, Martinson was accused for denigration by right-wing critics, but Martinson said that what she did was the opposite. The different run-down lodgings the family moved in and out of are described in the books Kyrkbröllop (Church wedding) and (My Mother Gets Married) as well as in a couple of the short stories in Jag möter en diktare (I meet a poet).

Martinson's political interest started to develop in 1921, when unemployment in Sweden was higher than ever before, and in 1922 she and Johansson joined the Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden where Martinson became very active. To further educate herself, she read the works of authors like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Émile Zola, Maxim Gorky and Martin Andersen Nexø. Because of her political interest in better pay and conditions for workers and her ability to speak in any context, she was elected to the municipal council in Sorunda where she represented the labour party. She resigned from office in 1926. In November 1922, Martinsson wrote her first article for the syndicalist paper Arbetaren's ("The Worker's") page for women. She continued writing for the paper and in 1923 she had articles published weekly in Arbetaren. In her articles she wrote about how men and women should work together for a better world. She engaged in many debates, especially those involving women's issues.

With her work for Arbetaren she developed her writing skills, but even though she often pushed the boundaries in her articles, she went too far in 1924, when she wrote that women and men should receive equal pay for equal work. Quarrels started at the magazine, resulting in Martinson resigning from the paper, but due to her contributions in Arbetaren she was now known to the public although mostly in syndicalistic circles.

One author who had significant impact on Martinson was Martin Andersen Näxö. It was the first time she recognized her own experiences in a literary work. She wrote a letter to him, telling him about her own life and also sent an article she had written for Arbetaren. Näxö responded positively, telling her she should write a book about her life. Shortly afterwards Martinson started writing the book Pigmamman ("The Maid Mother"). In 1925, she worked for a new magazine called Vi kvinnor ("We women"), where she contributed with articles, novels and causeries.

During the 1970s, Martinson became a role model for female writers during the feminist movement in the Nordic countries. Earlier, during the 1960s, she had been labeled "the cheerful chronicler of misery" by Swedish author Erik Hjalmar Linder.

"Paradoxically enough, I am mostly indignant not because I was denied the possibility to get a university education, but because I landed right in the same anonymous hell as my mother. Maybe it was even harder for me, for I was fully conscious that it was hell. I was clear about the injustice against all of us, and powerless."
— From foreword for My Mother Gets Married

In 1989, a literary award named after Martinson was instituted by the Workers' Educational Association (Arbetarnas bildningsförbund, ABF) and the Moa Martinson Society. The Moa Award (Moa-priset) is an annual prize awarded to a person who writes in the spirit of Martinson

Ulrika Wilhelmina Johnsson was born in Tampere on 19 March 1844, the elder daughter and first surviving child of Gustav Vilhelm Johnsson, whose hard work in the Finlayson textile factory enabled him to become a foreman there. At home and at school she was strongly influenced by the emphasis on industry and piety, and when in 1853 her father was promoted to manager of the Finlayson textile shop in Kuopio, she continued her education there, doing so well that she was allowed to enter a school for daughters of the upper classes and, in 1863, to enrol at the newly-founded teacher training college in Jyväskylä (now the University of Jyväskylä), the first institute in Finland to admit women to higher education and to deliver teaching in Finnish.

However, before completing her studies, Minna married the college’s natural sciences teacher, Johan Canth, who was nine years her senior, and over the next thirteen years produced a family of seven children. Nevertheless, this was not the end of her ambitions, which developed in a literary direction. Canth became the editor of the newspaper Keski-Suomi (Central Finland), and his wife contributed articles on matters particularly relevant to women, including temperance, which she saw as a means of combating the addiction to alcohol which reduced many families to poverty. Her polemical attitude, which her husband shared, compelled them to leave Keski-Suomi in 1876 and to move in 1877 to a rival newspaper, Päijänne, which began to print her stories. Two years later her first collection of these, Novelleja ja kertomuksia (‘Novellas and Tales’) appeared in print.

Minna Canth did not shrink from taking on prominent public figures such as churchmen and authors when the occasion demanded. In 1885 she published one of her most famous plays, Työmiehen vaimo (‘The Wife of a Workman’), the story of a spirited and capable woman, Johanna, whose shiftless husband Risto ruins the family by drinking her money away while the laws governing women’s property render her helpless to prevent him. Set in contemporary Kuopio, the drama created a considerable scandal; that same year, its author spoke out robustly against a bishop who claimed that emancipation was against God’s law and the writer Gustaf af Geijerstam who supported him by arguing that men’s different needs and nature made it impossible for them to achieve feminine purity. Before the year was out, the Finnish Parliament had passed a new law allowing married women to hold property in their own right.

In the 50th and final Runo (canto) of the Kalevala, the narrator tells of Marjatta, a cherished and protected young girl so pure that she will not drive in a sleigh pulled by mares who have been running with a stallion, or drink milk from cows who have been kept with a bull. Sent to the upland pastures to guard the flocks, she eats a magical lingonberry and shortly afterwards finds that she is expecting a child. Her parents cast her out, and she seeks refuge in vain with neighbours who drive her away with harsh words. In a stable deep in the forest she gives birth to a son, warmed by the breath of the horses:

//And a sinless child was given,
On the hay in horses’ stable,
On the hay in horses’ manger.

Then she wrapped the little infant
And in swaddling-clothes she wrapped him,
On her knees she took the infant,
And she wrapped her garments round him.//

Shortly afterwards the baby mysteriously vanishes and Marjatta goes in search of him, asking the stars, moon and sun for guidance until she finds him in the marshes and carries him off to be baptized. The old man asked to do so demurs, asking Väinämöinen for his judgment. When the latter calls for the destruction of the child, the infant speaks out and denounces him, and Väinämöinen, realizing that his power is at an end, sings for the last time before stepping into his copper boat and sailing away, leaving his kantele as a final gift to ‘Suomi’s children’.

Drawing together the threads of Christian and pagan tradition like Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, the closing lines of the Kalevala sum up its enduring significance for the Finnish people and for poets throughout the world:

//Here the path lies newly opened,
Widely open for the singers,
And for greater ballad singers,
For the young, who now are growing,
For the rising generation.//

Susan Halstead, Content Specialist (Humanities and Social Sciences), Research Engagement.

The ancient Scandinavians’ name for themselves was ‘Northmen’ and for their language and culture ‘Norse’ (norrœn).

Of the two Old Norse nouns víkingr (m.) and víking (f.), the first meant ‘pirate or sea-rover’ (OED), the second an overseas plundering expedition. Their etymology is contested but related to the noun vík, ‘bay’, or the verb víkja, ‘to turn away’ etc., referring either to people from a bay area – such as the Vik region around the Oslofjord (though its inhabitants were called víkverjar, not víkingar) – or to those who ‘set out’ on raiding voyages. But such ‘vikings’ formed only a fraction of the Norse peoples. Overseas trading voyages had been undertaken long before then, for instance by the peaceful ‘farbönder’ of Gotland, while the fact that travel by boat was so much faster than overland was the basic reason why so many Norse groups lived near and moved around on water.

The name Sweden was loaned from Dutch in the 17th century to refer to Sweden as an emerging great power. Before Sweden's imperial expansion, Early Modern English used Swedeland. Sweden is derived through back-formation from Old English Swēoþēod, which meant "people of the Swedes" (Old Norse Svíþjóð, Latin Suetidi). This word is derived from Sweon/Sweonas (Old Norse Sviar, Latin Suiones). The Swedish name Sverige (a compound of the words Svea and rike, with lenition of the consonant [k], first recorded in the cognate Swēorice in Beowulf) literally means "realm of the Swedes", excluding the Geats in Götaland.

Variations of the name Sweden are used in most languages, with the exception of Danish and Norwegian using Sverige, Faroese Svøríki, Icelandic Svíþjóð, and the more notable exception of some Finnic languages where Ruotsi (Finnish) and Rootsi (Estonian) are used, names commonly considered as referring to the people from the coastal areas of Roslagen, Uppland, who were known as the Rus', and through them etymologically related to the English name for Russia.

The etymology of Swedes, and thus Sweden, is generally not agreed upon but may derive from Proto-Germanic Swihoniz meaning "one's own", referring to one's own Germanic tribe.

The Peregrine by John Alec Baker recounts a single year from October to April from the author's ten-year obsession with the peregrines that wintered near his home in Chelmsford, Essex in eastern England. The writing is lyrically charged, as the author's role of diligent observer gives way to a personal transformation, as Baker becomes, in the words of James Dickey, "a fusion of man and bird”

The story of The Peregrine’s writing is remarkable, and has a mystery at its heart. For around a decade – from 1954 to 1964 – a myopic office worker from Essex tracked the peregrine falcons that hunted over the landscape of his county. He pursued them on bicycle and on foot, watching through binoculars as they bathed, flew, stooped and roosted. He carried Ordnance Survey maps on which he marked in ballpoint pen the locations of his sightings, with circled capital letters – P, SH, HH, BO – recording raptors by species (M is for Merlin, K is for Kestrel).

He learned to predict the peregrines’ locations by means of an intelligence that began as logic and ended as instinct, and in a relationship that began as fascination and ended as obsession.
Even the savage winter of 1962–63 – when the sea froze for two miles out from the shore, and spear-length icicles hung from eaves and trees – didn’t deter Baker from his quest. After a day in the field, he would retreat to the spare room of his Chelmsford terrace house, and write up the details in journals that together run to more than 1,600 manuscript pages.

In the mid-1960s, he compressed those journals into a book fewer than 60,000 words long, and written in ecstatic, violent, enraptored prose. The journals were coal to The Peregrine’s diamond: crushed, they became the book. He collapsed 10 years into a single “season of hawk-hunting”, and “stripped” the narrative “down to the livid bone”, to borrow a phrase from one of his early poems. Instead of plot, he deployed pattern. The same actions recur across the book’s course: man pursues falcon, falcon pursues prey.

In the words of Baker: “I have always longed to be a part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the unworldliness of water; to return to the town as a stranger”

Robert Mcfarlane writes that Baker’s Essex is "landscape on acid: super-saturations of colour, wheeling phantasmagoria, dimensions blown out and falling away, nature as hypernature.”

"The trees did not reflect the sun so much as glow from within, as though their bark was of parchment, a membrane through which a steady flame was shining. They seemed to have their own light, absorbed from the sun, and retained. When I went past at dusk they were still shining with a strange, almost gaseous, incandescence, a reddening luminosity that only faded, and then quite suddenly, when night came, as though the colder air had frozen it away.

The tall pines rose from the heath in complete stillness, unmoved by the wind. The bark of one tree was peeling, and the eye winced from the flayed look it had. Slowly I saw, really saw and did not simply know, that these pines were living things, standing like emaciated horned animals, maned with their dark green or dull blue clusters of narrow leaves. Their deep piny smell was the small of living beings, anchored by their roots, able to move only upward or outward as the sun ordained. They were not dead, but merely prisoners, land-captives, with the sound of the sea in their leaves.

...Nothing disturbed my vision of these ancient Nordic pines, herded together here like the last buffalo, living their own intense life, the slow fire that can never be seen. Cut where you will, you cannot find that flame. It can never be seen, any more than you can see the spirit, or soul, of a man.”

John Alec Baker

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