We're All In This Together, Lads....

From a Norwegian tourist leaflet:

SKOR.  430 meters above sea level.  People lived here on a permanent basis until about 1960.  At the hight of its popularity, about 622 people lived in this small mountain hamlet.  It had its own council and school.  One of the reasons why people moved away was because they felt it unfair to have to pay the same amount of council tax as those who lived in Eidefjord.  ...

So, just like Detroit, then.   The description continues: There is a pully to carry up goods but visitors have to walk up.

The Linguistic Heisenberg Principle: Scandinavian Languages

It's the Heisenberg principle that holds (not so?) that the closer you look at something, the less likely it is to be there.   I guess I've written before about how true that is with language(s).  And here's a new case: Scandinavia, for present purposes meaning Sweden, Norway, Denmark.   Start at the level of the various nations.  If you wanted to say "I am a subject of the crown," Google translate says it would come out this way:

Swedish:  Jag är ett ämne av kronan
Danish: Jeg er et emne af kronen
Norway: Jeg er en gjenstand av kronen

Don't know about you, but these look suspiciously alike to me--even granting that funny-looking "gjensand" in the third line, you really want to shout "People!  It's all the same language!  Get over it!"--even though the "crown" in each case would be a different crown in each country (and no, I have no idea whether any of the three would refer to the monarch as "the crown," but it is convenient for my purpose).

 On the other hand, if you start looking at the sub national level, you begin to find there are variations which may be at least as substantial as those between nations.  I wrote a few days ago about the Isle of Gotland where it seems they speak what might be called Icelandic [Ég er háð kórónu--actually, that does look/sound a bit different.]   Aside from  Gotland, I  gather there may not be a lot that you can call separate languages in Sweden, though there may be stuff that counts as "dialect"--as, for example, Göteborg, where it is said they speak with a Scots burr.

In Denmark, they'll tell you there isn't any dialect.  Maybe not but--well, I don't find this quite plausible.  Denmark is, after all, part island, part mainland.   I'd be surprised if the (mainland) Jutlanders fromn Århus speak quite the same as the (island) Zealanders from Copenhagen.  I've had at least one Copenhagen Dane whisper that I should listen up to the person nearby talking country style (I couldn't pick up any real difference).

But I suspect it is Norway where dialect thrives: mountains, after all, and fjords, and impenetrable valleys, just the sort of places you would expect to develop their own modes of speech--and also to keep them down through the ages ("you rule Norway from the sea," it is said, and I can see why: until perhaps the 20C, you really weren't going to get to the interior, and there really wasn't that much to go for anyway).  On language, there's a pretty good Wiki  (Cf. also this) where we learn that there are two "standard" versions of "Norwegian," and a tropical (heh!) rain forest of dialect variations.  Indeed it is said that the only people who speak "pure Norwegian" are the Sami, the people we used to call the Lapps--and they learned it as a second language (come to that, Sami languages also have their own wheels within wheels, but this is getting ridiculous).
 

Wattle

I will arise and go now,
And go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there,
Of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there,
A hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

WB Yeats, Lake Isle of Inisfree

Wattle, "A construction of poles intertwined with twigs, reeds, or branches, used for walls, fences, and roofs."   Link. Also the activity of constructing same. You apply the clay over the wattle.

And here I thought it was "A fleshy, wrinkled, often brightly colored fold of skin hanging from the neck or throat, characteristic of certain birds, such as chickens or turkeys, some lizards and my fourth-grade teacher."

Wattle I do
When you
Are far away
And I am blue
Wattle I do.

 
 

 

What I Learned in Scandinavia: Two Items

This will  be old stuff to you,  dear jaded and all-knowing reader, but here are two items new to me:

Wiki

Falu red:  here's how you paint your Swedish farmhouse.  You get some tailings from Swedish copper mine.    You mix with a bit of linseed oil, rye flour and water.  You  paint the farmhouse.  Ten years latter you brush it down and put on another coat.  Repeat every ten years for three centuries.  You've got a nice-looking red farmhouse; I would say "wooden," but at this point I assume the copper oxide is standing up by itself.

http://www.nordicneedle.com

Tractor eggs: you cut they hay, you sprinkle on some chemical.  You bundle it up in, I don't know, I suppose polyeurethane.  You make a lump about the size of a suburban compost turner.  Tractor eggs.  You leave them in repose in the field  to be admired until needed.  I suppose they can be deployed any place you have hay, but the term does seem to have peculiar frequency in Scandinavia.  Cue up jokes about tractor chickens.

Falue red has a Wiki  page.  Tractor eggs, it seems, do not. 

Elsinore (and Saxo Grammaticus)

Two weeks after Elsinore and I'm still brooding over Saxo Grammaticus.

Have you reread Saxo lately (you never ask an intellectual if he has read anything; only if he has reread it lately)? Huh? Have you? Ah, I suspected as much. But you do recall that Saxo is recognized as the first Danish historian; his Gesta Danorum was completed early in the 13^th Century, and serves, inter alia, as the source of Shakespeare's Hamlet. This you knew; but have you ever actually paid attention to Saxo's telling of the Saxo tale,ever actually thought through what it was for Shakespeare to use it as a source?  No, me neither, at least not until this week when my mind ran aground on the topic. Now, this may be old stuff to the cognoscenti, but it just now sank in on me and I can't let go of it. The thing is—the thing is I think I said before that we can regard Shakespeare, without a particle of disrespect, as the world's greatest rewrite man. Almost everything he wrote was swiped from somebody else. But the point is that everything he swiped he made better; every time he looked at a potential source, you can hear him saying “I see possibilities here”--and finding them.

I remarked before how the Danish locale of Saxo's Hamlet (Saxo calls him “Amleth”) is enough in itself to add power to Shakespeare's theatre—the unsettling energy of English adversary and forebear. But now look at Saxo's text (there's a serviceable version here, though not the one Shakespeare used). But you take a look at the original, you can see it is far more than that. . You can see, first, that Saxo offered far more than the bare revenge plot. Rather, it appears that many, perhaps most, of the scenes we remember in the play are already adumbrated in the old narrative. But most important, you can see that everything Shakespeare took from Saxo, he made into something entirely his own. 

Or perhaps better, “our own.” Serious critics have remarked on the fact that Hamlet appeared just about half way through Shakespeare's public career. They've made the point that he seems to be telling us everything he has learned in the tumultuous stage decade that has gone before. Harold Bloom says (I quote from memory) that Hamlet/Shakespeare taught us what it was to be human. And it comes forth from the seed planted in the mists of time.

Bonus: you can also see, refreshingly, how interwoven Shakespeare's artistry is with the ordinary work of the stage. You can see that the “plot”of this masterpiece isn't that much: rather, what we have here is a series of scenes—scenes in most of which the actor gets to test his chops, and to assemble the first great modern sensibility. It all helps you to understand why they say that any actor who gets to play Hamlet goes into heaven by a separate door. Saxo himself seems to have anticipated the point:

O valiant Amleth, and worthy of immortal fame, who being shrewdly armed with a feint of folly, covered a wisdom too high for human wit under a marvelous disguise of silliness! and not only found in his subtlety means to protect his own safety, but also by its guidance found opportunity to avenge his father. By this skillful defense of himself, and strenuous revenge for his parent, he has left it doubtful whether we are to think more of his wit or his bravery.

You can say that again. Rather, Shakespeare did say it again, but with a force and insight that Saxo could barely have understood.

This One is for Taxmom

Grand Canyon Cake:

Update:  yes, very educational,   The White Trash Cookbook instructs (I quote from memory): add a different food coloring to each layer; pour whiskey over the whole.

I Thought So...

You can feel it in the air. This sounds right:

Western Norway has the lowest unemployment rates, lowest crime rates, smallest public sector, fewest people on welfare and the most innovative economy in the country. It is generally regarded as Norway's most functional region.  ... Western Norway is a very rich region. The region is stood for around 70% of the total Gross National Product of Norway—Europe's richest country./

It's oil of course, but it's not just oil.    There's a good deal of tourism but it's not just tourism.  There's still a lot of fishing and farming--orchards--and one just gets the sense of a humming economy.  Also wet.

But then there's this:

It was early morning 09:05, 4.october 1944, when the first planes was observed. They came in from the west and turned north over the city, when they suddenly dropped their bombs. The target was the u-boat bunker, but the bombs hit everywhere, and it seemed like the RAF was carpet bombing the whole of [the Bergen borough of--ed.]  Laksevåg. One of the bombs hit Holen skole, crashing through the roof and exploded over the air-raid shelter that was housing 350 children, teachers and men from the civil airdefence. The rescue teams and firefighters that found the dead children said that at the instant of death, some of the children had clung to their teachers and was now nearly impossible to remove. Others died under collapsing walls, and of suffocation.

It is impossible to imagine the dreadful seconds in the shelter, when the lights went out, and the panic started among the children.

61 children, 2 teachers and 16 men from the civilian airdefence died on Holen Skole that day.
A total of 193 Norwegian civilians died as a result of the bomb raid, 180 was wounded, 60 houses was totally destroyed and over 700 people was homeless.

The Germans lost 12 men,2 u-boats (damaged or destroyed: U-228 and U-993) and at least one auxiliary boat (E. Bornhofen). It is believed that a few russian POW's working on the bunker was killed too, but this is not in any record and remains unknown. The Bunker was hit several times, but the bombs could not penetrate the thick roof, hence no damage was added to the bunker during this attack.

The RAF had used 93 Halifaxes, 47 Lancaster bombers and 12 mosquito's in this raid, and lost only one bomber. 1260 450 kg bombs and 172 225 kg bombs was dropped within 11 minutes.

The raid had been a partial failure.

 

Back-of-the-Envelope on the Kroner

I did a bit of Googling last night and satisfied myself that the Norwegian kroner is indeed one of the most overvalued currencies in the world, perhaps to the tune of 80 percent--for ease of computation, assume 100 percent,  or a factor of two.  For the Norwegian Kroner, assume a price of five--lower than what Google says but rounded down for convenience and to take account of exchange rates.  Which is to say, if we got twice as many kroner for our dollar--say 10 instead of five. 

So: we just paid 180 kroner for an appealing but very modest lunch  At the going rate, that pencils out to about $26.  Divide by two and you get $13 which is more or less what you would expect at the Palookaville price..

Next question is, of course, what do these numbers mean for the ordinary Norwegian?   I suspect the answer is not very much    I'm having a tough time laying my hands on the data just now but I suspect the average Norwegian has more or less as easy a time buying Big Macs or Iphones as people in the US. 

So what has made the kroner so %^&$! expensive?  I want to say "oil"--money pouring in to finance the Norwegian oil boom  The objection to my suggestion is that Denmark and Sweden are pretty expensive too, and they don't have any oil.   In my favor I can say that Norway seems to be even more expensive than the other two.  This boils down to saying that they have exported the inflation you might expect from the oil boom to foreign investors (and tourists) in the form of higher exchange rates.

I really can't blame them for that but it does make me wonder--something of the same sort seems to have happened  to the Netherlands when they brought in their gusher.  The Netherlanders complain that the oil was a poisoned chalice in that the rising cost of Dutch investment sucked capital out of so many competing Dutch projects.  Yet I don't hear any similar complaint about Norway  Am I missing something?  Could it be that Norway just doesn't have that many competing projects to begin with?  Or--?

Longboats, etc.

I've spent a good bit of time these past few days admiring Viking longboats, warrior halls, stave churches and suchlike. It's a humbling exercise because you have to admit that along with rape and pillage—well, they also loot, but along with all of that, you would have to admit that by, say, 850 AD or so, these guys were by some measures among the most successful civilizations on the planet. Yes, I'm thinking about the longboat and its kin: these vessels really are marvels of engineering. They're seaworthy (of course) but beyond that, in various avatars they are swift and efficient. By “seaworthy,” I mean they can get you all the way to Newfoundland more times than not, and one has to marvel at the generations of evolving craftsmanship went into the final product.

Aside from the vessels, the most noteworthy avatar is the great hall—the place for warrior powwows. They look like upside down longboats and the resemblance may be more than accidental: my friend Ken says, “if you can build a longboat, you can build anything.” One is tempted to ask, which (great hall or longboat) came first. The answer may be “neither:” maybe they co-evolved, each one profiting from the other's technical advance.

The stave churches are a somewhat different matter. They're wood, and so terribly vulnerable to fire (the one I saw yesterday has discreetly placed 21C sprinklers). They're made to look like stone churches or cathedrals; the “staves” are the “columns.” As with any derivative architecture, you have to wonder how much of this product consists of design elements that once served a functional purpose, but serve one no longer. Specifically, the columns—are they weight-bearing or only decorative? On superficial appraisal, I couldn't tell.

But hang all that and let me tell you about what might be the coolest of northland inventions: the barrel. Recall how the ancients, notably the Phoenicians, carpet-bombed the Mediterranean with amphorae full of wine and olive oil and whatnot. But amphorae are heavy; they don't contain a lot and they are frustratingly vulnerable to breakage. Enter the barrel, which pips them on all counts.

And where do we get the barrel? Ha, compare the longboat. They're both made of planks, seasoned and sealed. The barrel is much more “seaworthy” than the amphora, in that they are capable of holding more, easier to move and much harder to break, but conceptually a longboat it is. 

 

Or maybe I have it backwards; maybe the barrel is really the father of them all.

 

Fn.: much as I admire the technical skill of the people who developed all this stuff, I must put in a good word for the adventurers who found the hulks on ocean bottoms and hoicked them to the surface and hauled them to a museum and reassembled them without losing the whole project to  heap of rubble.

More on Claiming-race Taxation

A couple of followup points re my post on claiming-race taxation.  One, my friend Scott tells me that he has heard--though he admits he has no confirming source--that Castro offered such a deal to the multinationals operating in Cuba in 1961,  If true, I suppose it is documented in the literature, though neither Scott nor I has troubled to track it down.
 
Two, Underbelly's Wichita Bureau points out that it's just a species of the standard buy-sell agreement, familiar to anyone who ever drafted the paperwork for a partnership business: either party can name the price at which the other can buy or sell.
 
And three,  now that I think of it, they are all variants of "one cuts, the other chooses," for splitting, say, a pastrami sandwich.  I think you can even generalize it to a situation where there are seven or eight people around, say, a pizza.  One guy cuts.  Everybody else (in turn) gets to take or pass; if nobody takes, then the cutter is stuck with it.

There must be more. Hey, I smell dissertation topic!  But it's probably already been written.

Save Your Confederate Money, Boys...

A word about my backup travel reading these past few days. It's something with the restrained and scholarly title of America Aflame, subtitled “How the Civil War Created a Nation,” by one David Goldfield, hitherto unknown to me. It's an imperfect book, starting with the subtitle. The fulcrum is indeed the Civil War but it would be better (if less pithily) described as an account of how white Americans in the 19^th Century understood what they might perhaps have called “the Negro problem.”

Here's a defining point: except for a gripping account of the mad zealotry of John Brown, Goldfield says next to nothing about abolitionism per se. His tenet, if I read him right, is that abolitionism really wasn't an important factor in northern opposition to slavery. Far more important, in this reading, is that northerners really didn't like blacks very much and would have been happy to see them and their attendant complications just fade away. They particularly didn't like the threat of competition from slave labor which, as they saw it, would have simply undercut the aspirations of honest white folks. This reading would explain why so much turned on the question of extending slavery to the territories—the Kansas-Nebraska act, and suchlike. Indeed, Goldfield doesn't spell out but one comes away that the matter of the territories probably drove the pre-war agenda as much as or more than any other issue.

This perspective helps to explain the other important strand in pre-Civil-War politics--“internal improvements,” as Henry Clay put it; more generally, the use of government resources to open up the country for settlers, particularly those with a purpose to become “yeoman farmers” on the opening frontier.

Goldfield is at his best in describing the swirls and eddies of politics in those pre-war years.   But he seems to hold to the belief that the Civil War was an avoidable war. I'd agree that it would have been nice for it to be avoided—I have heard, and tend to believe, that the sovereign could have paid off both the slaves and the slaveholders at less gross cost than the war exacted. But I don't find anything here by way of plausible roadmap as to just how that might have come about.

Goldfield is less impressive on the war itself, not least because he has such overwhelming competition. My guess is he might have been better off to say, “look, you all know the narrative, so I'll just skip it except insofar as it impinges on his particular concerns.”

His treatment of the postwar period is a more complicated issue. He feels obliged to give a narrative summary of the economic explosion—the railroads, the giant corporations, unions and union violence. Again this is an oft-told tale and it is one in which Goldfield seems a bit ill at ease. Yet its telling is essential to the other and perhaps most important part of his story—his account of the swift and dramatic sea change in northern white attitudes to the race issue in general and blacks in particular. Some northern whites seem to have been surprised and disappointed to discover that the new freedmen were not as enchanting as the northern whites had hoped they would be. Others remembered that they had never liked blacks that much in the first place. And many discovered how much blacks reminded them of new immigrants, particularly the Irish who quickly developed an aspect in the popular mind as ill-educated scoundrels and buffoons.

But perhaps most interesting is the way in which northern whites simply lost interest in the race issue—lost interest as they turned their attention to opening up the west, building railroads and such like, and, yes, destroying the Indians. For good or ill (or both) northern whites turned their face to the future. Southern whites, for no good reason at all, remained fixed on its disappointments and resentments from the past.

Which means that southern whites were at last free to relitigate the old battles—to strip away the protections that the War had won for blacks (had won with, it must be noted, the active participation of blacks themselves)--the “slow grinding of hard boards”--by which southern whites came at last, to win what they had lost.   The climax is, necessarily, the corrupt Hayes-Tilden election, the one in which the north laid down its arms just as surely as the south had done at Appomattox,   I don't think it ever occurred to me before that 1876 was the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 

 

Slow boring of hard boards, relitigating dead issues, refighting and last winning the last war. Nice to know we don't have to live through all that again. Oh tee hee.

Slow boring of hard boards, relitigating dead issues, refighting and last winning the last war. Nice to know we don't have to live through all that again. Oh tee hee.

Update:  I see I wrote this post before.   But this is the  improved, expanded, updated version.

Misc

Distracted today, but you could be reading--

• Which is Worse: Airline Monopolies or Airline Competition?

• Uwe Reinhardt's Latest on Health Care Costs

• The most chilling story about marginal men since Juan Corona.

Claiming-race Taxation

I'm very far from being an expert at this sort of thing but I think I understand the bare mechanics of a claiming race. You enter your horse at a declared value and somebody, more or less anybody, has a right to buy at that price. Best way I understand, it is a way of keeping the owner from trying to slip in a ringer: he lowballs the value, he risks losing the horse.

I had a friend back in Kentucky who said we ought to use that device for value-based property taxation: the owner gets to declare its value and the sovereign can tax at that value, or buy at that price.

It struck me as an interesting idea though but while I can't say I've searched very hard, I've never before found anyone who took it very seriously (just now I tried it on a couple of my taxy friends who seem not to have given it any thought).

But maybe I have a contender. The subject for the moment is “sound dues.” We're at Kronberg Castle, facing out from the coast of Denmark towards Sweden just four miles away. The “dues” are the customs duties that the King of Sweden extorted collected from passing ships, starting in the 1420s and continuing until 1857 (the Americans bullied him out of it).

You can see where this is going. So I'm told (I haven't seen a written source), the system operated on the principle of the claiming race. The captain would declare the value of his cargo; the king could tax or buy. I don't know any of the details: how long the system lasted; how many times the King exercised his right; how much money he made—nor, indeed, whether the story is a total fairy tail (the Danes do have a history with fairy tales). So, claiming-race taxation on the sound. There must be a whole literature out there that I haven't discovered yet but I must say I find the idea highly intriguing.

Elsinore

”Now, Shakespeare was a juggler and he traveled all over Europe with a troop of players so it could very well be that he was right here.” So a tour guide at Elisinore Castle in Denmark, where they also provide you with a statue of Hamlet, so perhaps as to remind you why you came (though he looks like a young Christopher Columbus to me). I admit I do tend to get kind of snobby about these cheap tourist connections (Then why you go?​—ed. I'll get that to that, I promise—Buce). But actually, I'd say that this pitch might not be quite as silly as it sounds, for a couple of different reasons.

One, we certainly don't know that “Shakespeare was a juggler,” but we do know there is a yawning gap of half a dozen years about which we know nothing and the idea that he traveled with a troop of strolling players is not as fanciful as the suggestion that he was a highwayman, a sailor a priest, an Italian or any of the countless other possibilities that have been entertained in the literature.

And two—well, let's consider this Elisinore stuff. People are bound to want to believe that the Danish palace really is Hamlet's Elsinore, just as they want to believe that the North Italian city is Juliet's Verona. So baldly stated, I've never found either proposition particularly interesting: I perfectly content with the notion that Shakespeare had never seen the real Elsinore, just as he (ahem, I assume) never saw the Lincoln Memorial. 

But don't stop there. Consider Shakespeare's audience. For them, the idea that Hamlet lived (and died) through his existential crisis on a murky headland across the North Sea is not trivial. Probably Shakespeare had not been there; very likely nobody in the crowd had either. But they probably had a mental picture of Denmark: the Danes had, after all, invaded England, and pretty damn near carried off the whole country. There's plenty of reason to infer that they took a reference to Elisinore castle as unsettling and full of portent. That is, it wasn't accidental that Shakespeare set his play in a place they had never seen, just as it was not accidental that he set Macbeth in the raw, violent, untamed north, nor Lear in the pre-Christian mists of time. More likely than not, Shakespeare had never seen Elisinore, but it was part of his imaginative equipment even so.

Back in Copenhagen, we didn't have time to seek out the Little Mermaid whom I first encountered near 40 years ago. We did go down to the docks to seek out the Little Barmaid. They told us she had married a Jaguar salesman from Slough and moved off to a villa in Tuscany. Good on her. My imaginative universe is broader for the information.

Harald

I idled away some travel time yesterday reading sections of King Harald's Saga, available, inter alia, on Kindle from Penguin. There must be a market for such accounts Viking of derring-do: Penguin seems to keep quite a number in print. Myself, I have several weathered paperback editions around the house although I'm not sure I ever actually read any before: always one of those things I would get to next year, after finishing Clarissa for example, or Finnegans Wake (the answers are no, and no).

I suppose I'm sorry I waited. The Saga is a rattling good story, with superb intro material by Magnus Magnusson and Herman Pálsson (on Magnusson's own remarkable career, go here; Pálsson's equally distinctive bio is here). Harald the protagonist has story enough to fill out any self-respecting saga: he saw service in Byzantium and Kievan Rus and died fighting another Harald—rather, Harold—at Stamford Bridge in the North of England in 1066 (the winner went on to lose the Battle of Hastings to William of Normandy, aka William the Conqueror). But in addition to Harald the protagonist, the editors introduce the reader to another, perhaps even more interesting, character: Snorri Sturluson, author of the saga and himself an important player in the tumultuous and violent public life of Scandinavia in his time (Snorri died in his basement at the hands of an assassin: it is said his last words were Eigi skal höggva!—"Do not strike!"). Just off hand, can you think of any other major historian who was both a writer and an active politician? The standard model would seen to be Trotsky or Thucydides, both writing in enforced idleness after their political careers had ended.

But I digress; back to Harald. The really extraordinary fact about this book is the utter absence of anything remotely resembling a “public purpose” in Harald's career (at least not as seen by Snorri). It's all hackin' and hewin', life in tooth and claw, triumph and disaster, betrayal and vengeance. 

Which brings me to one reason why it is so interesting to study the Scandinavian record: we can observe, at least dimly and inadequately, the emergence of something you might call “a modern state” (well: states) out of the turbulent stew of what came before. One is necessarily tempted to try to find some quick-and-dirty Twitter-style summary of the transition, and good luck with that. One is tempted, I suppose, to say “the coming of Christianity,” and I suppose there is something to the suggestion though not, perhaps, the way it is commonly understood. It certainly not the case that the Vikings woke up won day and said “Oh! We're Christians! Let's put down our swords and love our neighbors as ourselves!” No: the very process of Christianization was long and painful full of wrong turnings (though not so painful, perhaps, than the transition that led to the 30 Years' War on the Continent, nor the Civil War in England).

But perhaps you can say this much: perhaps what Christianity did do for Scandinavia is to bring on board a fully-developed bureaucratic apparatus with a priestly class, with bishops and archbishops (the Swedes seem even more serious about this sort of thing than the Anglicans). But that's not so much “Christianity” per say as a tradition that extends that right back past the beginning of Christianity to the Roman empire itself. And they do say all roads lead there.

Souvenirs

I'm looking for something uniquely Swedish to take home as a souvenir and I was thinking maybe a couple of sticks of dynamite.  Cooler heads are likely to prevail on that one, but I am advised that Swedes also invented the self-turning lighthouse and the cream separator.

Okay, right, a bunch of other stuff too.

Gutnish? (aka "Center and Periphery")

So we're checking in from Gotland off the Swedish coast, where they like to think they are not quite part of Sweden and that the language is not quite Swedish.  I was chatting with a long-timer (lifer?) and I asked:  When you do to Stockholm, do they know where you are from the moment you open your mouth.  His response

Well, you know, language changes in the center a lot faster than it does at the periphery.  What we speak here is closer to Old Norse, more or less what they still speak in Iceland.  When I go to Stockholm, I speak English.

Apparently there is a recognized local language, though whether that was what my host had in mind is perhaps a moot point. But that stuff about center and periphery--is it true, I wonder? Perhaps it is a corollary to the proposition that fringe populations are more severe in the politics than those at the center because they find themselves by a beleaguered frontier spirit.
 

Women, Viking and Others

Women in the Viking world,  how did they do?  Were they just chattels, baggage, or did they have a life of their own?

On the surface, you'd have to say they didn't have much.  Best   I can tell, there is none but the most trivial evidence of women in raiding parties and suchlikw; more, but not a lot, by way of female grave goods.  I don't hear of any important Viking-age queens, though I gather the royal line might descend through the female to her son.

But on closer scrutiny, there's more to the story.  The elephant in the room is that Vikings by nature were voyagers, which is to say "away from home."  Somebody--guess who--had to manage the home place: a job that must necessarily have accumulated some power and discretion.  And not just day-to-day, either: we're in a world of long frozen winters. Somebody had better see to it that the fish get salted, that the hay gets seasoned and stowed away (actually, it blows my mind that people developed an agricultural surplus as well as they did under such hostile conditions).

All that set my mind to wandering (Viking-style?) to other societies where men are absent.  Kerala, for example, famously low in wealth, high in social well-being--a place where men are off at sea most of the time and women run things at home.  Or Switzerland, where the relatively orderly settlement of social conflict may owe something to the fact that the testosterone-poisoned young bucks were off doing mercenary service in somebody else's army.  Contrast WWII Poland and Ukraine, where the Germans shot most of the middle-aged social glue, and left behind bands of youngsters whose skill set did not extend much beyond weaponry.

Which makes you understand why the Viking lands were such a peacef--oh, right,  strike that.  They certainly didn't look peaceful  when they showed up at Lindesfarne or the laid Siege to Paris.  And it seems that when they weren't looting and pillaging, they were whaling the tar out of each other.  Hm.  Well, maybe life on the home place was quiet even so.  Or maybe not.

The Thing

From a marker by a Swedish burial mound:

The Thing took place at Anundshög all through the Middle Ages.  This was a meting point for the local inhabitants.  The Thing settled legal disputes, e.g., concerning the ownership of land. or other property, and it sentenced criminals.  During the 1450s the Thing was moved to Badelunda Church, one kilometre further north.

Elevator music in a Stockholm hotel:

She had a dream 'bout the King o' Sweden
'Cos he had a Thing that she be needin.'

Up to now, the only Thing on my radar  was the giant carrot from outer space.

Instead of Smoking It?

Please walk on the grass.