This message is from: "Teressa Kandianis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I'm Norwegian though my family immigrated to the US in the mid 1800's and direct contact and to some degree any knowledge of our family has been lost over the years. So, I've been gathering books and other info about Norway to try to understand what their lifestyles were like there. My grandmothers family came from Vardo which is at the northern eastern tip of Norway and were fishermen. My grandfathers family came from farm country though. The wealthy, successful Norway of today hasn't been so all that long. I read one book that was quite appalling really, about farming in the old days. There were young girls in each farm who spent all summer up in the mountains with the cows, gathering forage for the winter, watching the cows and making cheeses and other products from the milking. They gathered grass in the woods, bark from trees, leaves from trees, lichens, moss - just about anything that was edible. Even so, by the end of winter not only the livestock but the people as well were reduced to making food from bark and so on. The most poignant memory (the book was a collection of memoirs of these women who spent the summers in the woods) was of the day that the cows were driven up to the summer "pastures". She recalled that many of livestock were so weak they had to be carried. I also watched a video tape called When the Home Fires Died about the existence and demise of the farms perched along the fjords in western Norway. If anything, these conditions were even more brutal. Animals that were bred and selected for this kind of hard life are obviously what produced our fjords of today. I can't help but believe that both natural selection in the survivability in this climate of a smaller animal - a mountain goat, if you will, rather than a camel - combined with a liklihood of periods of near starvation every winter kept the fjords smaller in stature. On a lighter note, I found that my great grandmother was illegitimate and knowing Norwegian lutherans I wondered how common this was. I obtained a book called "Sexual Customs in Rural Norway - A Nineteenth Century Study". It was written by a 19th century urban Lutheran minister who deplored the sexual customs of the countryside and gave a blow by blow account of the shocking practices in various regions he visited. He even produced tables comparing various rural regions in the incidence of out of wedlock births and ranked the regions by their lack of propriety. He also tried to categorize the reasons for this behavior - chief amongst them was poverty so young teens (read pubescent) were often hired out to other farms where these hormonally overflowing kids were housed - girls and boys - together in an outbuilding. I'd say that was asking for trouble. Teressa Kandianis - Slimming my fjords down - no more over the fence fjord - in beautiful sunny Ferndale.
